Moods and states seem all too easy to explain on the basis of brain chemistry - you feel this way because of low or high dopamine, for example, but these explanations evade the issue even if they can prescribe effective actions. Is it possible to give a purely internal account of how these local but pervasive conditions operate? That is, an account good enough to actually bring about a desirable change in mood or state. You might try to talk someone you know out of their depression or anxiety, because you see no objective reason for these feelings, because you think you can provide an alternative point of view in which your friend appears in a better light than that with which they view themselves. You think, if they trusted you they might take on the perspective you are offering, just as in a discussion about a more disinterested subject perspectives can be shared and modified. This rarely works. You can't persuade anyone, you can't even persuade yourself, even if you rehearse earnestly some event in your own history where you seem once to have made such a change. All such attempts dissolve into the relationship which then reinforces the state. Without understanding what states are, they at least seem to be powerful attractors which hold their integrity in spite of a plethora of new contents in the stream of experience. Moods and states don't fit easily into the intentional paradigm of noesis, noema and horizon. They seem to be rooted in the ways you have learned to internally hold your body, staying upright, toilet training, refraining from vomiting, crying, yelling, drooling, leering etc., self-respect, decorum - they draw on the non-negotiability of these basic foundations. To shift a mood often seems to require the intervention of a moment when you are released from the body, in sleep, or sex or extreme effort - opportunities to reconfigure the way in which you inhabit the body, in certain energetic figures difficult to name. Moods often linger on past the time when their somatic underpinnings have changed, and then some chance event, something heard or seen with unexpected clarity, suddenly crystallises a massive change in subjectivity.