Coffee is the world’s most popular drink, and it may make the world a bit happier, too.
The caffeine in coffee prevents a naturally occurring compound called adenosine from attaching to brain receptors that promote tiredness, therefore increasing alertness and attention.
Moreover, it increases the release of mood-boosting neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and norepinephrine.

Coffee can put you in a happy mood

When you’re feeling down, it can be tempting to turn to food to lift your spirits. However, the sugary, high-calorie treats that many people resort to have negative consequences of their own.Recently, research on the relationship between nutrition and mental health has been emerging. Yet, it’s important to note that mood can be influenced by many factors, such as stress, environment, poor sleep, genetics, mood disorders, and nutritional deficiencies.Therefore, it’s difficult to accurately determine whether food can raise your spirits. Nonetheless, certain foods have been shown to improve overa<warningtag>ll brain health and certain types of mood disorders.</warningtag>

Using food to put yourself in a happy mood

<ul><li>Omega-3 fatty acids are a group of essential fats that you must obtain through your diet because your body can’t produce them on its own.</li><li>Fatty fish like salmon and albacore tuna are rich in two types of omega-3s — docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) — that are linked to lower levels of depression.</li><li>Although there’s no standard dose, most experts agree that most adults should get at least 250–500 mg of combined EPA and DHA per day.</li></ul>

Fatty fish

<ul><li>Since up to 90% of your body’s serotonin is produced in your gut, a healthy gut may correspond to a good mood. </li><li>Fermented foods, which include kimchi, yogurt, kefir, kombucha, and sauerkraut, may improve gut health and mood.</li><li>The fermentation process allows live bacteria to thrive in foods that are then able to convert sugars into alcohol and acids.</li><li>During this process, probiotics are created. These live microorganisms support the growth of healthy bacteria in your gut and may increase serotonin levels.</li><li>It’s important to note that not all fermented foods are significant sources of probiotics, s<warningtag>uch as in the case of beer, some bread, and wine, due to cooking and filtering.</warningtag></li></ul>

Fermented foods

<ul><li>In addition to being high in fiber and plant-based protein, beans and lentils are full of feel-good nutrients.</li><li>They’re an excellent source of B vitamins, which help improve mood by increasing levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), all of which are important for regulating mood.</li><li>Furthermore, B vitamins play a key role in nerve signaling, which allows proper communication between nerve cells. Low levels of these vitamins, especially B12 and folate, have been linked to mood disorders, such as depression.</li></ul>

Beans and lentils

<ul><li>Chocolate is rich in many mood-boosting compounds. Its sugar may improve mood since it’s a quick source of fuel for your brain.</li><li>It may release a cascade of feel-good compounds, such as caffeine, theobromine, and N-acylethanolamine — a substance chemically similar to cannabinoids that have been linked to improved mood.</li><li>It’s high in health-promoting flavonoids, which have been shown to increase blood flow to your brain, reduce inflammation, and boost brain health, all of which may support mood regulation </li><li>Chocolate has a high hedonic rating, meaning that its pleasurable taste, texture, and smell may<warningtag> also promote a good mood.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Because milk chocolate contains added ingredients like sugar and fat, it’s best to opt for dark chocolate — which is higher in flavonoids and lower in added sugar. </warningtag></li></ul>

Dark chocolate

Oats are a whole grain that can keep you in good spirits all morning. You can enjoy them in many forms, such as overnight oats, oatmeal, muesli, and granola.Oats provide the fiber that can stabilize your blood sugar levels and boost your mood. They’re also high in iron, which may improve mood symptoms in those with iron deficiency anemia.

Oats

Nuts and seeds are high in plant-based proteins, healthy fats, and fiber.Certain nuts and seeds are high in tryptophan, zinc, and selenium, which may support brain function and lower your risk of depression.

Nuts and seeds

Although the mechanism isn’t clear, a diet rich in antioxidants may help manage inflammation associated with depression and other mood disorders.Berries pack a wide range of antioxidants and phenolic compounds, which play a key role in combatting oxidative stress — an imbalance of harmful compounds in your body.

Berries

Bananas are a great source of natural sugar, vitamin B6, and prebiotic fiber, which work together to keep your blood sugar levels and mood stable.

Bananas

Small things  you can do every day to quickly put yourself in a mood. 

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Mood Boosters: Put Yourself in a Happy Mood 

Here are 9 healthy foods that may put you in a happy mood.

It may be tempting to turn to unhealthy items like cookies or ice cream when you're feeling down, but these high calorie foods are unlikely to improve your spirits. Here are 9 healthy foods that can really boost your mood.

Happy Mood Food: Foods That Can Really Boost Your Spirits

<ul><li>Spending time with loved ones is a great way to lift your spirits. If you can't be with them in person, give them a call or video chat.</li><li>Plan a vacation. Sometimes all you need is a change of scenery. If you can't take a vacation right away, start planning one for the future.</li><li>Go on a picnic. Whether you go to a nearby park or your own backyard, pack a picnic basket full of your favorite snacks and enjoy the outdoors.</li><li>Look at old photos. Life can get hectic and stressful. Sometimes it's nice to take a walk down memory lane and look at old photos</li><li>Have a water balloon fight. No water gun – no problem. <warningtag>Take some leftover balloons and have a balloon fight instead. </warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Go for a ride. Something as simple as getting in your car and going for a ride can help improve your mood. </warningtag></li></ul>

Get Yourself in a Happy Mood: Family Activities

<ul><li>Watch a funny movie or TV show.</li><li>Play with a pet. There's something about the unconditional love of an animal that can cheer you.</li><li>Make yourself a feel-good playlist of your favorite upbeat songs and listen to it whenever you need a pick-me-up. Or listen to a Podcast. </li><li>Read a good book.</li><li>Meditate. A simple 10-minute session may be enough to reset your mind quickly.</li><li>Taking deep breaths is a simple yet effective way to instantly relax and improve your mood. </li><li>Making a gratitude list of the things and people who make your life happy can relieve you of negative thoughts.</li><li>Drink herbal tea. Chamomile an<warningtag>d lavender tea are especially good for relaxation.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Fix yourself a pretty meal.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Make sure you are getting at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night.</warningtag></li></ul>

Get Yourself in a Happy Mood: Indoors Activities

<ul><li>Hang out with friends. Surrounding yourself with positive people is a great way to improve your mood. </li><li>Take a walk around the block or sit in the park and people-watch. </li><li>Exercise. Endorphins are released when you exercise which can lead to an improved mood.</li><li>Connect with nature. There's something about nature that has a calming effect on the soul.</li><li>Volunteer.  Giving back to the community can make you feel good and improve your mood.</li><li>Go to a coffee shop. Grab some coffee, tea, or hot cocoa, take a seat, and people-watch. Many coffee shops often play some cool music and have comfy chairs to relax<warningtag> in.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>If you have access to a beach, take advantage of it! The sound of the waves, seagulls, and the smell of salt water will be invigorating.</warningtag></li></ul>

Get Yourself in a Happy Mood: Outdoors Activities

<ul><li>When you’re in a bad mood, it can feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Everything seems ten times harder and nothing seems to go your way. It’s hard to enjoy the simple things in life when you’re feeling down in the dumps.</li><li>Your bad mood can also affect those around you. If you’re constantly complaining and snapping at people, it’s only natural that they would start to distance themselves from you.</li><li>But it’s not just our social life that suffers when we’re in a bad mood. Our physical health does as well. When we’re stressed or unhappy, our body goes into fight-or-flight mode.</li></ul>

How Does Our Mood Affect Our Life?

Get yourself in a happy mood: Simple and quick ways to cheer yourself up

In this post, we have listed a few tips to help you get into a good mood when your feeling down. Read on...

Quick Ways to Get Yourself in a Happy Mood

Activities to Get Yourself in a Happy Mood

As a species we have an in-built ‘negativity bias': a propensity to remember, cling to, and learn from negative experiences more readily than positive ones, according to neurology research.
It made sense that our earliest ancestors should be risk averse, but nowadays that bias is completely out of step with modern life. When a bad experience is highly unlikely to be life-threatening, a propensity to constantly rake up bad memories, see ourselves through a negative prism or belittle ourselves in a way we would never dream of doing to a friend can cause us to become unnecessarily fearful and depressed.

Negative bias

<ul><li>I can only go forwards, I can never go back</li><li>I can learn from this and it’ll be easier next time</li><li>I recognize that I feel down, and know that this will pass</li><li>Today is the first day of the rest of my life and I will take notice of the many positive things this day has to offer</li><li>I have a lot to be proud of.</li></ul>

Five affirmations to try for a happy mood

Affirmations challenge our negative self-talk and negative self-image. Positive thoughts have also been shown to help us respond better to stressful situations by regulating the stress hormone cortisol. Basically, the more positive our outlook, the less likely our brains are to go into fight-or-flight mode when we encounter a stressful situation. Which means we have to talk ourselves up.But it’s not as easy as looking in the mirror and chanting a mantra; if you don’t really believe what you’re saying, the whole process can do more harm than good. Affirmations need to be realistic, otherwise, y<warningtag>our brain rushes in to try and disprove them.</warningtag>

Positive affirmations

This is likely because our thoughts change our brain structure – the more positive thoughts we have, the more positive neural pathways we build in the brain, making it easier to think positively in the future.So build a practice whereby every time you have a good experience – no matter how small (i.e. sending the email you’ve been putting off) – you take 12 to 15 seconds to stop and appreciate the good feelings it prompts. This is how long it takes for the experience to be stored in our long-term memory. Even without saying anything, this allows us to build more positive neural pathways in the <warningtag>brain.</warningtag>

Changing brain structure

Can positive affirmations/mantras really put us in a happy mood?

Everyday is a new day for our bodies and minds, check in with yourself daily using Moody Month and find the motivation to give your body what it needs.

How to talk yourself into a good mood

How to talk yourself into a happy mood

. “The greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.”

“To be kind to all, to like many and love a few, to be needed and wanted by those we love, is certainly the nearest we can come to happiness.”

“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.”

“The happiness of life is made up of the little charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment."

“Just because you are happy it does not mean that the day is perfect but that you have looked beyond its imperfections”

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“You can't buy happiness”

“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.”

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

“It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”

“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.”

You must be the best judge of your own happiness.”

“Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.”

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it's the ability to deal with them.”

“There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”

“If you want happiness for an hour—take a nap. If you want happiness for a day—go fishing. If you want happiness for a year—inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime—help someone else.”

“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.”

“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

“The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.”

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us."

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”

"If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes."

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity."

“A flower blossoms for its own joy.”

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”

“Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks—I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.”

“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”

“Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.”

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

"Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are."

We could all use a little more happiness in our life. Here is a selection of quotes to put you in a happy mood.

Here are 100 inspiring quotes about happiness. These happiness quotes are perfect sayings for a toast or speech, or just looking for joy in your own life.

Inspiring Quotes For A Happy Mood

The primary puzzle is asking how long do you spend sampling options to give the optimum chances of a successful final decision? How many frogs must you kiss to secure your chances of getting a prince?Mathematicians have given us an answer: 37%. The basic idea is that, if you need to make a decision from 100 different options, you should sample and discard (or hold off on) the first 37. The 37% rule is a calibration period during which you identify what works and what does not. From the rejected 37%, we choose the best and keep that information in our heads moving forward.

The Mathematical Question And The Solution

When trying to pick the best among many options, how many samples should you try before you commit? This is known as the optimal stopping problem. Mathematicians tell us that, to maximize the chances of the best outcome, we ought to ditch the first 37% of any options. In psychology, people tend to either "explore" or "exploit" more.But, sadly for us, relationships are a bit messier than probability would have it.

The 37 Percent Rule: Key Takeaways

Mathematics offers us the best answer to the “optimal stopping problem.” But there’s just one big issue with it: Humans are not rational probability-crunching machines. In fact, the opposite is usually true. We’re beautifully, infuriatingly, creatively, and messily chaotic.In psychology and economics, there is what’s known as a “explore/exploit” tradeoff. This asks whether you should go with a guaranteed “win” (the exploit) or risk going somewhere else for an unknown outcome (explore). The degree to which someone will explore or exploit will depend on our curiosity and risk appetite.

Exploit or Explore

The world of interpersonal relations is hard to put a number on. Probabilities and game theory do funny things when you input the wobbly, fuzzy variables at play in human behaviour.But the biggest problem with the 37% rule, or the idea of “exploring,” when applied to dating is that one date(or even 10) is never enough.   When it comes to buying things or making life decisions, the 37% rule is a mathematically safe starting point. There’s a lot of wisdom to be had in sampling the field before settling down.

The Complexity Of Relationships

The optimal sample rate while deciding on something.

The 37% rule states that when making any major decision in life, reject the first 37% in a list and choose the next best that comes along.

Happy Mood Food: Foods That Can Really Boost Your Spirits

Quick Ways to Get Yourself in a Happy Mood

How to talk yourself into a good mood

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Inspiring Quotes For A Happy Mood

It's time to
Read like a Pro.