How to deal with feelings of sadness

Are you feeling sad or generally down-in-the-dumps? Don’t avoid your emotions. The best way to resolve your sadness is to work through it.

by: E.B. Johnson

In this life we deal with a lot of complex emotions, and sadness is often among those feelings. Being sad is uncomfortable. It puts us on edge and causes us to drift away from the people we care about most. Beyond that, it can erode our mental health and our physical health as well. Sadness can be incredibly toxic, but it can be incredibly healing and cathartic too. It’s all in the way we choose to understand it and to process it.

Are you feeling sad all the time? Are you going through major life changes that have left you feeling lost or somehow set-adrift from the things you used to know and love? These are difficult experiences to process, and life has so much more in store for us. In order to build lives which are fulfilling and joyful, we have to learn how to confront our emotions and work through them. Sadness is no different. To get back to joy, we have to take action.

Sadness is an unavoidable emotion.

Happiness seems to be the thing that we’re all chasing. You can hardly turn on the TV or computer without being promised a hope of it, or promised a secret recipe to it. We all crave happiness, but too often we pursue this happiness at the expense of our other emotions. Like it or not, sadness is one of the feelings you’re going to experience. Running away from it will only make its effects worse. If you truly want to shed you sad feelings, you need to confront them.

Sadness is an avoidable emotion. No matter how happy you make yourself in life, there will still be moments that bring you down or tear your heart to pieces. That’s what it means to be human. We are emotional creatures and we care deeply for the people, places, and things that bring us a sense of fulfillment and joy.

Stop running away from your sadness and your grief. Stop pretending to feel some way that you don’t and stop pretending that your narrative is something that it isn’t. We all get sad. We all feel down and go through periods in which life seems particularly hard. The one thing we all have in common is that we are capable of making it through anything. We have all the strength and courage that’s needed to build a life that is authentic — happiness, sadness and all.

How sadness takes a major toll on us.

Sadness is not an emotion to take lightly, nor is it one that should be ignored. Our sadness takes a heavy toll on our mental health and our physical bodies. It can destroy your closest relationships and even cause you to look at yourself in an entirely different light. When we’re sad, we have to admit it. We have to admit too, though, how it’s destroying our sense of self and happiness.

Alienating relationships

Perhaps one of the most toxic side-effects of sadness is the major damage it causes to our relationships. Whether platonic or intimate, sadness pushes other people away from us. Sure, some are compassionate and extend their compassion — but that only works for a time. Eventually, people move on and they expect us to as well. No one will hang around forever while you grieve or lament over what can never be again. Unaddressed sadness alienates our relationships in the worst possible way.

Corroding self-esteem

Believe it or not, unaddressed sadness can go a long way to corrode our self-esteem or the self-confidence that we hold within. Sadness can force us to look down on ourselves or our abilities, which then (in turn) can become the belief that we aren’t good enough to ever thrive within happiness. While we may feel good about who we are before the sadness sets in, that’s usually a different story once we begin to see the world in a different light.

Warping the narrative

Sadness is a powerful emotion, and when it’s given enough leeway it will work hard to warp the world we see ourselves in. That’s because our sadness gives us tunnel vision. It forces us to zero-in on all the negative going on around us, and all the things we don’t want in our lives. Over time, we start to see everything as a battle; every relationship as an inevitable failure. Sadness warps the narrative when we give it the keys to our mental health.

Undermining mental health

While our mental health is not always dictated by the emotion, we’re feeling in any given instance, long term emotional states can be affected by our mental states and vice versa. The longer you spend being sad, the more your mental health will degrade. You may begin to harbor feelings of hopelessness as your feelings of sadness wane on. Or perhaps you fall into patterns of rumination and toxic communication and boundary setting with others.

Physical aches and pains

Did you know that your mental and emotional states have a direct impact on your physical body? When you’re dealing with a lot of heavy thoughts and feelings, your body will begin to take on the weight of your burden. You might notice that your sleep patterns become disrupted. Then you may notice increased headaches or aches and pains. Over time, these physical symptoms can corrode and we can find ourselves facing the bigger dilemma of cardiac and immune function issues.

Degraded mood

It’s probably no surprise to you that long-term sadness takes a long-term toll on our moods. Unlike our emotions, our moods are long-lasting, hard to shift states that go a long way to dictate things like our working opportunities and intimate relationships. When you are sad for an extended period of time, it takes down your mood substantially; putting you in a dense fog of unease and unhappiness that begins to leak into other parts of your life.

The best ways to deal with feelings of sadness.

Are you ready to release your sadness once and for all? Are you ready to process it and allow it the space it needs to resolve? You’ll never rid yourself of sadness by running from it. The only way out is through, and that takes action, commitment, compassion and understanding. You have to flip the narrative and be compassionate with yourself.

1. Don’t backslide into rumination

One of the biggest reasons that sadness causes us so much pain is our tendency to fall into rumination. Rumination occurs when we build up an obsessive focus on our sadness. We allow our thoughts to dwell constantly in the misery, and we think about all the things we wish we had done differently or better. It’s a way of chaining ourselves to the past, and one that is especially toxic when allowed to continue in the long term.

Don’t let yourself backslide into rumination. You have to keep moving forward if you want to resolve your sadness, but that’s something which is done consciously and with intention. There’s nothing you can change in the past. All you can do is learn from it. By dwelling there you’re becoming a prisoner of your sadness and a prisoner of the past; unable to break free.

When you feel yourself looking backward, make a conscious effort to stop it. Replace the thoughts with happier ones and know that this is nothing more than a temporary moment in time. The low moments don’t last forever, and they are great reminders of just how high we have yet to rise (and feel). Don’t allow your brain to put you permanently in a miserable place. Release the rumination and keep fighting forward.

2. Increase your mindfulness

Do you make a conscious effort to incorporate mindfulness into your everyday life? Do you intentionally focus on the things you’re grateful for every day? Mindfulness is a powerful tool, and one which can lift us up out of our sadness and put us back into a place of gratitude and enjoyment. If you’re serious about working out your sad feelings, then you need to be serious about improving the way you think about your life and yourself within it.

Create a daily mindfulness practice which allows you to connect with those deeper parts of your happiness. Sadness is a temporary feeling, but it’s also very often a superficial one. The experiences which bring on us our sadness are usually temporary too, and they (very often) hold less meaning than the things we are grateful for.

Start your day — every day — by focusing on at least 3 things that you’re grateful for. They can be people, they can be things or your pets. It doesn’t matter. Focus on the things that make you organically happy without expecting anything in return. What makes your soul sing? What do you hold the more appreciation for in your life? These things are powerful reminders of the good in our lives. Use them to set the right intentions and move forward in positivity.

3. Manually boost your mood

Our moods are a funny thing, because (unlike our emotions) that are a semi-permanent state of being which lay like a blanket over all our issues. Emotions are short-lived and related to a specific event. Moods don’t work like that. They are the overarching feeling we carry through our lives, and these overarching moods are also the “auras” through which people pick up on who we are and align themselves with us accordingly.

Manually boost your mood and focus on activities and experiences which can help to boost serotonin. Paint. Write. Draw. Read a book you’ve been eyeing for a while. The things you enjoy increase your happiness and your mood. Physical activity and exertion are also a powerful antidote. Go outside and finish a 10 minute run. You’ll be surprised at how good you feel afterward.

There’s no right or wrong way to go about boosting your mood manually. Listen to your body. Listen to your heart. Follow your passions and your interests. Reach out to trusted friends and loved ones and allow them to help rebuild your sense of self and excitement. Although our moods are powerful, they aren’t omnipotent. At the end of the day, we decide how we want to feel and who we want to be.

4. Reshape the way you see things

When it comes to sadness, we have a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for. It’s understandable. Sadness is a heavy emotion, and a distracting one. It pulls us down and muddies the water of our clear thoughts so that it’s a challenge to get ourselves back on track. We can choose how we want to feel, however, and we can choose the type of mood we want to exist in. So many of our emotions come down to personal choice, but we have to take that responsibility on with pride (and action).

Reshape the way you see things and do it with intention and with purpose. It’s time for you to decide whether you want to live in sadness, or you want to get back to your general joy. In order to do that, though, you’re going to have to consciously reshape the way you see things, and write a new narrative for yourself and those you love.

Stop wallowing in your misery. Stop looking for exits and start finding a new way to see your current surroundings. There’s a silver lining to your sadness, but you’re going to have to be bold enough to see it for yourself. Force yourself to see things from a new angle. Get outside of your ego and outside of your feelings. What’s the bigger picture to your sadness? What happiness does it point to you? What path is it leading you toward? You choose how to see it.

5. Be kind to yourself inside and out

As humans, we have a funny way of looking outward for the things we should be seeking from within. For example, when we’re sad — many of us look to partners and worldly distractions to make us whole again. And while those things can provide a relief for a while, that relief is only temporary. True release from our sadness comes not from what others provide for us, but what we consciously and willingly provide for ourselves.

Back off of the self-critical talk and all the internal negativity. Back off of those insecurities and “shoulda-would-coulda” narratives. Instead of being your own worst enemy, try being kind and compassionate to yourself. Nourish your body and your spirit so that you can get your mind and your heart back on track.

Consider a friend or loved one in pain. How did you treat them? How did you show up for them or show out for them? How did you make it clear that you supported them and that you wanted them to be better? Extend that same compassion to your own struggles and sadness. Why do you save the best parts of yourself for someone else? Open up your love and be kind to your body. Give it the rest it needs, feed it with love, and watch the sadness slowly recede.

Putting it all together…

Are you tired of feeling sad or rundown all the time? We don’t have to allow these feelings to control us or the course of our lives. Accept your emotions and accept the lessons they have to teach you. Then you can look at the reality of how this sadness is impacting you and get serious about shifting it through action and honest commitment.

Don’t allow yourself to backslide into rumination. The longer you dwell in the negativity and the gloom, the worse your mood will become. Increase your mindfulness. Find better ways to be present in who you are and look for things you can focus your gratitude on. Even our darkest moments have silver linings to them when commit to finding them. Find something to appreciate, then zero in on manually boosting your mood. You decide how you want to feel and you can shift that feeling by following your passions and even moving your body around. This superficial boost to hand, you can then reshape the way you see things. Change your perspective and find the benefit in the situation for you. Our emotions always have something to teach us. Listen and be kind and compassionate to yourself from the inside out.