Agony Aunties: How to handle mood swings

For this week’s Agony Aunties episode, we were asked how to handle mood swings. And to answer that, as usual in these episodes, we have a few different angles to approach. The first thing we suggest is to bring awareness to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems within us, and to ground our approach towards mood regulation in the physical. If our bodies and nervous systems are dysregulated, we can experience a range of affective states, both positive and negative, and so finding ways to regulate ourselves first - be it through rest, diet, or exercise - is one approach to settle the body and to manage these mood swings.

We also recommend a sense of self-compassion here, as there are negative connotations to mood swings, and we hope that you don’t adopt any self-blaming language while trying to regulate your nervous system, but to approach your needs with a sense of softness and care. And, as always, we thank you for your questions here and for your prompts to these conversations. We really enjoy exploring these topics with you, so do please keep sending in your questions, and we’ll do our best to answer as many of them as we can.

Please email your questions to [email protected] or DM Julia on her Instagram @juliasamuelmbe.

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