This post will show you mood-boosting activities so you can lift your mood without eating.
Many people use food to improve their mood when they are sad, stressed, anxious, bored, lonely, tense, agitated, or even just exhausted by the end of the day. Food is often used to suppress negative emotions or distract ourselves from these feelings. Food can make you feel calm and relaxed temporarily.
It´s ok to eat emotionally occasionally, everyone does that. The problem is when eating becomes your main coping mechanism. It’s beneficial to learn and use other mood-boosting activities too so eating won’t be the first thing you want to turn to.
But first, let´s see what can make your mood shift in the negative direction or cause mood fluctuations.
If you feel like you don’t have balanced moods, or you are constantly in one extreme or another, it might be time to take a look at your habits, daily routines, and how you spend your time. Your behaviors and a lot of things in your everyday life, many of which you don’t always have control of, have such a large impact on your moods and how you feel.
The more you understand about mood changes, the more you can decide what lifestyle changes will help the best with your mood-boosting rituals.
Some causes of shifts in your mood include:
Probably one of the most common causes is stress. This can be severe stress where you expect your mood to change, but also very mild forms of emotional stress that you didn’t realize had such a big impact on how you feel and behave overall.
When we think about stress we usually think of stress caused by work, relationships, money, or parenting issues. But the body also experiences undereating and overexercising as stress and this physical stress can also cause a bad mood, and even weight gain, and emotional eating.
Yes, how much and how well you sleep is going to affect your mood! We aren’t just talking about having a crappy night’s sleep and not feeling your best the next morning. This also includes just poor sleep hygiene habits that affect your mood the next day.
What you will see in this post is that what you eat can greatly impact how you feel. What you choose to eat the majority of the time does make a big difference in your mood.
Many mental health disorders can lead to changes in your mood, including anxiety and depression. If you struggle with your mental health, you might already be aware of how drastically your mood can shift.
Not only can hormone fluctuations affect your mood (hello PMS and menopause), but other medical causes like thyroid disorders, stroke, vitamin deficiency, and Parkinson’s might all be the cause of your mood changes.
Whether you are struggling with some challenging emotions or are just trying to process a bad day, writing about what is happening in your life right now can help improve your mood, and it can boost your emotional and mental well-being as well.
The act of writing about your thoughts and feelings, known as expressive writing, has been shown to benefit your emotional health. When you write about these things, you feel better and more grounded, and it helps you process feelings and notice patterns of behavior that could be influencing your emotional well-being. Journaling can help lower stress and even improve your memory!
The physical act of writing gives you time to reflect on your emotions. A journal becomes a time capsule for your thoughts and emotions, and when you look back on your entries later, you can learn a great deal about yourself. A journal, therefore, becomes a tool for introspection, which can help you grow and overcome unhealthy habits.
There are many ways journaling can help you.
If you want to discover what triggers your emotional eating I highly recommend writing down in your journal how you feel before and after eating, what happened before eating, how stressed you were that day, how much you slept, relationship issues, and any other factors affecting your mood.
You can download here a free journal I created exactly for this purpose. A Food and Lifestyle Journal is the most honest and least biased source of information that you will have at your disposal. There probably won’t be anything as convincing as your own handwriting.
If you see your eating habits, your feelings around food, mealtimes, and events written in black and white, you will also see the recurring situations and foods that caused you to overeat. These observations may be the key to overcoming emotional eating.
Another great way of journaling is a brain dump.
This simply means you write whatever is on your mind, and keep writing until you feel like you have gotten through all those nagging thoughts. Your mood fluctuations might be from stress or just feeling overwhelmed. Your thoughts can do that without you even realizing it.
A brain dump is a good mood-boosting activity because you get those thoughts out on paper to help release some of the tension, and also you gain a little more clarity.
This Floral Colouring Planner contains a Brain Dump page and a Mood Tracker page you can use to release stress and track your mood. Once you gained some clarity on what affects your mood using these pages, you can use the Time To Decide page to decide which habits you want to change to improve your mood. Then you can track your new habits using the Habit Tracker page. Coloring a flower each day you complete your new habits is a good visual motivational tool.
The Planner also contains Daily Planner and Weekly Planner pages to get more organized and reduce overwhelm and stress in your daily life. On the Daily Planner page, you can fill out a to-do list, write about your feelings and what you are grateful for that day, as well as track your water intake and step count. Coloring the flower mandalas on each page is also a good stress-reducing and mood-boosting activity.
The next most important thing you can do each day when you want to boost your mood naturally is to get better sleep. And I’m not just talking about how many hours you sleep, though that is definitely important.
You also want to focus on proper sleep hygiene, which is simply the nighttime routine you have before you go to sleep.
Here are some things you can add to your sleep routine that will help you get more restful sleep, and balance your mood at the same time:
With these few changes, you will notice that you tend to fall asleep a little easier, and you don’t wake up exhausted and cranky.
If you suffer from insomnia, I highly recommend trying the Sleep Salon audios. These audios help your brain waves dip down from wide awake Beta to deep sleep Delta waves. This is a scientifically proven method to synchronize your brain waves to the frequency that you’re listening to. It’s perfectly safe to use and very effective.
You could also try the Superiour Sleep Hypnosis Bundle from Hypnosis Live. I wrote about this brilliant website earlier. It has an NLP self-hypnosis audio for every problem that can occur in your life.
This Bundle contains 4 self-hypnosis MP3s: Great Night Sleep Every Night, Overcome Insomnia, Complete Relaxation, and Power Nap. Together in a bundle, they are cheaper but of course, you can buy them separately too.
This might not be what you want to hear, but what you eat does make a difference in how you feel, including mentally. Some foods, like high amounts of sugar and refined carbohydrates, give you energy and make you feel better in the short term, but cause an energy crash later. This energy fluctuation negatively affects your mood too.
Mood fluctuations may result from nutritional imbalances like a blood sugar imbalance from too much sugar and refined carbohydrates, low vitamin B levels, food intolerances, lack of essential omega-3 fatty acids, or low serotonin and selenium levels.
When it comes to eating right, you want to focus on balance and proper nutrients. I don´t recommend starting a restrictive diet, but just improving your current diet gradually. Trying to get in more complex carbs (beans, squashes, sweet potatoes, and potatoes), whole grains, fruits and vegetables, healthy fats (from fish, seeds, and nuts), and lean protein.
If you find that you always feel bad after eating certain foods, you might be dealing with food intolerance. Try to avoid those foods for a few weeks and see whether your digestion and mood improve or not.
In addition to eating right, try to also get some regular exercise in. Again, we aren’t talking about completing a difficult fitness challenge or pushing yourself to do some extreme form of activity you don’t enjoy.
Instead, find some workouts that get you moving, you are motivated and excited to try, and that you actually enjoy. These can help you become mentally healthier and improve your mood exponentially, with the added benefit of being good for your physical health as well.
Some exercises you might want to try include:
A JAMA Psychiatry study shows that physical exercise is an excellent mood-boosting activity. “What our study would say is that any kind of movement can add up to keep depression at bay. I think that’s why our study findings were especially appealing. It didn’t say you have to run a marathon, do hours of aerobics, or be a CrossFit master just to see benefits on depression.”
When you appreciate the blessings in your life, instead of focusing on what you don’t have, your mood will change practically overnight.
No matter how difficult or challenging things might feel right now, there are always things to be grateful for. It might be people in your life who are always loving and supportive, a decent job, a roof over your head, your pets or family, or just your cup of coffee every morning when you have 5 minutes of peace and quiet.
To improve your mood every day, start writing 5-10 things you are grateful for in your journal. Turn this into a daily ritual that you do every morning or evening, and you will notice the changes very quickly.
As I mentioned before, the Floral Colouring Planner contains a Daily Planner page in which you can write about what you are grateful for that day. Practising gratitude is one of the most effective mood-boosting activities! You cannot feel anxious and grateful at the same time.
Self-care is so much more than people realize, and often misunderstood. To put it simply, your self-care routine should be something you do for yourself and only you. At least once a day, you choose some type of activity that you enjoy, relaxes you, and makes you happy.
While it can be absolutely anything, here are a few ideas if you’re not sure where to start:
It can be something you do alone or with friends. There are no rules about self-care, as long as it makes you feel better and is something you truly enjoy. Make sure you do at least 5 minutes of these mood-boosting activities by planning and tracking your daily self-care activities and daily exercise in this Floral Colouring Planner.
This is probably one of the more surprising ways you can boost your mood naturally. Sometimes, you have so many expectations and so many people needing things from you, that you don’t realize your responsibilities are what is negatively affecting your mood.
It is okay to say no. It is okay to turn down an invitation. It is okay to not always be the one person people can count on for whatever they need.
Set some healthy boundaries and let people know when and if you are available to them. If they love you, they will understand your need for boundaries, just like you respect their boundaries.
Check out the two blog posts below and the End of overwhelm ebook to improve your work-life balance:
Give yourself at least one time of the day when you are completely unplugged. This means no computer or laptop, no tablet, and no cell phone. It is up to you if you choose to include TV in unplugging, but definitely no phones!
You need some time to relax without social media, phone updates, and text messages. This allows you to sit in the quiet and just enjoy your home and family, without all that extra noise.
All that stimuli bombarding your brain all day long overstimulates the brain and it badly affects your mental health. That overwhelmed feeling often leads to emotional eating too. You don´t even realize why you reach for food but it´s to release that tension.
You’ll also have more time to do the things you enjoy; for example, self-care activities or a hobby you want to pursue. You can also use the time you gained to self-reflect and journal.
You will also save time doing the next mood-boosting activity.
Our next mood-boosting activity is spending more time outside. Fresh air and vitamin D will both greatly benefit your mood, mental health, and energy levels.
Many people don’t get enough vitamin D in their diet and aren’t outside enough during the day to get it naturally from the sun’s UV rays.
The simplest thing is to figure out how you can spend a little more time outside. If you need to improve your productivity to be able to find time to get outside try to use this Productivity Planner.
6 tips to be more productive, vision planning pages, yearly goal setting pages, 13 pages of goal setting tips, not to-do lists, delegation lists, 12 calendar pages, undated monthly goals and top priorities pages, undated weekly and daily goals and top priorities pages, habit tracker pages, weekly reflection pages, 12 quote pages, end of 6 months reflection pages, end of the year reflection pages, and 10 pages for notes or journaling.
Lastly, the final mood-boosting activity is decluttering and organizing your space. Yes, working on your space and getting it organized helps with mood stabilization!
Have you ever woken up in a clean and orderly room, and just felt better? Just having a decluttered and clean home makes all the difference. You feel happier, healthier, and more productive.
Spend just a few minutes a day picking up your home and tidying it as much as you can, even if you have a busy schedule.
So these were the 10 mood-boosting activities I recommend to start doing to feel better emotionally. Improving your mood will, in turn, result in less need for emotional eating.
If you need help to find out what you are really hungry for and break free from emotional eating, the How to stop eating your feelings workbook will be perfect for you. You can also download a free chapter here to see if you like it.
If you need further support don’t hesitate to reach out to me 🙂 You have a few options:
– You can send me an email at hello@ritamayblog.com.
– You can book a free call here.
– We can have a 90-minute 1 on 1 consultation to help you find your triggers and develop a strategy to break free from emotional and binge eating.
– This free training will show you a 6-step strategy to stop feeling out of control around food and eliminate emotional eating and binge eating.
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