To define what sadness is, we must know that it is one of the basic emotions of the human being. It is an emotional pain or decaying affective state. It is described as a non-native emotion and is located next to five other emotions also called basic ones, such as anger, dislike, fear, happiness and surprise. Scientifically it is defined as a low level of serotonin in the brain and is considered a symptom of disorders such as depression or dysthymia.
Sadness is defined in terms of emotions as general dejection. It is a state of mind in which the individual experiences hopelessness, pessimism, helplessness and lack of motivation. Sadness is a complex emotion since it does not have a single origin and can trigger a series of other emotions of the same type, that is, it is related to other very similar emotions that make it difficult to identify.
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Many times it is linked to loss, activated by the feeling or sensation of lack of something, it can be material or immaterial, which denotes the primitive instinct of alert to what is needed that is considered indispensable.
Although sadness is considered a negative feeling, it is necessary for the balance of the psyche, as well as the movie Intensely that highlights the importance of sadness in the emotional development of the person. According to experts, experiencing sadness helps the evolution and psychological maturity and allows the individual to overcome traumatic situations such as disappointments, failures and losses.
Types of sadness
Sadness is a common experience that should not be pluralized and although its study is complex, it can be differentiated, it can be classified and even more so a cause or origin of it can be determined. The types are:
Healthy sadness
The meaning of healthy sadness consists of one that can improve a person after having experienced it, that is, after a person goes through a critical situation to stimulate sadness, such as betrayal, fear or trauma that generates the loss of someone or something.
If the sadness is healthy, its presence helps the individual to accept the situation, initiating a process of understanding to find the best way to show and progress. This type of sadness is also considered primary sadness, since it does not transcend, it has a beginning with an identified cause and an end with learning about itself. An example would be a person who has failed in a project and this generates many sad thoughts. As a result, he begins to analyze what was the cause and begins his project again with different strategies to achieve it.
Unhealthy sadness
Unlike the first, this is the kind of sadness that cannot be faced. Usually it has no identified cause, the individual consciously ignores it or simply becomes stuck with the idea of not facing it. It tends to blend in with other emotions that make its presence difficult. It can lead the individual to states of anger, guilt, loneliness, and low self-esteem, one at a time or simultaneously. Due to this sadness the person does not want to do anything, or communicate, which can lead to possible depression and a very difficult mood to overcome. An example is the case of a person who learns that he has a terminal illness, causing great sadness. As a result, he becomes isolated and depressed, causing further damage to his health. In addition, anger and guilt can arise from all this.
But why does this happen? Sometimes the individual can justify that he deserves the situation that stimulates sadness, generating a feeling of lack of love towards himself. Therefore, 0 to work on this type of unhealthy sadness, an introspection in self-esteem must be carried out, until you feel worthy of any positive gesture in life.
Secondary sadness and depression
After the sadness turns into an unhealthy kind, it transcends and transforms into a secondary sadness. Usually another type of emotion is added (which in most cases is depression) which makes the situation worse. The difference between depression and sadness is a bit complicated. In most cases the sadness can become so great that it causes so much hopelessness and discouragement, and opens the door to depression. Unlike sadness, depression is already considered a disease, which not only affects the person who suffers from it, but also those around him.
This disease mostly generates hopelessness, restlessness and zero desire to live. Identifying depression is difficult for the person suffering from it. It is always detected by a third party that shows the different attitudes of the subject. However, if the affected person does not wish to visit a professional (as a first option), they can perform an online depression test to rule out this disease. Depression is usually treated with different types of psychotherapy, in addition to antidepressant medications. That is why it is recommended to locate the relevant health professional to help you in your treatment. If you do not know where to go, you can go to your GP and he will tell you who you can meet.
Instrumental sadness
This type of sadness is used with treachery in order to achieve something that one wants, that is, it is used as an instrument for some type of negotiation in our favor. For example, using crying in front of another person, victimizing yourself and satisfying your own needs.
This type is the one that most evokes the primitive form of feeling, whose reason is to alert the body to the lack of something.
You may also be interested in our definition of depression
Sadness of grief, mourning or sadness of love
This is about a mourning for the loss of something extremely important, which can be both loved and something material or immaterial, where what reigns is pain and sadness. These feelings will depend on the link you had with what was lost. As well as love, the circumstances of the loss, the emotional situation you are going through and whether you are vulnerable or not.
It should be noted that grief, of any kind such as sadness of love or lack of love, involves a process with several phases. Starting with denial, the person is shocked by the situation, which leads to avoiding what happened. Second is anger at not having avoided such loss. Third comes crying, a product of affliction, which in some cases can be depression. In the fourth place begins the negotiation where the pros and cons of what caused the grief are seen and finally the acceptance, where the inevitable is assumed and a new vision of loss is addressed.
Sadness and its Homeostatic function
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Characteristics of Sadness
Some characteristics of sadness as an emotion or feeling are:
It is considered a negative feeling
which you usually want to avoid. However, sadness is based on a normal emotion or feeling that appears after reacting to situations of loss, loneliness and restlessness.
It works like a warning
which helps the person to carry out introspective analysis and discover the factors that caused the imbalance before which the subconscious is on alert. From this, people can identify the origin and solve it in case of a positive reaction or plunge into it having a negative reaction.
It can be linked to a wide variety of emotions
for different reasons and in many cases it is not possible to identify or express it, as for example in the lyrics of sad songs. A sad person is tied to various characteristics and actions that in most cases cannot be understood if they have not gone through that situation.
In 2005 a researcher named Cliff Arnal, came to the conclusion that the third Monday in January is the saddest day of the year, called " Blue Monday ". Bearing in mind factors such as debt, the weather, work, unmet goals and demotivation.
It is a very complex and broad emotion
Since sadness will never be the same, it depends on several factors and occurs in different situations depending on each environment and individual.
Characteristics of a sad person
Identifying a sad person can be generally easy, however, sometimes the meaning of sadness is so difficult to determine that it can be believed that the person is in a completely normal state. It can also be the case in which it is believed to identify sad people only by the presence of emotions and feelings that are related to being sad, an example of this are people who believe that because someone is constantly upset it is because they are sad, without However there may be thousands of reasons and they are not related. There is also the opposite case in which the sad person does not accept that he is sad.
Lament and cry
Sadness is generally represented by these two elements. They are considered reflections of the body, in the case of tears, they contain natural hormones that help the body calm down before the exaltation. When people are sad, they experience a reduction in serotonin that throws normal body processes out of control. This characteristic is a sign that the person is going through an exciting process, which can be restlessness or euphoria in the case of happy tears and increased serotonin.
Guilty feeling
This is a common type of behavior in a sad person, since he feels responsible for a bad situation that has occurred, which may even blame others for his behavior. A guilty person tends to present counterproductive attitudes due to the fact of being the cause. An example of this is immersing yourself in alcohol or drug use out of guilt. From a technical point of view, the person can act in this way as self-punishment or to avoid being aware of the reason that encourages guilt.
Demotivation and lack of energy
The person tends to isolate himself and prefers to be alone. At this point of sadness, demotivation can lead to harming the person if it lasts longer than normal, that is, they can become so isolated that they could lose their friends, family or their job. Sadness in love is characterized by this quality.
Anxiety
Anxiety appears due to the mixture of feelings present in the emotional state of the individual. Sadness can bring with it a bag full of complex emotions such as fear, depression, melancholy and grief. All these emotions together can collapse the person and present some type of anxiety disorder.
Disgust and fury
It occurs in certain cases when the emotion of anger is accompanied by sadness and goes hand in hand with guilt, towards others or towards themselves. It is usually a very short period, however, they tend to focus their anger or disgust for other reasons. The sad state should not always be interpreted as implying the presence of anger.
Change in routine activities
People, seeing themselves totally dejected, tend to lose the desire to carry out routine activities, in order to avoid social interaction. This can cause a lack of appetite, sexual desire, not wanting to sleep, not participating in leisure activities, among others.
Evolutionary reason for sadness
Emotions, like any organism, throughout their existence adapt in order to survive. As for the primary emotions such as desire, love, fear, anger and sadness, they can be transformed until they reach a more advanced scale.
Just as human beings evolved to an ideal state, emotions also have an evolutionary reason. In the case of sadness, it raises protection and well-being towards oneself as a foundation.
Based on Darwinian studies and under the theory of John Bowlby for the 1940s, it can be said that the evolutionary reason for sadness comes from the survival instinct of the species, in which the individual seeks to obtain a benefit and which in turn it cannot get by itself, but depends on an external variable. For example, a child who loses his mother (his food and safety provider) and cries for her to care for him.
The triggering event is crying, because crying stimulates the mother's reaction. The body needs to create authentic crying and to achieve this it needs to develop an unbalanced feeling (low serotonin). This imbalance is taken care of by the tears that bring natural hormones for calm. As a secondary result of this process, crying is obtained, which the child needed to achieve its main objective, the mother's attention.
If we extrapolate the explanation we can realize that being sad is a state that appeals to the compassionate reaction of an external agent, to achieve something desired that cannot be achieved independently. In this way, when a person suffers from a lack of love or goes through the death of a loved one, sadness instinctively develops as a means to awaken the grace, compassion and comfort of some external agent (the loved one, God) to obtain what it is not in your hands to recover.
This is how evolutionary reason is explained, as the product of a primitive instinct: survival.
How to avoid sadness
Specialists believe that different moods can be modified with a lot of training and emotional education. That is why there are different ways of learning to manage emotions and thus avoid states such as sadness and be able to control mental health.
There are days when discouragement really prevails and you simply begin to remember all the sorrows experienced, or simply the individual is going through a situation in which he is down. In any of the cases, it is very important that the person takes into account that they must face this situation and implement the most favorable tips to avoid its lengthening.
Avoid staying alone for a long time
If you remain alone, you are giving way for the mind to start thinking about what could have been. That is why it is recommended to go out with friends, go to the movies, do different leisure activities that keep your day to day busy.
Avoid at all costs remember
the situation that originated the feeling of sadness, that is, if it is a sadness of love by breaking up, you should avoid watching tragic movies. This generates sad thoughts.
Don't listen to any sad songs
sentimental, romantic, or any music that makes you remember. The opposite would be to listen to positive, happy music that keeps you in good spirits.
It is recommended to avoid at all costs being around toxic people, equal to or sadder than you.
Avoiding everything sad, even a simple sad emoji ☹ can alter your emotions. That is why it is necessary to include in the new routine things that generate happiness and improve mood.
How to overcome and face sadness
Sadness is an affect that in turn can produce other types of emotions if it is not treated as necessary. Depression, anxiety, misery, bitterness, and hatred are the secondary emotions that permanent sadness brings with it. That is why when finding yourself in a vicious circle of sadness, you consider how to overcome it and face it.
When someone is in the first stage of sadness, the best thing to do is cry. Live the duel once and for all, cry all necessary, until you feel no more. This helps to unburden the soul and body, in addition to making the load much lighter.
You may also be interested in our definition of postpartum depression
Accept that the damage is done
and regretting the past doesn't change anything. It may sound easy but it is a job that must be done every day. Focus your attention on today and now.
Perform an exercise routine
if possible at the beginning of the day and then in the evening or late. This makes the body release all accumulated tension, reducing stress and avoiding sadness.
In case you begin to feel feelings of unease, it is recommended to seek help from a professional. Emotional psychologists or coaches are ideal to support when there is no exit.
Practice some type of exercise that develops your consciousness
Meditation is a healthy way to eliminate all kinds of negative stimuli. For this you can practice yoga, meditation, tai chi, walks, among others.
Recognize what is the reason for sadness
doing an analysis. This helps to deal with the grief and eventually overcome the situation.
Communicate
with family and friends about what is happening. Talk about the feeling.
Seek professional help
qualified people. Perhaps it is not a simple sadness that the person has but it is something more serious such as a depression in the first stage. For this, the professional, psychologist or psychiatrist will perform a depression test to make sure that another level of emotion is being discussed. Later he will resort to treating the disease with the treatment according to it.
Child sadness, how to deal with it
You may also be interested in our definition of Child Psychology
It is crucial for parents to know how to detect if a child has depression and to be aware of how they can help them. It is always advisable to seek qualified professional help, they have the appropriate tools to know if a child has depression, because, if an emotional state is detected in time and it is known what emotions are in children and how they work, steps can be taken in the emotional evolution of infants.
Differences between sadness and loneliness
In the emotional sphere, sadness and loneliness (desolation) go together, but it does not mean that they are the same. Staying sad is not comparable to loneliness, this can be confusing, however, it should be clear that being sad does not mean suffering from loneliness at the same time.
When loneliness is felt, it is related to the idea of not being part of something and this feeling leads to sadness. However, sadness for a given situation in life can result in the person moving away from society. This is how it is possible to consent that one depends on the other even though they are totally different emotions. A person who is in a circumstance of loneliness refers to the fact of being alone "without company." In the same way, it can refer to the feeling of sorrow or nostalgia for the lack of someone or something.
On the other hand, a sad person results in an emotional state as a consequence of disappointment, loss, illness, dissatisfaction, death, among others. Synonyms for sadness can be nostalgia, grief, melancholy, grief, grief, sorrow, regret, grief, however, none of these are directly linked to loneliness.
Examples of sadness and loneliness
Below are some examples between sadness and loneliness so that it can be understood even better:
Examples of Sadness
- To have lost someone you love and be downcast about it.
- Failure in a project and lose the opportunity to achieve a specific goal.
- Having a terminal illness.
- Suffer some injustice by someone who considered good in their social environment.
Examples of Loneliness
- Facing changes in your life such as a move, entering college or a new job and not having someone to share this experience and emotions with.
- Seeking to isolate and be alone due to some kind of situation with close people, which causes a lot of pain.
- A person isolates himself for having a terminal illness and does not want to have to face this situation in front of other people.
- Seeking to stay away from society to find its own essence, in this case it is planned and does not lead to a feeling of sadness or guilt, since it seeks to improve something in life.
Movie intensely highlights the importance of sadness
Intensely or Inside out, is a Pixar film in which the importance and function of emotions in human beings is explained from a dynamic point of view, more specifically in the growth and development of children.
The film brings emotions to life to explain the function of each and the way in which people interact under the influence of one or a combination of several. The emotions that star in the film are Joy, Fury, Fear, Disgust and especially Sadness.
The plot highlights the importance of sadness, which must be present in the behavior to evolve emotionally and be able to face new situations through the construction of primary memories and the feeling associated with it.
According to the images of intensely, sadness helps to value moments of happiness and therefore helps to overcome difficult moments.
The message that the film conveys is that when sadness manifests, it cannot be omitted, it must not be hidden, because there would be an unhealthy personality imbalance. The film teaches that people must live their emotions intensely and know how to identify them at the moment they manifest themselves, this will ensure a healthy development of the personality and emotional stability.
Benefits of sadness
Helps to be well adjusted
Once sadness is presented and dealt with, the brain develops the ability to turn it into experience and guts, such that people who achieve this are better adapted to different situations.
Help people be more authentic
and connected, or in other words, it is such a common feeling that everyone experiences that they develop empathy. It reveals feelings of sensitivity that are not shown in favorable situations, which is why it also impacts authenticity. In the introspections that some people do to discover the causes of depression, they discover a little more about themselves.
Can strengthen faith
Since after the experience of adverse situations, the authentic desire to pursue happiness and fight for it can be generated, to be people full of hope who believe in good actions, full of positivism and inner peace.
Stimulate change
by taking people who experience it to the limits of their comfort zone and putting them in situations in which creative strategies must necessarily be applied to get out of it. The individual conquers new domains of his mind that previously may have been in the unknown zone of the personality.
Activate compassion
this being beneficial for man as a species in the face of the most serious problems worldwide, such as famine, poverty, wars, among others. The presence of sadness opens room for compassion on all scales, it is also a stimulus for fraternal collaboration in a situation that generates pain.
You may also be interested in our definition of Inner Peace
Sources
//www.crosswalk.com/slideshows/7-unexpected-benefits-of-sadness.html?p=1
//www.quora.com/What-evolutionary-purpose-does-sadness-serve
//www.eafit.edu.co / ninos / reddelaspreguntas / ser-human / Pages / why-we-cry-when-we-sad.aspx
//www.somosinteligenciaemocional.com/la-tristeza/
