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Mood2021-07-17

“If you want to know what you were doing in the past, look at your body now. If you want to know what will happen to you in the future, look at what your mind is doing now.”

—Dalai Lama

Mood is activity1 2 3, modulated by how favorable the environment is, mediated through energy metabolism, cellular growth, and cellular circadian clock mechanisms4. A central molecular underpinning of mood is the mTOR pathway5. A favorable, stimulating environment leads to high mood- high motivation, activity, expansion and reproduction/multiplication. An unfavorable, deprived environment leads to low mood- low motivation, inactivity, retraction and apoptosis. Mood is related to time, as underlined by the circadian mechanisms connection. Internal organismal time, at its essence, is experiencing things and/or getting things done. In high mood states you get more things done, thus have more internal time compared to the external passage of time, which seems to pass more slowly. In low mood states, you get less things done, thus you have less internal time compared to the external passage of time, which seems to pass fast. Mood is about doing things or not, and with how much resources (time, energy, attention, money, etc.) Hope for the future achievement of goals is reflected in mood levels, and is related to current slope of things in your life, and to placebo effects.

Individuals can keep track of their mood in our Life x Mind app. Their clinicians can get an objective assessment about the patient’s risk for mood disorder episodes, and pre-emptive medication and nutraceutical choices, with our MindX Blood Testing.

Live. Happier. Longer.

Bob

Footnotes

  1. Niculescu AB. Genomic studies of mood disorders -- the brain as a muscle? Genome Biol 2005; 6(4): 215. ↩

  2. Le-Niculescu H, Patel SD, Bhat M, Kuczenski R, Faraone SV, Tsuang MT et al. Convergent functional genomics of genome-wide association data for bipolar disorder: comprehensive identification of candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 2009; 150B(2): 155-181. ↩

  3. Niculescu AB, Le-Niculescu H. Convergent Functional Genomics: what we have learned and can learn about genes, pathways, and mechanisms. Neuropsychopharmacology 2010; 35(1): 355-356. ↩

  4. Le-Niculescu H, Roseberry K, Gill SS, Levey DF, Phalen PL, Mullen J et al. Precision medicine for mood disorders: objective assessment, risk prediction, pharmacogenomics, and repurposed drugs. Mol Psychiatry 2021. ↩

  5. Saxton RA, Sabatini DM. mTOR Signaling in Growth, Metabolism, and Disease. Cell 2017; 168(6): 960-976. ↩