Mood induction: Science's best kept secret for managing stress
Today, I’d like to introduce you to a little known stress-management technique that science has been keeping in their back pocket for years: it’s called mood induction.
IT ALL STARTED WHEN….
I had my first, accidental, introduction to mood induction when I was in middle school. My school had a long-standing tradition of taking the entire 7th grade out of New York City for a week of rural roughing it in a village - literally - frozen in time in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. One afternoon they took us for a nature walk. I remember trudging through the snow with my group of friends. They were all habitual skiiers, but this was my first experience being thigh deep in snow. In the middle of January. I wasn’t loving it. At least I think I wasn’t loving it, I couldn’t really feel my artifices anymore.
My friend Stephanie pulled out a trick that she used on the slopes. She invited us all to start thinking about the summer and to start imagining that we were on the beach. Each of us had to contribute a detail - either the feeling of the sun on our face, the feeling of the towel on the hot sand, the sound of the palm trees in the background, the feeling of aloe-vera on our sunburnt skin. We shared this communal vision for a while, maybe 5-10 minutes…and the weirdest thing happened. I felt warm. More than warm, I actually wanted to unzip my jacket. The fact that I had diverted my attention and my thoughts onto something other than how cold I was, and started to focus on what warmth felt like, actually made my body respond.
MOODS IN REAL TIME
I’d completely forgotten about this experience until I was in my Post-Grad program on the Neuroscience of Mental Health. We were discussing stress and how it originates with our thoughts; causing a series of domino effects on the body and its systems. In clinical research, it’s hard to get real-time scientific data from people while they’re in the middle of a stress response, as they happen in real life settings and not in the lab. To combat this, and be able to do effective emotion-based research, science uses a series of tools they call “mood inductions” to intentionally direct someone’s mood, in either a more positive or negative direction.
Mood induction works by presenting a series of stimuli - for example, videos, audio tracks, images, keywords, sentences - to engage the person’s thoughts and attention, triggering a specific emotional response. This allows researchers to be able to experiment with moods in real-time because they can provoke the mood they need. This helps science see what happens in your brain when you’re happy, or how your decisions are affected when you’re mad. Much of the information we know about emotions and our behavioral responses comes from mood induction research.
VARIOUS TECHNIQUES
Mood induction has been used in scientific research since the 1960s, starting with the Velten technique. A series of sentences, ranging from neutral to exhilarating in tone, are shown to an individual who is asked to try and make the statements as real for them as possible. Imagination exercises, not dissimilar to the one I mentioned at the beginning, are also extremely effective as is asking you to relive a memory from your past. There are deep databases of words, images, and texts that have been scientifically categorized according to their strength on various emotional planes. Many meta-analyses (where they compare and contrast the data from a bunch of studies, instead of examining just one) have been done over the years confirming how effective mood induction is on changing people’s emotional states.
WE ARE WHAT WE THINK
Mood induction works for two reasons. First, the brain has a hard time distinguishing between your imagination and reality. Meaning that, in certain cases, if you can imagine it, for the brain it’s real. Have you ever thought of a past memory and gotten happy or sad? Or have you ever gotten teared up at a movie? Or maybe heard a noise out of nowhere in the middle of the night that got you jumping out of bed in an instant to discover it was nothing? These are all different instances of how our mind works. None of those things were actually happening in the moment. The memory wasn’t taking place, the sad movie wasn’t happening to you, and it was just a door, not an intruder. But for your brain, they’re real. Why? That’s reason number two
Your senses and sensations cause your reactions. Sensations can be triggered by what’s going on around you OR by your thoughts. Your thoughts and attention determine your reality. If you don’t see/hear/feel something it doesn’t exist to you, even if it’s in front of you. Don’t believe me? Try the experiment in this video: EXPERIMENT The bottom line: if something isn’t on your attention radar, it doesn’t exist.
There are two truisms here, for better or worse. The first is that “fake it til you make” it is actually a thing. Just as I was able to convince myself that it was warm, even though I was thigh deep in snow, if you get your thoughts on board, your body will follow. The second is that “if you ignore it, it goes away” is true, particularly when dealing with your thoughts. If you stop thinking about something that’s annoying you and start thinking about puppies and kittens (assuming they don’t annoy you!) you’ll stop feeling annoyed. Long story short, if you can point your thoughts, and attention, you can change how you feel. This is the magic at the heart of mood induction.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
So why am I telling you all this? Because mood induction is a great tool to deal with stress in real-time. As I mentioned above, stress is triggered by your thoughts. Because of the way our brain is wired, we tend to stay in a stressful state for a while, because we keep thinking, or talking about the thing that is stressing us. It’s called rumination. Remember the point about attention? Keeping your attention on what’s bothering you is the same as not putting a band-aid on a cut.
Stress behaves like a running faucet, keeping a series of physiological reactions going inside your body that, in the long run, can cause problems through a domino effect. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but stress has been indirectly linked to serious illnesses like heart disease, MS, diabetes, IBS, etc. This is because of those secondary reactions being constantly triggered and activated, causing the bigger problems.
A BETTER MOUSETRAP
Many of us like to wait until the end of the day to deal with our stress. We might go to the gym, meditate, or go out and vent with friends. It’s a start, but this keeps our stress faucet running all day. The ideal solution is to shut off the stress faucet in real-time. How do we do that? If you said by controlling your thoughts and pointing your attention, give yourself an A for the day. Easier said than done though, right? That’s where mood induction can help. By applying the techniques of mood induction, in an easy to access way, we can actually get all of the clinical benefits of this technique in the palm of our hands; allowing us to take control of our stress, while it’s happening.
You may be asking - well why hasn’t science ever shared this magic pill with the public? The answer is relatively simple. In order to make the products required for mood induction you’d need to have a really profound understanding of a range of skills; understanding human behavior, being able to induce specific emotional responses, as well as having the creative, and production, skills to be able to put together content that is effective in changing moods. It requires a blend of science and Hollywood which is a pretty rare skill set combination.
YOUR NEXT GREAT DAY IS JUST ONE MOOD AWAY
Being able to shift your mood, at will, to manage stress is only one benefit that comes with mood induction. Our moods influence every aspect of our lives. The things we remember, the things we choose to remember, our decisions, our reactions, and the way we perceive everything that happens around us during the day. Mood induction techniques have been linked to improved productivity, better emotional resilience, and even increase serotonin levels - you know, our happy hormone.
Here’s some tips for some DIY mood induction: put together a playlist of your favorite empowering songs for an uplifting mood boost. Or put together your favorite calm down songs for when you’re wound up. Make a list of questions you know you can’t resist: why do cats twitch while they’re sleeping? Trying to solve it will help distract your brain from what’s bothering it. Compile a playlist of YouTube clips that crack you up every time. Or get your hands on tools that specialize in mood induction. Being able to successfully manage our moods is one of the hallmarks of high emotional intelligence and one of the greatest tools we can have in our toolbox. We know we can’t always control what happens to us, but with a little help from mood induction we can now easily control how we respond.
About the Author:
Erika Ferszt is the founder of moodally.com. Moodally uses mood induction techniques to help you get out of the mood you’re in and into the mood you choose. Erika, previously an award winning creative director for Ray-Ban, got the idea for Moodally while getting her Masters in Science in Behavioral/Organizational Psychlogy and her PostGrad program in the Neuroscience of Mental Health.