Seven things you should do consistently to boost your mood…

You don’t have to be in a great mood to approach, attract and connect with a beautiful woman, but one thing’s for sure… it’s a hell of a lot easier if you are.

One of the first rules of male-female interactions is, whatever you feel, she feels. Bear this in mind when you approach a woman.

If you’ve just finished a really stressful day at work and you’ve been keeping yourself up with caffeine all day, she’ll sense that you’re a little out of sorts and probably not the person she most wants to talk to.

Conversely, if you’ve had a great nights sleep and a fun-filled day catching up with old friends and sharing laughs together, she’ll pick up on your good vibe and feel much more compelled to talk to you.

Of course, to a great extent these factors are out of your control. However, there are factors within your control that will ensure that by-and-large, day in and day out, you’ll be in a good mood and a positive frame of mind.

Here’s a list of 7 habits that will ensure that you’re closer to a peak state the majority of the time, ready and prepared to engage an attractive woman:

Cardiovascular exercise three times a week

Cardio can be anything from running to cycling to swimming to trampolining. It’s literally any activity that works the heart and lungs and causes adaptation to a more efficient movement of oxygen through the body.

Studies show that cardio can help to improve mood by helping to release more endorphins, or ‘feel good’ chemicals, including adrenaline, serotonin and dopamine.

In people with mild depression, 30 minutes of intense cardiovascular exercise can be as effective as medication for improving mood, and the effects are equally powerful for healthy individuals. What’s more, cardiovascular exercise has even been shown to boost self-esteem!

I personally feel charged, happier and dramatically more productive on returning from 20-30 minute run.

For lasting and consistent benefits it’s important to do some cardio three or four times a week. Perhaps the simplest way to fit this in is to do a 30 minute run a couple of times before work each week, and one on the weekend. Easy!

Yoga everyday!

Yoga has been shown to increase the level of gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a chemical in the brain that helps to regulate nerve activity. Chris Street of the Boston University School of Medicine found that after a session of yoga postures GABA levels are increased, and this is associated with improved mood and decreased anxiety.

It’s believed that the practice of yoga stimulates specific brain areas, giving rise to changes in endogenous antidepressant neurotransmitters such as GABA. However, don’t take this at face value, try it out for yourself and you’ll find out in your own experience that it’s true.

If you can get to some classes and learn some basic postures, you can then begin to incorporate it into your everyday life. I personally try to do a few yoga postures every morning, it only takes a little time and I feel much, much better for it.

Anaerobic exercise three times a week

Anaerobic exercise is exercise in which oxygen is used up more quickly than the body is able to replenish it inside the working muscle, resulting in building and strengthening muscles through tension. This typically means lifting weights or body weight training.

Anaerobic exercise has also been shown to increase your mood and fight off depression. Studies show acute and chronic benefits of exercise for mood, which means you can use an anaerobic workout session as a pick-me-up. However, more importantly, if you stick to a regular schedule you can expect an overall improvement in your mood that isn’t limited to the time right after the workouts.

As an added benefit, anaerobic exercise is shown to increase levels of body image satisfaction, speed up learning, and increase self-control!

If you think you have to go through the daunting process of joining a gym and dragging yourself there regularly to do anaerobic exercise, think again. A full body anaerobic workout can be completed with body weight exercises at home (see here), and if needs be you can buy some weights for your home too.

As with cardio, anaerobic exercise should be done around three or four times a week. You can fit this in a couple of times a week upon returning home after work, and once at the weekend. Once again, easy!

Incorporate some powerful nutrition into your diet

What you eat obviously has a massive influence on your mood. However, counting calories, sacrificing eating your favourite foods or adopting one of the latest fad diet plans will not increase your mood. If anything, it’ll decrease your mood dramatically and make you irritable.

For this reason I recommend that you simply increase the number of nutritious foods that you eat. Once you begin to do this and you begin to experience increased energy levels you’ll probably find that the really bad food choices become more and more redundant and naturally fall away. However, if you want, you can still treat yourself to them once in a while.

I’d probably start out by eating some fruit every morning, at least one salad every day, a fresh juice every day (try beetroot), and at least one ‘superfood’ supplement.

I personally take goji berries, raw cacao, bee pollen, maca, reishi mushroom, ginseng and spirulina everyday. I’m a bit of a health freak so there’s no need to incorporate all this into your diet immediately. However, it’s well worth trying out one and seeing how it effects your energy levels and mood.

In order to best increase your mood I’d recommend spirulina taken in high doses everyday. Start out with a small dose, as it can induce a healing crisis in individuals leading a toxic lifestyle, and gradually increase. After a few weeks you should notice a marked increase in energy levels, mood and mental clarity. You should have less cravings for the bad stuff too.

“Nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels.” -Unknown

Be sure to get a good quality product as this makes a big difference, you can find a good quality UK supplier here.

Spend some time with chilling with positive friends

The benefits of friendship are universally renowned, living without friendship would be living a very dark existence indeed. Establishing friendships with a variety of individuals is definitely a worthwhile exercise. However, it’s also worthwhile to make sure that those individuals you spend the most time with are positive people who will boost your mood rather than bring you down.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” -Jim Rohn

The health benefits of being positive include increased life span, lower rates of depression, lower levels of distress, greater immune response, better psychological well being and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

Spending some time checking in with some good, positive friends can act as a good reset if you’ve allowed yourself to slip into a negative state or mild depression. They’ll inspire you to cope with your troubles, chase your goals and help you to maintain a healthy and balanced frame of mind. Not-so-positive friends often have the opposite effect.

Try to make it a policy to check in with two or three close friends every week who you can just sit down with, relax, unwind and re-balance yourself. Ensuring that you do this on a regular basis will ensure a more consistently balanced mood and sense of well being.

Dance everyday!

There are very few pleasures in life greater than the pleasure of losing yourself in your favourite music and allowing your body to move ecstatically in rhythm to the beat. Everyone loves to dance but most of us don’t do it nearly as much as we might.

Dancing is known to strengthen bones and muscles, tone your entire body, improve your posture, increase your stamina, reduce stress and tension, build confidence and ward off illness. However, perhaps the most important effect is the therapeutic effect it has on our psyche.

The expressive aspects of dancing allow people to process feelings that they may have trouble dealing with consciously. The Ancient Greeks believed dance to be healing because it provided a safe opportunity to release emotions, and today dance therapy is used as one form of treatment for disorders as diverse as schizophrenia, depression, autism, and eating disorders.

In healthy individuals dance boosts mood more than exercise alone. I personally try to dance a little in the morning every single day for five to ten minutes, sometimes gently and sometimes vigorously. It’s very difficult to be in a bad mood after dancing, and doing it consistently will help balance your mood in the long term.

Meditate everyday!

Meditating for just 20 minutes a day is well documented to  lower blood pressure, improve concentration and increase the immune system. Research even suggests it may increase positivity.

The University of Wisconsin found increased electrical activity in regions of the left frontal lobe, an area that tends to be more active in optimistic people, after eight weeks of training in meditation.

However, the most notable effect of meditation is in relieving tension and stress. It’s not often in modern life that we are not plagued by one thought or another, which causes a restless mind and the absence of relaxation. Meditation provides a welcome rest from the plague of thinking and access to periods of stillness and relaxation.

If you’re worried that you need to study a long-winded meditation course to figure out how to meditate, fear not. A basic meditation simple involves sitting in silence with your eyes closed and allowing any thoughts to come and go without attaching to them. With practice you’ll find that you cultivate more and more inner stillness.

Try meditating for 20-30 minutes upon waking and before you go to sleep. If you make it a habit, just like brushing your teeth, you’ll get the most benefit.

There you have it, seven habits that will dramatically increase your mood day in and day out! I’m sure you’re probably thinking to yourself ‘How can I afford to fit all that in?’ But bearing in mind the benefits these habits will have on your health, well being, productivity and love life, the question should really be ‘How can you afford not to?’

If you can make all of these things a habit you might also find yourself engaged in one more mood lifting activity on a regular basis… sex!

Want to get your dating life handled?

Sebastian Callow is a personal dating coach for men in London. Unlike other dating services he provides a practical, real-life coaching experience that actually involves meeting and interacting with women in everyday situations. Sebastian helps men develop the comfort and ease to express themselves with raw honesty. If you're unhappy with your dating life and you're hungry for change, the Personal Coaching Course could be exactly what you need.