Mood States
Sustained affective backgrounds — depressive types, manic patterns, dysphoria, mixed states, baseline mood.
30 entries
All behaviors in Mood States
Anhedonic Depression
A depression in which the cardinal loss is not sadness but the capacity to register pleasure — the Reward System's receptive machinery has gone quiet, and Deposit can no longer land.
Atypical Depression
A DSM-5 depression specifier marked by reactive mood, increased appetite, hypersomnia, leaden paralysis, and rejection sensitivity — possibly the most common form of depression, often missed because the spaces between negative events look fine.
Bipolar Mood Cycling
The defining pattern of bipolar disorders — alternation between depressive and elevated mood states that fragments identity across functional-states within the same person, and the long arc of stabilising a life around that fact.
Burnout Depression
The depression that follows sustained burnout — when chronic over-Effort with insufficient Deposit finally collapses the mood system. A transition state between WHO-classified burnout and clinical depression, often misdiagnosed as 'just burnout' when treatment-grade depression is already present.
Cyclothymia
Cyclothymic Disorder (DSM-5): two-plus years of sustained mood instability — hypomanic and depressive symptoms that never quite cross the threshold into full episodes. Often mistaken for a difficult personality rather than what it is: a mood disorder that responds to mood-disorder treatment.
Dysphoria
The umbrella state of unease, dissatisfaction, irritability, and low mood — broader than sadness, less specific than depression. The Greek roots dys (bad) and phoros (bearing) name what it feels like from inside: something hard is being carried, and the surface state of things-feel-wrong is the residue.
Euphoria
The intense elevated-pleasure mood — exaggerated wellbeing, expansive feeling, energy, and optimism beyond circumstance. Sometimes earned and integrable; sometimes engineered and followed by a crash.
Existential Depression
Depression whose content is the meaning-question itself — a legitimate response to encounter with death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness, distinct from biologically-driven depression and asking for meaning-work rather than only medication.
High-Functioning Depression
The colloquial name for someone who meets depression's internal criteria — low mood, anhedonia, exhaustion, worthlessness — while continuing to perform at high levels externally. Not a formal diagnosis; a recognition pattern. The functional surface is what keeps it hidden, and what makes it dangerous.
Holiday Blues
The mood depression that arrives around major holidays — Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year — as multiple stressors converge on the calendar and the gap between the cultural script and the lived experience becomes impossible to ignore.
Honeymoon Mood Crash
The mood drop that follows the high of a positive transition — a new city, new job, new relationship, retirement — when imagined forever-peak fades into ordinary baseline and the gap between expectation and arrival becomes visible.
Hypomania
The elevated-mood state below manic threshold — sustained days of high energy, reduced sleep need, racing thought, and goal-directed surge. Often feels productive, often valued, often the leading edge of a cycle the depressive crash later closes.
Major Depression
A clinical disorder in which the Meaning and Reward Systems have gone offline together — sustained low mood, loss of interest, and a body that cannot reliably land deposit, register reward, or carry effort. A treatable medical condition, not a failure of will.
Mixed Mood States
The DSM-5 mixed-features specifier — the simultaneous presence of depressive and elevated symptoms in the same episode. Particularly dangerous because depressive content rides on activated energy, and the system can act on what an unmixed depression would only contemplate.
Monday Dread
The specific heaviness of Monday morning — the felt-weight of the coming week arriving at the precise point where the weekend's buffer runs out. Distinct from Sunday Scaries: this is the present-state of starting, not the anticipation of it.
Mood Anchoring to Weather
The pattern of letting the day's weather set the day's affect — gloomy rain reads as low mood, sunny morning reads as lift — independent of what is actually happening in one's life. Distinct from seasonal affective disorder; this is a day-to-day anchoring.
Mood Congruence
The cognitive bias whereby current mood selectively attends to, remembers, and interprets mood-consistent information — making the depressed mind certain it now sees the truth, when what it sees is itself wearing the world's clothes.
Mood Contagion
The phenomenon of moods spreading person-to-person through mimicry, resonance, and prolonged co-presence — and how to remain in attuned contact without absorbing what isn't yours.
Mood Drift Across the Week
The recurring 7-day mood curve — Monday-Tuesday low, mid-week stabilisation, Thursday-Friday lift, weekend recovery or burnout-crash, Sunday Scaries return — read as residue accumulating across a work-week cycle and partially discharged by the weekend deposit.
Mood Lability
Rapid, often disproportionate mood shifts — fine one hour, crying the next, then angry, then okay — usually faster than the integration system can keep up with, and frequently misread as character when it is mechanism.
Mood-Dependent Memory
The empirically robust effect by which information encoded in one mood is recalled more readily when that mood is re-entered — so a depressed mind doesn't only see the present darkly, it retrieves a darker past, which makes the future look hopeless. The autobiographical store filtered by current weather.
Persistent Depressive Disorder
Chronic low-grade depression lasting two years or more (one year in children) — formerly called dysthymia. Less acute than major depression, more sustained, and often mistaken by the person living it for their personality rather than a treatable condition.
Post-Achievement Low
The flat, empty, sometimes depressive state that arrives after a major achievement was supposed to deliver joy — the gold medal, the published book, the closed exit, the finished degree — and the mechanism that explains why the expected peak so often lands hollow.
Postpartum Depression
A clinical depression with onset in the weeks-to-months after childbirth — the Meaning and Belonging Systems collapsing simultaneously under a biological, identity, and isolation load that no single dimension would have carried alone.
Premenstrual Dysphoric Patterns
The cyclical mood disruption — from subclinical PMS to DSM-5 PMDD — that drops baseline density predictably for 7–14 days each luteal phase, and is missed for years when each episode is read as a separate event.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
A depressive episode with a seasonal pattern — most often winter-onset, spring-remission — in which the Meaning and Reward Systems are dimmed in lockstep with the photoperiod, and a biological substrate change is reliably mistaken for a character or meaning problem.
Smiling Depression
The specific pattern of actively performing cheerfulness — joking, brightening rooms, being 'the funny one' — while internally carrying a depression the performance is built to hide. Distinguished from high-functioning depression by its active positivity, and particularly dangerous because the people closest cannot see it.
Subclinical Depression
Depressive symptoms below the diagnostic threshold for Major Depressive Disorder — real impairment, real risk, real treatability, often dismissed by self and others as not-really-depression and therefore left to compound.
Sunday Scaries
The time-locked anticipatory dread that arrives Sunday afternoon or evening — anxiety about the coming work-week, mood drop, sometimes physical tightness — and a signal that should be read, not just managed.
Travel Mood Decompression
The specific mood arc of travel — anticipation, transition exhaustion, mid-trip flourishing, end-of-trip wistfulness, post-return crash — read not as escape but as data about the chronic conditions of home life.