My Moody Daybook

SADNESS - Centering Thought: When I feel sad, it’s okay to simply let myself feel sad for the moment. I can allow myself to feel sadness and then let it go. I can talk to others about what I’m feeling. Sadness is one of the four major emotions that humans experience (mad, glad, sad and scared), but it’s often the most difficult to endure, especially when our brain chemistry and thus our thinking is compromised. What is our personal relationship to sadness? What does it feel like when we are sad? And is it safe to be sad in our world? Answering these questions can give us a clearer picture or a broadened perspective on feeling sad. But it probably won’t make our sadness go away in the moment. To do that, it takes acceptance. Accepting our emotions is a very big challenge for most of us. After all, if we could accept the way we feel, we probably wouldn’t be so overrun by our feelings. How is that so? It seems counterintuitive, but accepting our feelings lets us process them. We can’t even begin to process them if we’re too busy tamping them down, ignoring them, denying them or pretending they’re something else. Although our first reaction to a negative emotion like sadness is frequently to avoid it, we do well to recover from sadness (and by means avoid or minimize depression) when we actually accept that something has made us sad and by staying in the moment to recognize that sadness. The trouble comes and the sadness grows when we either ignore our initial sad feelings or when we project the oncoming onslaught of sadness that we think we’re sure to encounter, based on past experiences. While it may truly be our pattern to experience major lows when something happens in our lives to make us sad, we can actually change that pattern. The best way to change the pattern of letting sadness overwhelm us is to think to ourselves I’m sad right now, but I don’t have to think about all the other times I’ve been sad; I can just be sad for now. It’s the linking together of all of our sad experiences that frequently serves to overwhelm us and grow our sadness. We may consider this as a sort of “sadness trigger.” Perhaps putting a time limit on our sad feelings can help us practice this process. We may give ourselves permission to just feel our sadness and do nothing about it for an hour or for a whole day. Then we can take steps to move out of sadness or we can talk to our supporters or professionals about what continues to make us sad.