Six Ways to Start Early and Lift Your Mood

This column generally focuses on how to become happier. But over the years, I’ve found that the questions I most often get from readers are less about getting happier and more about becoming less unhappy. People inquire about how to resolve relationship disputes, quit a job they hate, or deal with anxiety and sadness. Getting happier or less unhappy might strike you as equivalent efforts, but they aren’t. Indeed, neuroscientists have found evidence that certain positive and negative emotions are produced in different regions of the brain. This makes sense when we understand that emotions exist to alert us to opportunities and threats, and parts of the limbic system specialize in producing each type of notification.

This distinction between your positive and negative emotions also means that their intensity does not move in tandem. Having below- or above-average intensity in positive and negative moods—which psychologists call affect—has been a topic of a lot of research, and it has led scholars to develop a test called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. You can take the test yourself and learn whether you are above average in both positive and negative affect (the so-called Mad Scientist profile), high positive and low negative (the Cheerleader), high negative and low positive (the Poet), or low on both positive and negative (the Judge).

What this test will tell you is whether your personal well-being challenge involves getting happier (Judges), getting less unhappy (Mad Scientists), or both (Poets). If you’re a Cheerleader and doing great on both counts, bully for you. I’m not.