Having struggled with both, when I found a document directly dealing with them, I knew I would benefit from noting my understanding.
Why?
Satisfaction with life is important and worth time and attention, since unhappiness is dangerous, for thought and life.
Even in less ideal situations, a general sense of satisfaction helps. Mood maintenance is thus a better way to live.
How?
Consider your historical baseline a result of being uninformed, not as everlasting. This means emotional information from self guided and focused experimenting is necessary. Focus on increasing the factors that help with heightening your baseline and decreasing the hurting factors. Also, relax standards around feasibility to prevent self-sabotage.
Habits
To wit:
- Pick a “default mood” you want to count as okay — one that’s a bit ambitious but still realistic — and treat that as your new normal. This should be a baseline and not the point to spend emotional energy, i.e. to do emotionally stressful tasks.
- Use descriptive and directive labels for mood and emotions, so labels immediately suggest the next action - e.g. “overwhelmed” → reduce tasks.
- Stop tolerating consistent minor injuries to mood. If you don’t like waking to noisy alarms, fight for morning leeway.
- Commit to controlling your environment to a considerable degree for personal satisfaction.
- It can be hard to avoid thinking about things, but you can decide to think about whatever you want.
- When you write something off, continuously let it go.
- Be willing to expend resources on life satisfaction. Be willing to spend money, and try new things, including whims. Desire to do fun things is important and should be unrestrained where possible - even though they could cost time and other activities.
- Have many accessible, cheap excuses to cheer up whenever feeling blue. Have favorite pair of socks, make lots of friends on purpose to chat with, gather inexpensive goods like music and interesting websites.
Reference
I forget now, but will add when I find it.