How to deal with mood swings without making them worse

When a mood swing hits, name what you’re feeling instead of judging it, then pause any big decision, text, or reaction for a few minutes. Ground your body with a slow exhale, then add 20 to 30 seconds of bilateral stimulation, like alternating taps. Most swings ease within minutes once you stop fighting or feeding them.

An hour ago you were fine. Now you’re snapping at a text that wouldn’t have bothered you yesterday, or blinking back tears over something small, and you can’t point to what actually changed.

The mood arrived faster than any reason for it did. That part is normal. What happens in the next few minutes decides whether it passes cleanly, or turns into a message you regret or a decision you didn’t really mean.

What’s actually happening when your mood swings like this?

A mood swing rarely has one clean cause. It’s usually your baseline shifting under a few things stacking up at once: how you slept, when you last ate, where you are in a hormonal cycle, or how much stress had already built up before this moment.

Sleep matters more than most people expect. In a 2007 study in Current Biology, researchers found that after a night of poor sleep, the amygdala, your brain’s threat-detection center, reacted about 60% more strongly to negative images. Its connection to the prefrontal cortex, the part that normally keeps reactions in proportion, also weakened. Skip good sleep, and the same small thing lands harder.

Blood sugar plays a role too. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tracked 107 married couples for 21 days and found that lower blood glucose lined up with more aggression toward a partner. “Hangry” is a real, measured pattern, not just an excuse.

Hormonal shifts, certain medications, and thyroid changes can move your mood too, according to Mayo Clinic. And once a mood has arrived, judging yourself for it can keep it going. A widely cited review of rumination research found that replaying and criticizing a low mood, instead of letting it move, tends to prolong it rather than resolve it (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008).

None of this means something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system is reacting to real inputs, and it’s temporarily outside its usual window of tolerance, the range where you can feel a feeling without it running the show.

How do you ride out a mood swing without making it worse?

Run through these steps in order. None of them require you to fix the mood, only to stop feeding it.

1. Name it, don’t judge it

Silently or out loud: “I’m in a mood swing right now.” Not “what is wrong with me.” A 2007 study in Psychological Science found that putting a feeling into words measurably calmed activity in the amygdala, the same alarm system driving the swing. Naming it lowers the charge; judging it adds to that charge.

2. Pause anything big

This is the step that actually keeps a mood swing from making things worse. Don’t send the text, answer the email, make the call, or decide anything that matters while the mood is running high. Give it 20 minutes before you act on how you feel right now. Fast-moving moods pass; a decision made inside one is much harder to undo.

3. Ground your body

Slow your exhale, in for about four counts and out for six, for close to a minute. Feel your feet on the floor or your hands on a solid surface. This nudges your body back toward steady, whatever the mood is still doing.

4. Add bilateral stimulation

This is where EMDR’s core technique comes in. Tap left, right, left, right, slowly, on your knees or your arms crossed over your chest, for 20 to 30 seconds while the mood sits loosely in mind. This is bilateral stimulation (BLS), the rhythmic left-right technique at the center of EMDR therapy.

A 2013 meta-analysis of 26 studies in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry found that eye movements reliably reduced the vividness and emotional intensity of distressing material held in mind. Tapping uses the same left-right principle. It isn’t a guaranteed fix, but it’s a low-risk technique worth trying while a mood is still moving, instead of after it has already hardened into a decision.

If you’d rather be guided than count your own taps, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same technique with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, at your own pace, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers pacing and choosing a method in more detail.

5. Recheck before you act

Once the intensity has actually dropped, not just gone quiet on the surface, decide what to do next. Most swings ease noticeably within a few minutes once you stop fighting or feeding them. If nothing has shifted yet, that’s useful information too, not a failure of the steps above.

Why do some people’s moods swing harder than others?

For some people, a small shift tips further and faster than it seems like it should. EMDR’s own model of the mind holds that a reaction this outsized is often less about today’s trigger and more about a lower threshold set by earlier experiences that never fully got processed. That doesn’t make the steps above superficial; settling today’s swing is real, useful work, even when there’s a deeper root involved.

If this happens most days regardless of sleep or stress, it may be closer to emotional dysregulation than an occasional rough patch, and it’s worth naming that difference honestly rather than leaning on the same quick reset indefinitely. The emotional regulation toolkit has more techniques for in-the-moment swings and spikes like this one.

When does a mood swing need more than this?

This practice is built for the ordinary swing: snapping at someone because you skipped lunch, tearing up at a commercial, feeling flat for an afternoon you can’t explain. Some patterns are asking for more support:

• Swings this large happen most days, not just once in a while.
• They come with big, days-long shifts in energy, sleep, or motivation, not just an hour or two. That pattern, paired with fast, intense mood swings, is sometimes part of something like bipolar disorder. Telling the difference from an intense ordinary week is a job for a doctor, not a self-check.
• A physical cause hasn’t been ruled out. Mayo Clinic notes that certain medications and thyroid changes can drive mood swings, and a doctor can check for these directly.
• They’re damaging a relationship, your work, or how you feel about yourself.
• They bring on hopelessness or thoughts of harming yourself. That’s outside what self-guided practice is built for. Use our crisis resources page or call or text 988 (US) right away.

A therapist, or a doctor for the physical possibilities, can help with any of these. Needing more than a quick reset isn’t a failure of the technique. If a swing tips further, into your whole body flooding and your thinking shutting down rather than just shifting, emotional flooding picks up from there.

The next mood swing will pass too. How you handle the next few minutes decides whether it takes anything else down with it.