Give Me 4 Min, I Can Turn Your Sadness Into Strength

Sadness isn’t a bad emotion, but it can feel like you’re carrying the weight of two cities when you’re in the midst of it. It shortens your sense of perspective so you find it hard to see anything else besides that feeling, but I’ll say again — “Sadness isn’t a bad emotion!” It doesn’t create the same negative loop as jealousy, anger, resentment, and dislike.

However, at the same time, it’s not really valued in our culture. We’re often not allowed to feel sadness because we’re made to feel like we need a very valid reason for it, and even when we do have one, our society values our ability to overcome it more than it does for us to feel it. Our self-help culture preaches positive thinking, attitudes, and thoughts which while well-intentioned only makes us to feel like we need to keep the sadness at Bay that we have to push it away or cover it up when it swells inside of us.

Recently, researchers have been looking into the reasons for sadness. Other negative emotions like jealousy or anger — they’re more obvious survival traits, but we haven’t been able to figure out how sadness contributes to our survival. You see, for sadness to still be around, it must have some evolutionary purpose and by this point, scientists believe that in some way, shape, or form, sadness does help us to survive. So, they conducted studies to find out what exactly happens to our brains when we are sad. In one study, researchers found that on rainy moody days, the days that usually get people down and put them in a bad mood, our memories improve.

• Positive moods — impair our memories.
• Negative moods — improve them.

Interesting, right?

Happiness is shown to produce less focus and attentive processing, which increases the likelihood of false or even very little information being incorporated into our memories, and not only do our memories improve when we are sad but so does our judgment. When participants in the study were shown a video and asked to detect deception, it was the participants who were sad that were the best at calling out deceptiveness and truthfulness. Sadness is such a strong all-encompassing emotion, more so than happiness, so that all of our senses become heightened. We even trust ourselves more because sadness can make us skeptical of other people, and it also increases our motivation.

• When we are sad — our natural instinct is to chase that happy feeling that we love.
• When we are happy — our brains are being told that we are in a safe familiar situation. We don’t need to make the effort to change anything.

But sadness is like an alarm signal. You know you can’t be complacent with where you are. You have to do something to move past it. You will have more energy, which triggers more effort and motivation to change your environment.

In the study, the researchers also found that sadness can improve interactions. Happy people are often poised and assertive communicators. They’re perceived as more likable and as a result, they instinctively make less effort, but sad people are aware that they’re sad, and how that might bring other people down. So, they put more effort into their interactions. They come across as kinder and more empathetic. People in a sad mood are also more persuasive, produce better arguments to support their opinions and are better able to convince other people.

In one study, researchers asked participants to play the ultimatum game. Each person is given the same amount of money. They can split and allocate this money to anyone else playing the game, and this person has the right to accept or reject the offer. If the offer is rejected, neither side gets anything, but if the offer is accepted, both parties get money according to the split. The researchers made participants watch either a happy or a sad movie. Once the emotion had been induced, they measured how long it took for participants to allocate money and how much they chose to give. The participants in a sad mood gave more money and took longer, which suggests they paid more attention to the needs of the other people. When they looked at the receivers of the game, they saw that those in a sad mood were more likely to reject unfair offers.

So, it seems like when we are sad, we are more prone to fairness and generosity.

Now, those four things that sadness improves —

1. Memory
2. Judgment
3. Motivation
4. Interactions

Readers, these are things that are cornerstones of a healthy well-rounded individual and look, when you’re going through a breakup, you’ve lost your job, or you’re just having a bad day, doing something or anything could be the last thing on your mind. You can’t imagine your memory or your judgment improving. You just want to get out of that horrible feeling and hey, there is no better motivation than wanting to flee from your feelings. Your sadness is not going to last forever, but while it’s there, make the most of it readers. It’s trying to help you, not bring you down!

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