Has anyone ever said to you, “Calm down” when you were upset? It didn’t work, did it? In fact, it probably made you more agitated. Finding calm when everything is hitting the fan isn’t something we can do on someone’s command, and being told to calm down comes across as patronizing and dismissive — as if we’re being silly or irrational by being upset. This just ratchets up our lack of calm.

We don’t consciously notice a calm state since we experience calm when we feel safe and in control. When we’re calm, we are free from agitation, anxiety, worry, stress, or other strong emotions. Everything is going well, and the way forward is smooth. …

For many of us, winter usually brings a double dose of the blues due to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and the holidays. This year, we’re facing a triple whammy because we’re heading into the blues season with a heavy dose of Covid-19 blues, which isn’t going away any time soon. Governments are only marginally successful at controlling Covid-19, and while vaccines look promising, production and distribution challenges need to be met.

SAD is already rearing its depressing head, and holiday celebrations are being curtailed by the increasing need for isolation, face masks, and travel bans. We’re in a deep blue state, and it’s going to get even deeper. If we feel overwhelmed now, the weeks ahead are going to make everything worse. Is there anything we can do when the holiday blues and the SAD blues join forces with Covid-19 blues? …

Frustration can feel as if we’re spiraling into the ground like a screw being turned by some unseen hand that’s out to get us. Things hit the fan, we’re up against a roadblock, everyone seems to be working at cross purposes to us, tempers are short, irritation is high, and we’re frustrated beyond description. Nothing is going the way we want.

Frustration can make us feel pressured, trapped, helpless, angry, and a host of other negative emotions. It can boil over into arguments, fire up into conflict, and lead to actions we later regret.

While screaming might release some of the immediate pressure, it’s not an optimal solution. We need strategies to help us cope with frustration and to recognize what it may be telling us. …

Our mood matters in many ways. A good mood can make us more creative, productive, happier, and resilient. On the other hand, a bad mood can drag us down, kill our motivation, and leave us bereft of happiness. Sometimes, we know what triggers our mood; sometimes, they seem to appear out of nowhere; sometimes they bounce up and down like a ping-pong ball. While it can seem as if our moods are out of our control, they aren’t.

Our moods can range from high to low in a matter of seconds. Consultant and author Larry Senn, in his book The Mood Elevator, provides a road map for navigating the ups and downs of mood. His elevator looks like a thermometer with zero as a curious, interested mood. Above zero are the positive moods from flexible and adaptive to grateful, which is the top mood. …

Most of us aspire to high emotional intelligence; it’s held up as the path to career success and life satisfaction. One of the elements of high emotional intelligence is empathy. We tune into what someone else is experiencing and respect their right to feel what they are feeling. We are non-judgmental and accepting. So, why is it easy for us to have empathy for others and hard to have it for ourselves?

We criticize and condemn ourselves in language we would never use with someone else. It’s as if we must be harder with ourselves and less tolerant of our human foibles and emotions than we are with others. …

Tone is what we hear when we read. As we see the words and comprehend their meaning, we also are sounding out the words in our heads. We’re hearing the tone of the writing as we read, and it is a major factor in how positively or negatively readers react to our content. Here are some tools to help manage tone.

• Sentence length. Shorter sentences create a lively, punchy tone; however, too many lead to a staccato rhythm many readers find boring. Longer sentences create a more sedate, softer tone while too many make the content appear difficult to read. …

All day our moods run up and down from good to bad to neutral and over again. They reflect our self-talk, which is our constant companion even if we don’t realize it. Positive self-talk equals positive moods; negative self-talk leads to negative moods.

“Our mind is filled with the chaos of swirling thoughts that we have little or no control over. We feel unsettled and uneasy, in the same way that we do when there’s a loud disturbance outside us. It creates what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls psychic entropy — a lack of control over our own minds.” …

It’s hard for many of us to give up and walk away because it evokes images of weak-willed people with white flags shuffling off to ignominy. It screams that we don’t have the “right stuff.” We feel shame that we can’t find whatever we need to go the distance, that we’re losers. According to research by psychologists Carsten Wrosch and Gregory Miller, “The notion that persistence is essential for success is deeply embedded within American culture.”

This is not just an American phenomenon. Most cultures have heroic sagas that extol the bravery and courage of the lone hero facing seemingly unsurmountable obstacles to succeed in a worthy quest. The heroic spirit is practically part of our DNA, and we see it everywhere from ancient tales of bravery to modern action films. We are presented with a lofty ideal that can either motivate us to go beyond what we think we’re capable of or leave us filled with shame when we reach the breaking point and our quest fails. …