The sadness goes away when you accept what it wants to tell you

Feeling how sadness runs through our entire body is natural. How it clouds our minds and struggles to get out. However, Many of us insist on repressing and hiding what we feel, in a vain desire for it to go away without a trace.. Doing this not only worsens the situation, but it causes our sadness to gradually take root in our thoughts, from which it begins to nourish itself.

Society has taught us to act in an “ideal” way. So ideal that we can consider it artificial. We seek to move in the emotional field within very narrow limits.. Laughter, for example, is good as a sign of joy; However, it can become annoying and undesirable when it takes on strident overtones or shows poor restraint: either by will or by lack of self-control.

If this develops in this way with a positive emotion, anything that is negative, such as crying or being depressed, is directly avoided. This containment is carried to such a point that Not even in the warmth of our home, in the most absolute solitude, do we allow ourselves to give free rein to what torments us.. We are afraid that that mantra that our parents repeated when we were little will come true: repeating what we did at home outside.

Why has sadness made a place in your life?

Sadness can appear for various reasons: a job layoff, a relationship breakup., a significant loss of money or even an unexpected illness. These are normal situations and more common than we want to believe. The problem appears when we do not manage the emotion – whether due to clumsiness, because we do not know or because we voluntarily renounce it – and from feeling we go to being; when emotion stops being emotion and becomes a state with deep and strong roots.

This is why sadness has been able to find a place in our lives. It may even settle forever if we are not able to look at it, observe it and analyze the message it wants to convey to us. Let’s give some examples:

The sadness that appears after a breakup is a natural emotion within the grieving process that we will probably have to go through.. Feeling and experiencing it will help us turn the page and move forward. If it arises due to an illness, Sadness can allow us to become aware of our vulnerability at that moment. It can be the stimulus for us to stop looking outside and start looking inward. When faced with a loss of money, being sad can help us stop for a moment to think about other possibilities of getting it. Perhaps we have not exploited all our capabilities to the maximum.

Being sad can be an opportunity to stop and reflect on what is happening to us. But, above all, to value what we did not appreciate before. However, if sadness has completely blocked us, if we are one step away from depression because we cannot shake it off, then it is necessary to take a step forward and take action.

Intelligent strategies that will allow us to shake off sadness

To get rid of all that sadness that demotivates us, that makes every day instead of waking up with a smile we do it with a grimace of disappointment and that makes our life seem meaningless, it is necessary to put into practice some strategies.

The main ones are accept sadness and avoid its most typical manifestations, such as crying or introspection. There is no point in denying it and encapsulating it or sending it into exile.. We need to accept that we are sad and, above all, give ourselves permission to express it. It doesn’t matter if we whimper, if we cry a lot, if we want to burst into tears. Those moments are necessary in which the image that we can project becomes secondary: emotional catharsis loses all its function when it encounters strong and rigid walls that do not allow it.

Crying brings us back to peace, to the starting point to remind us of the importance of taking care of ourselves. Doing sports, eating healthy, establishing schedules for eating and sleeping, going out with our friends… In short, even if we don’t feel like doing this at all, because we want to abandon ourselves completely, all is not lost. Little by little, we can introduce small changes that activate us and begin to motivate us.

Finally, it doesn’t hurt to look for intrinsic motivation in some of our activities, a pleasure in doing them beyond the result they may offer. Thus, when we don’t like it, we won’t be able to talk about wasted time either. Also, we can rely on Mindfulness, a very pleasant activity that will help us gain height in the face of what seems to surpass us.

But, without a doubt, the key to all this is to go to a professional when the cuts we have exceed our ability to withstand the pain or when we feel so crushed by a load that we cannot find leverage with which to lift it. Because even if we don’t believe that our situation can change now, every storm has ended up giving in to the sun.

You might be interested…

Images courtesy of Brooke Shaden