Interdisciplinary Psychology:

ELEVATOR RIDE

            For the two mood lifting activities I chose to do them after a hard stressful day of work and the other when I was felling burned out on homework.

            For the first activity after a stressful day at work, I went back to my apartment and sat down to play my video games, which usually work to calm me down and get me in a more relaxed mood. How ever on this particular day the video games did not work so I decided to try my fall back activity for when the video games don’t work, which is to listen to music. When I listen to music to come down I listen to a lot of upbeat good felling oldies. After about a half hour of listening to this music I was dancing around and felt to be in a less stressful mood, not quite ecstatic but not as stressed out, so it was mood lifting. 

            For the second mood lifting activity that I implemented during a burn out on homework I called a couple of my friends and got a group together to play monopoly. It worked out great because they to were felling burned out and wanted something to do. While playing monopoly we had a lot of fun we were joking around and talking about what each one of us was up to lately, for a few of us it was the first time we saw each other in 3 months due to our schedules, so it was a good time for us all to get together. Te change form doing something that was depleting us cognitively to something that allowed us let lose and do something fun allowed at least me to get back to doing my homework and allowed me to complete it rather effortlessly.

            For the activity to lower my rumination, I decided to acknowledge the thoughts and to acknowledge where they were coming from, but to know that these thoughts were not true. After the acknowledgement I combated those thoughts with more positive thoughts that I knew to be true, such as listing all the things that I am good at when I failed at something and had the though that I am not good at anything, even thought I knew that I was good at a lot of things. This didn’t stop the self talk but it allowed me to deal with it in a positive manor.

            For the activity to low the cognitive process I tried meditation. I played a low drum beat music in the background and I lit some sage incenses, the only ones I had laying around, sat on the floor crossed legged. For the next hour I focused on my breath and just let all my thoughts fly out of my mind with out focusing on them. After this meditation I felt really relaxed cognitively, but had a pain in my lower back from sitting that way. However I was relaxed and felt a lot better.

            Before doing this project I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought about a lot of things that I could do, like helping my roommate learn to paint but then I thought that I myself am not that great at it. Then I thought that I could teach my brother how to knit, which is something that he would like to lean, but then I thought that I don’t have the patience for that I have tried to teach him before but got really frustrated with it. Then I was hanging out with a friend one day and she wanted to talk about something that was bothering her and then I remembered that one of the things that we could do for this project was to listen to others.

            After listening to her talk about what was bothering her she asked for my advice on what she should do so we spent the next couple of days, off and on, about possible solutions to her problem. When we were finaly able to come to a workable solution I felt really good about being able to help her with her problems, it felt good because I have a hard time dealing with my own problems and when I was able to help her it made me think that I could find solutions to my problems if I tried harder next time.

            A couple of days later she called me to let me know how things turned out and it made me fell really good about being able to help her, and to know that I could really help someone when I had trouble helping myself. Doing this project made me what to more things for others.