Recovery Experiences and Your Mood at Work

Have you ever finished the working day and felt as though the weight of the world is on your shoulders? Worse, it's 9 am on Monday morning and you feel so tired that it would be more appropriate if it were 5 pm on Friday afternoon? You are not alone. Yet solidarity in how tiring work can be does not achieve much, can foster a desire for the excessive alcohol consumption, purchasing of lottery tickets, and simply perpetuate the spiral. None of this is healthy or sustainable. Surely, there must be a better way! I am pleased to report there is, and it takes the shape of what we do during our non-work time.

But first, a primer on mood so we can better understand how efficacious our current recovery experiences really are.

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I have read enough academic literature and pulp business magazine articles to apprehend that in the Org Behaviour space we have a language problem. The academic literature is too often lost in its ivory tower to be of much use, and the pulp articles are so lacking in nuance that key takeaways are lost. In this piece, I hope to bridge something of that gap by starting in the ivory tower and bringing the concepts down to the practical level without losing critical aspects of meaning.

What is Mood?

In the journals of record, definitions of mood are — to the lay reader — jargon infused and opaque. To take one example:

mood is defined as prolonged core affect without an Object, affect regulation as action aimed directly at altering or maintaining one's own core affect without reference to an Object.

(Russell 2003, 149)

Which begs the question, what is 'affect'? This will only yield something along the lines of:

A neurophysiological state that is consciously accessible as a simple, nonreflective feeling that is an integral blend of hedonic (pleasure–displeasure) and arousal (sleepy–activated) values.

(Russell 2003, 147)

So much, so complicated. But there is good reason for this. Much of what we take to be obvious because they are daily encounters, such as the notion of 'mood', are in fact highly complex phenomena. Dismissing them out of hand, failing to apprehend their complexity in a fit of 'everyone knows', or assuming because someone is a 'people person' that they are well placed to understand the complexities of the human condition, explains why organisations continue to struggle with the human elements of people management. In this context, we need to grapple with the complexity for a moment to better understand how our working day and our leisure time activities share a symbiotic relationship.

As far as mood goes, we need to move beyond thinking of it as a 'feeling' or momentary 'emotional condition'. Rather, it is best expressed by a model of three intercorrelated bipolar dimensions: wakefulness–tiredness, calmness–tenseness, and pleasantness–unpleasantness.