Low Mood Doesn’t Need Diagnosing

Stop turning blue days into disasters

You woke up feeling flat today and immediately started scanning for what’s broken.

Most people treat every dip in mood like a medical emergency.

You Google symptoms when you should be resting. You create narratives about depression when you’re just tired. You turn a normal Tuesday into evidence that something’s deeply wrong with you. The panic compounds the problem. The stories you build around low mood last longer than the low mood itself. You’re not experiencing a mental health crisis, you’re experiencing being human.

Stop pathologising inevitable patterns.

The data nobody discusses

Research shows that mood fluctuates naturally across 24-48 hour cycles for most people, independent of external circumstances.

Your nervous system operates in waves, not straight lines. Energy dips are biological, not biographical. When you treat every flat day as a problem requiring diagnosis, you create anxiety around normal human variation. You train yourself to fear the very rhythms your body was designed to experience.

Ask yourself: What if your low mood isn’t a warning sign but a maintenance signal?

How to stop turning bad days into disasters

Stop interrogating it.

Not everything needs a root cause analysis. Sometimes you feel flat. That’s the complete story. No trauma to unpack. No pattern to decode. No diagnosis required. Your mind will search for problems because that’s what minds do. Recognise the search, then stop participating in it. Low mood can exist without meaning anything beyond “I feel low today.”

Keep basics strong without forcing output.

Sleep when tired. Eat real food. Drink water. Move gently if you can, rest completely if you can’t. These aren’t cures, they’re the foundation that allows natural recovery. Your body knows how to reset. Your job is to not interfere with the process by adding stress, stimulants, or stories. The basics keep your system stable while mood finds its way back up.

Set a 48-72 hour timer.

Most low moods resolve naturally in this window when you stop adding narrative. Track it. Wednesday’s flatness is usually Friday’s normalcy. But you have to give it time without intervention. Without diagnosis. Without creating meaning. If you’re still flat after 72 hours and nothing has shifted, then consider whether something deeper needs attention. Until then, just let the system recalibrate.

Here’s why you should let low mood exist

Low mood teaches you what high mood is worth.

You can’t appreciate energy without experiencing depletion. You can’t value motivation without feeling flat. You can’t recognise your baseline until you’ve dropped below it and returned. The contrast creates gratitude. Without the dip, everything becomes neutral. You stop noticing what’s working because you’ve never felt what isn’t.

For example:

Someone pushes through low mood because they have commitments. Forces the morning workout even though their body is asking for rest. Maintains productivity targets. Attends every meeting. Uses energy they don’t have. Three weeks later, their system stops asking and starts demanding. What should have been 48 hours of recovery becomes 10 days of shutdown. The body takes the rest that was refused, with interest.

The lesson? Low mood is data, not failure. Your system requesting rest isn’t weakness or lack of discipline. It’s maintenance. The cost of ignoring the signal is always higher than the cost of honouring it. Push through once, and you’ll pay back double later. Rest Tuesday and be fine by Thursday, or work through Tuesday and crash for nearly two weeks.

When you feel flat, rest. Not because you’re weak, but because you’ve learned what happens when you’re not.

What low mood actually is

Dr. Julie Smith writes in “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before” about how we’ve medicalised normal emotional variation. Every dip gets labelled. Every flat day gets Googled. Every bad week becomes potential depression.

She points out that low mood isn’t always pathology. Sometimes it’s just your nervous system asking for a break. Sometimes you’re tired, not traumatised. Sometimes you need rest, not therapy.

The best athletes in the world have days where they feel completely flat. Movie stars wake up unmotivated. The CEOs you follow have Wednesdays where nothing clicks and they can’t focus. They don’t rush to diagnose it. They recognise it as part of being human with a nervous system that operates in cycles, not straight lines.

Your body requesting rest doesn’t mean your body is broken. It means it’s working exactly as designed, in waves, with natural dips that require recovery.

When you stop treating every dip as an emergency, you stop creating emergencies out of dips.

A brief example from this week

Earlier this week I woke up completely wiped. Low energy. Low mood. No trigger I could identify.

Monday’s run didn’t happen. I didn’t force it. Didn’t panic about breaking my streak. Didn’t create a story about losing momentum or discipline.

I focused on sleep. Ate well. Stayed hydrated. Let my body do what it needed without adding narrative or intervention. By Wednesday morning, everything had reset. Energy back. Mood stable. No intervention required beyond basic rest and nutrition.

I didn’t self-diagnose a covid variant. Didn’t spiral into mental health concerns. Didn’t Google “sudden fatigue and low mood.” Didn’t create a problem that didn’t exist.

Just recognised it as temporary human experience. Two days of feeling flat. That’s the complete story.

The difference? I stopped resisting what was happening. I let low mood be low mood instead of making it mean something catastrophic. The mood passed faster because I wasn’t adding layers of anxiety and story on top of it.

The real cost of constant diagnosis

Every time you treat low mood as a mystery to solve, you extend how long it lasts.

The Google search adds anxiety. The self-diagnosis adds story. The panic adds resistance. The original low mood might have lasted 48 hours. The spiral you create around it lasts two weeks.

You’re not helping yourself by constantly monitoring and analysing every dip in energy. You’re training yourself to fear normal human variation. You’re creating problems that don’t exist by refusing to let temporary states be temporary.

Most people spend more energy resisting low mood than they would spend just resting through it. They fight it. Question it. Diagnose it. Create elaborate explanations for it. All while the low mood sits there, waiting to pass naturally like it was always going to.

What changes when you stop resisting

You gain permission to rest without guilt. Low energy stops feeling like failure and starts feeling like information. You stop using energy you don’t have. You stop forcing productivity that depletes you further.

You start seeing low mood as part of the natural cycle instead of evidence of something wrong. You stop Googling symptoms and start honouring signals. You stop creating stories and start acknowledging patterns.

Most importantly, you stop turning 48 hours of flatness into weeks of spiral. The low mood passes faster because you’re not adding layers of panic, diagnosis, and narrative on top of the original feeling.

The mood was always going to shift. You just stopped making it harder by resisting it.

What to do next time

The next time low mood shows up, recognise it for what it is: an inevitable pattern. Temporary. Normal. Human.

Don’t Google it. Don’t diagnose it. Don’t create stories about what it means.

Rest through it. Sleep more. Eat well. Move gently or not at all. Give yourself 24-72 hours.

Your mood will shift. It always does.

The question isn’t whether you’ll have low days. Everyone does. Elite performers. Successful entrepreneurs. The people you admire most. All of them experience flat days where nothing feels right.

The question is whether you’ll let low mood be what it is, just a day, or turn it into evidence of something catastrophic.

Low mood doesn’t need fixing. It needs acknowledging.

Then it needs you to go make some tea and get more sleep.

Your nervous system will handle the rest.

-Chris

P.S After an overwhelming “Yes” on the Podcast poll last week, I’ve recorded an audio version of this newsletter which will be emailed out tomorrow. Feedback welcome.