Our moods and what we notice...

How we feel affects the things we notice and the things we remember.

Have you ever had a bad day when nothing seemed to go right? The day might have begun badly and just seemed to go from bad to worse. This is because our emotions lead us to notice things which agree with and support our mood.

Most of us can, to a certain extent, think ourselves into a certain mood - we know that listening to sad or to happy music can either lower our lift our spirits.

Experiments tell us that anxious people tend to pay more attention to the things they're afraid of and tend to think about them more often than most people.

This tendency to think more about the things that scare us can start a vicious circle of worrying more, feeling worse, becoming more tense, and so paying even more attention to the things that scare us.