“On awakening” (Page 86, Big Book)
“When a drunk has a terrific hangover because he drank heavily yesterday, he cannot live well today. But there is another kind of hangover which we all experience whether we are drinking or not. That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of yesterday’s and sometimes today’s excesses of negative emotion—anger, fear, jealousy, and the like.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 88)
When I wake up in a bad mood, I’ve been tempted to conclude
‘I have a bad programme’ or ‘the programme does not work’, on the basis that,
if the programme did work, I’d wake up like Snow White every morning, glad to
be alive.
There are lots of reasons why a person can wake up in a bad
mood.
There are the cited hangovers of yesterday’s mental
self-indulgences. There’s then the overnight processing of all of the incoming
data from the previous day, bad or fitful sleep, physical ailments, heat, cold,
hay fever, infections, bad dreams, kicking, snorting, snoring, or the getting
up of the person next to you. None of these are a function of having a good
programme or a bad programme.
It’s easy to take the mood on awakening also as an augur of
the day ahead. This is untrue. If it implies information, it implies
information only about the past, not about the future.
Ideally it is dispelled by getting into one’s Step Eleven
practices or, if that’s too much, getting into the day and getting in contact
with present reality.
In other words, open the window and let out the mood. Certainly don’t analyse it.