"Everything is a Mood."

Castles in the Sky #31

Everything is a Mood by DallE2

In this essay, a man is the last of all the people he knows to discover something about himself. His journey to understand that thing about himself leads to a tumultuous weekend that upends his understanding of who he is and how the mind works. 

That man is me.

About a year ago, I was scrolling Instagram and saw a video where this woman was like, “how you know you’re an adult with ADHD,” then she did something that’s totally normal that everyone does. 

Or so I thought. 

Unfortunately, I can’t remember what the video was about, but I showed it to my wife, chuckling, like “isn’t this weird? Everyone does this?” And my wife told me that I was wrong–it was abnormal behavior not everyone does. So I sent the video to a handful of friends and family members who all said the same thing as my wife. Surprised, I messaged each of them something like, “well wait a second, if only people who have ADHD do this, that would mean I have ADHD.” To which they each responded with various versions of, “yeah duh you have ADHD.” 

For the unfamiliar, ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) affects both children and adults, causing symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that can disrupt daily life. Typically emerging before age 12, the three types of ADHD—hyperactive-impulsive, inattentive, and combined—manifest through behaviors such as fidgeting, forgetfulness, and interrupting others. While diagnosis usually occurs in childhood, some adults may remain unaware of their ADHD until significant personal or professional issues arise.

Luckily, I did not have significant problems: my life was not going off the rails in any observable way. But after a lot of time reading about ADHD and learning about how the different types present, I started to suspect that everyone in my life may be correct. A lot of problems I had always assumed were quirks or part of my character seemed straight out of the description for adults with ADHD Inattentive type. (For now, what those symptoms were is unimportant, but if you’re curious there are a lot of great lists you can research yourself.)

Sufficiently convinced it was worth checking out, I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. We had a long talk. He seemed like a good guy, but he told me at the end that he does what’s called “medication management,” and wasn’t inclined to either diagnose me or put me on medication if my life wasn’t being significantly impaired. However, he would set me up with a referral for some more exhaustive testing. 

There were some red flags with the psychiatrist. Things like, he recommended some pretty basic, standard books on time management (Getting Things Done by David Allen etc.). And we spent most of the meeting talking about good restaurants, as he was new to Houston. The fact that he was giving such generic advice and that we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about me was concerning. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when I didn’t get the referral until seven weeks later. And once I finally got it, finding out the person I was referred to wasn’t accepting new patients. 

So I went to a second psychiatrist. This one felt much better. He seemed to ask much more probing questions and I felt much more heard. He didn’t recommend that I do anything I could have found in a rudimentary Google search. He recommended the same battery of comprehensive tests but said it behooved us to get started on medication. I told him that I didn’t want to take any “uppers,” like Adderall, and he was tentatively understanding. 

And this is where the story takes a turn. 

(Before I continue, I want to state that I am OK now, that I was never in danger, and that I am still an emphatic supporter of psychiatry and mental health medications. In retrospect, I am still proud that I sought the help of a psychiatrist, and that I decided to start with my boundaries, telling him that I didn’t want to take Adderall or similar drugs. However, I did lack a certain maturity–namely, I never thought, “what will the doctor give me if not stimulants?”) 

The doctor had medication samples in his desk drawer. He pulled out one box covered in the colorful, warm, sans-serif writing typical of pharmaceutical ads. He said that I should start taking this, follow the instructions inside, and take the discount card to the pharmacy to get a prescription to round out the month. I accepted the box with some reservations. 

I walked out to my car and googled the name of the medicine. It was only recently released in the US and was very promising as an ADHD medicine. It wasn’t new though–it had been prescribed in Europe since the 70s as an anti-depressant to treat depression and other mood disorders. I could only find testimonials of people who found it super helpful or super unhelpful. I decided to have a little faith and took the first dose, which was on Thursday morning. 

The medicine said that it could kick in instantly or it could take a few weeks. Mine was nearly instant. Maybe once or twice a week, I have this phenomenon where time “slips.” As in, I’m working on something at 9:00 a.m., and suddenly it’s 2:00 p.m., and I feel like those intervening five hours just “slipped” through my fingers. Like I was distracted to the point that I did not get nearly five hours of work done. 

On that Thursday, about four hours after I took the first dose, I had the opposite happen. I had hopefully made a to-do list like I do most days. But unlike most days, on this day I just burned through it. I thought to myself, “must be quitting time, I’ve got so much done,” and it was only 2:30 p.m. I looked for more things to do and worked for what felt like a few hours, and it was only 4:00 p.m. I didn’t feel rushed or out of body, I just had less chatter in the back of my mind, and what to do seemed easier. That feeling wore off around 5:30 p.m. 

For the next two days, not much happened differently. I took the medicine, and it gave me a very subtle headache–one I may not have even noticed were I not being hyper-vigilant for changes in how I feel–and occasionally I would develop a warmth on the crown of my forehead, like a very light, localized Niacin flush.

To explain what happened on Sunday, I need to give a little background. I had never really considered what mood meant before. I want to share the honest prejudices I had before this experience. I thought of mood as something ephemeral and feminine. Mood was in the domain of feelings. Being “in a mood” meant that was how you felt about something, and there was always the connotation that it was not real. Like a bad mood or good mood meant, to me, that how you feel deviated significantly enough from how you should feel according to the reality of a situation that it was notable. 

I seemed to think that there was “the truth” of a situation, and then there were empirical sensory inputs, and that mood was a layer on top of this, like the feelings generated by our interpretation of the truth and our sensory inputs. And when a mood was notable, it was because we had some kind of overreaction in a given direction. I wouldn’t have taken the time to articulate it this way, but retrospectively this was what I thought. 

I now believe I was wrong. 

On Sunday, I woke up and took the medicine before I was really alert. But something was different. There was a book I read in elementary school called The Giver. It was about a dystopian world in the future with no feelings, no art–literally no color. Over the course of the book, the protagonist stops taking the medicine that robs the world of its color to become the titular Giver, the one who feels. His world goes from flat black and white to color. 

That Sunday morning, I felt like I had gone in the opposite direction. I suddenly felt terribly flat, like the color had drained from the world. I felt bad. In the past I’d felt bad, from losing people or pets, or from being dumped. This was different. Past sadnesses were a low with an accompanied high. It was like I had fallen into a hole, through the top of which I could see the Sun. There was immense pain but there was also a consciousness of another state–a good state, whose absence was acutely felt. 

As the day wore on, I felt bad, but there was no other state. It was like I was trapped at the bottom of the hole, buried alive. The best way I can describe it is that I felt bad and I could not imagine not feeling bad. I knew intellectually that this was silly, and I had been working hard enough to monitor my feelings that I knew that it was directly related to the medicine, but it was still very scary. 

I followed my wife around for a while trying to make normal conversation, but I would take a lot of pauses to look at her, blank-faced, and say, “I love you.” I meant it, but what I really wanted was for her to say it back, and simply reaffirm that she was there, and I mattered, and that there were pleasant parts of my life that were bigger and more important than me. 

I love a lot of people with depression. I know that the best thing to do when someone is depressed is simply to be around them with no expectations on them. Remind them that you’re there, that they can come to you, and don’t try to encourage them or make them feel better. Just be there and be familiar and reaffirm them when asked. 

The medicine I was taking had originally been marketed for mood disorders. I look up the details again and it said a possible side effect was depression. And while I had always had sympathy for people with depression, that morning I had empathy. I told my wife, “I think I’m depressed.” It was an enormous departure from my normal, jovial, optimistic self. I decided to quit taking the medicine. I didn’t know what to do with myself so I laid on the couch under a blanket all day and watched Lord of the Rings. 

The next morning I still felt very out of it. I surmised that if the medicine could get into my system that quickly it might leave quickly, so I ate a large meal then went on a long run. Near the second mile of the run, I felt a flush and suddenly laughed very hard, then almost teared up. I could feel that the “color” that had drained from the world the morning before had started to return. 

After showering at home, I realized I had to dramatically update my idea of what mood is. As I mentioned before, I had always thought mood to mean something, “not real,” something aside from the truth, something based in feelings, obscuring reality. 

After one day, everything had changed. I realized that mood is not separate from reality or the truth. On the contrary, everything is mood. Mood is not some other phenomena. It is not the window dressing to another view. It is everything; it is the miasma of context in which we live. It is the primordial swamp from which all meaning flows, from which the ooze of language and thought crawled out to build cathedrals and engineer the Internet.

Prior to this, my understanding of the mind came from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. He posits that our thinking is divided into two systems—intuitive (System 1) and logical (System 2)—and that errors occur when System 1, which operates in the background, feeds false information to System 2, which then accepts it as true.

Mood is the word that captures all of the meaning we don’t have other words for. Using Kahneman’s language, mood is the context generated by System 1. It takes all of our experience, all of our history, and all of our sensory inputs, and faster than we can process those deliberately, it spits back out a “feeling” to give us a signal for what is happening. 

Consider the mood of a story, or the mood of a place. To know a thing is a deliberate act. But to feel something is automatic and happens beyond our conscious understanding. It is possible to understand why you feel a certain way, but not a requisite that you understand something to feel that way. As a matter of fact, I would argue that the inverse is often true: people feel something despite the fact that they don’t understand why. Much of our modern attempts at introspection–therapy or otherwise–is us attempting to uncover why our mind generates the “feelings” or “mood” that it does. 

I was shocked to understand how much of my self-concept came back to my persistent mood. My optimism, my go-gettiveness, my sense of humor, my energy levels. I could potentially will myself into having these things, or deliberately attempt them, but on that Sunday they were simply gone. It was terrifying, awe-inspiring, and informative to understand how much of who I consider myself came from my mood, and that this mood could be turned off taking one pill a day for four days. 

I went back to the psychiatrist and their associated therapist and told them that I was less interested in medicine for the time being. The therapist told me that there were strategies and tools I could learn to treat my ADHD-inattentive habits and symptoms, but if I have any hyperactivity, that requires pharmacological intervention. I walked away from this experience with a shaken but richer understanding of myself, a more comprehensive definition of mood, and a deepened empathy for people with depression and other mood disorders.  

And so I end this experience with gratitude, but even then I have to ask myself, would I be as grateful if I wasn’t in a good mood today?

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