6 Tips on How to Boost Your Mood

1. Get Up Earlier: Research completed by the University of Colorado in Boulder and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that people who were early risers have a lower chance of depression than their peers.

After controlling for sleep duration, sleep quality, work shifts, exposure to light, weight, exercise, and so forth, the researchers concluded that those who went to bed early and got up early had up to a 27% lower chance of developing depression than the night owls.

Your preference for early versus late-rising may be driven by genetics, but it can also be influenced by things such as exposure to natural light, diet, and exercise.

2. Start with Water: Water gives your kidneys, liver, and digestive system a flush to help get rid of toxins that accumulated overnight, and if you’re dehydrated, drinking water will take care of that. Warm lemon water is the best for getting the job done.

3. Use Neuroscience to Set Your Brain Right: Our brains have a negative bias. In other words, the brain holds onto bad experiences and tends to discard good ones.

Fortunately, neuroscience has discovered that we can create new, more positive neural pathways in the brain by learning how to focus on the positive. The key is to spend enough time dwelling on the positive for your brain to “digest” it, which means you need to spend a minimum of 12 seconds “drinking in” each positive experience you go through.

Otherwise, the brain simply tosses the positive experience and reverts to the negative state.

4. Take a Break from Technology: There’s plenty of evidence that too much device time leads to depression and brain changes, as well as to stress-related conditions such as hypertension, thyroid disease, heart failure, and coronary artery disease. Make deliberate time to be away from your phone and computer.

5. Do Your Exercise: Workouts have psychological advantages since exercising boosts mood-elevating hormones and endorphins to start your day, and the effects last for hours.

6. Feed Your Spirit: Feeding your spirit means underlining your connection to beauty, goodness, and if you’re so inclined, to purpose in the universe. You might accomplish this by meditating, practicing yoga, listening to inspiring music, or intention setting.

But even if you only institute one of these six practices, you’ll likely see positive results sooner than otherwise. That said, the more of them that you make part of your life, the more positive the results you’re likely to experience.