Arnold Siegel: Are you feeling moody again? (And what to do about it).
Are the moody blues a gateway to profundity? A romantic explanation for anger? A sign that we’re mysterious and deeper than the average individual? A depressing response to a far-from-perfect world? No. Moodiness is a conditional suffering that does not have to continue.

Human beings subjectively experience their feelings in their immediacy. Some subjective experience feels decidedly felt in the body. For example, a loss may feel like a blow to the solar plexus. Some subjective experience doesn’t feel felt in the body, per se. It seems cognitive or perhaps “known,” as in appreciated, intuited, sensed, a “lightness” of being.

This interpretive ability, or handicap, depending on the quality of the impression, means that human beings feel what has come to be described as bitterness, jealousy, resentment, frustration, disappointment, alienation, inhibition, outrage, inertia, optimism, emptiness, fulfillment and on and on. 

Unfortunately, beset by moodiness, we tend to retreat to the metaphysically supported parallel universe in our heads. Arnold Siegel refers to this phenomenon as “a voice turned in on itself.”

Much of autonomy and life is about relieving this voice turned in on itself of its suffering. We do this by identifying ourselves with the concrete character in the story of our lives instead of with the unhappiness that attends the radically detached abstract character only psychologistically alive. 

Interestingly and happily, the practice of our values is accompanied by activities in the brain that are emotionally rewarding. A strong desire or passion to live a thoughtful life can and does become, if we make the effort, one of our highest values and the motivation for the choices we make.


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