"Depression is just prolonged low mood" George Pransky
I grow up in a family where my father's low moods made me think that something was wrong and it was my responsibility to make him feel good again. And for years I took the responsibility to make other people feel good, a full-time job that pays poorly on all levels.
Low moods = low thoughts
Discovering that moods changes all the time completely out of my control was a strange and profound insight. How could I and rest of the world not see it? It was even more important for my well-being to see that low moods often triggered insecure thinking and old habits, making a low mood into a devastating experience. I have spent so much time trying to improve my experience of life from a low mood that it´s comical.
"I can make me feel better. I only need to..."
Meditate, drugs, gaming, working out, call friends, eat chips, drink, social media binging, eating and reading a book - just to mention some of my few "favorite" technics. I found it strange that technics sometimes worked and sometimes didn´t. Now I see that the solution was to not think in the direction of "why do I feel so bad". So if I set out to do some of the technics in order to feel better, it will sometimes work but the experience would never change until I understand what is really going on.
A comical solution
Next time you feel tense/stressed/anxiety or any other of those beautiful negative feelings, see if you can notice that its just your mood going down, just like the sun do every day. And you know that moods come and go. The next step is to imagine yourself with a red nose, signaling to yourself that you should not take your thoughts (and yourself) so serious right now. This trick works its magic on other people too. Imagine your partner with a red nose next that (s)he is in a low mood and you start to get irritated. Or a random person that clearly is in a low mood.
My girlfriend was in a particularly bad mood one day and had no problem in sharing it with me. She was standing there and was furious about something and suddenly I imagined her with a red nose. I tried not to laugh but it only took seconds before I burst out in laughter. She looked and me dead serious said "you better not imagine me with a red nose!". Then we both started to laugh hysterical. Never have a bad mood disappeared faster in the human history! 