About your feelings, emotions, moods

Psychologists like to distinguish between feelings and emotions and moods. And that’s fine and no doubt important for their purposes.

However, in our everyday lives, most of use the words much more loosely to describe how we are at any one moment:

I’m disappointed
I feel fine
She’s in a mood
He’s just led by his emotions

How we feel is important...

Yes, I know, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that - because, for most of us, how we feel or our mood or our emotional state is the barometer that we use to evaluate the quality of our lives.

However, for most of us, how we feel appears to be in the hands of the gods. Or is dependent on some lottery, somewhere out there, which allocates to us a particular mood for the day; we wake up in the morning and discover which lottery ticket/mood has been allocated to us for that day - and that’s our lot!

How we feel is critically important. And yet we don’t have a huge say in how we feel - especially when the going gets rough. Or when our lives become stressful. Or when other people want us up or put down.

School lessons in “how to manage your feelings”

For most of us this didn’t happen – we didn’t have lessons in how to manage our feelings at school.

So in a very haphazard way we picked up tips and tricks here and there for managing our moods. We did this by modelling our parents, our teachers, our friends or other mentors. We may also have picked up a few insights from the media. And some of us did it by reading books on ‘positive thinking’.

It was all pretty hit and miss – and yet one way or another, over the years, each of us has cobbled together a rough and ready way of dealing with the highly complex process of living our life.

Sometimes our “cobbled together” way of running our lives works very well and some of the time it doesn’t. When it works well we feel good. When it doesn’t work well we feel bad – and usually blame ourselves. (Despite the fact that we were never taught, in the first place, how to manage our moods).

This website

That’s where this website comes in. It contains lots of tips and techniques which people have found useful - some of which I hope you, too, will find useful. Unfortunately it provide a tried and tested formula for a living a happy life – I’m still working on that one.

My name is Reg Connolly and I’ve been experimenting with many, many different forms of self-management and ‘positive thinking’ since I was in my teens. I worked as a psychotherapist and counsellor, seeing people on an individual basis, for about 22 years and, same time, I also worked as a stress management trainer and consultant.

I am the Training Director of Pegasus NLP Ltd and, in the early 2000’s when Pegasus NLP began to become very busy, I gave up up my psychotherapy practice and stress management business to focus more on working with groups.

Since this site was first launched in 1998 I have been building up an online collection of tips and techniques that appear to work well in enabling people to manage their moods and to feel more in charge of their lives.

The information is free - there is no subscription nor site entrance fee. We do not clutter the pages with advertising since we would have no control over the content of this and since it would be distracting. (Site running costs are covered by Pegasus NLP).

Please feel free to use the material here – and do read both our caution and our disclaimer. These are necessary because, since human nature is so wonderfully complex, it is impossible to offer a particular tip or technique or piece of information that would be appropriate for absolutely everybody or which would even be effective for absolutely everybody.

The information is freely available. And it is your responsibility to determine if it’s appropriate and useful for you.

Important: please read our caution regarding online advice

About your feelings, emotions, moods

How we feel is important...

School lessons in “how to manage your feelings”

This website

Self Help and your Moods