What sadness is for

An emotion doing its job

Sadness usually comes after a loss, a disappointment or something that didn’t turn out as you expected. It makes people quieter, takes away their energy and leads them to withdraw a little. Theories about the evolution of emotions hold that every one of them has a function, the uncomfortable ones too.

The psychologist Joseph Forgas, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, has spent decades studying in the laboratory how mood changes the way we think, and he has looked especially at sadness. His method is simple: he makes people a little sad or a little happy, with music or by asking them to remember something, and then gives them a task.

What Joseph Forgas found

In many of those tasks, mild sadness came out well:

• They judged more carefully. In experiments published in 1998, people who were a little sad made less of a very common error: believing that someone thinks what they have written even when they were asked to argue that position.
• They were less swayed by appearances. When assessing a philosophy essay, the happy participants gave a better mark to the supposed author if he looked like a mature professor with glasses than if she looked like a young, unconventional woman. In the sad group, that difference almost disappeared.
• They were better at spotting deception. Shown videos of people who were lying or telling the truth, the sad group got more right, and the happy group did no better than chance.
• They remembered more accurately. As witnesses to an event, they took in fewer false details that someone slipped in afterwards.
• They were fairer. In a game in which they could share something valuable with another person however they liked, the sad ones shared more equally.

Forgas summed it up in 2013 in an article with a provocative title, “Don’t worry, be sad!”. His explanation: a good mood invites you to trust what you already know and to think in broad strokes; mild sadness invites you to look outwards, pay attention to detail and check.

What those studies don’t say

They should be read with care. They are experiments with small, passing sadnesses, deliberately induced, and they don’t show that being sad is better than being happy. Forgas himself starts from the idea that each mood is useful for different things, and a good mood has advantages of its own. Some effects are modest: the improvement in witnesses’ memory, for example, is not enough to make their statements reliable.

And there is a clear limit. A deep sadness that drags on for weeks doesn’t help you think better; among the signs of depression is, precisely, difficulty concentrating.

When it is no longer sadness

The World Health Organization distinguishes between the mood changes of daily life and depression. In a depressive episode, low mood or a lack of interest in almost everything lasts most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks, and usually comes with other signs: excessive guilt or a feeling of worthlessness, hopelessness, changes in sleep and appetite, great tiredness, thoughts of death.

The researchers Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argued in 2007, in the book The Loss of Sadness, that since 1980 normal sadness in the face of a loss has often been mistaken for a disorder. Their book reminds us of something sensible: being sad about something sad is not being ill.

If the sadness doesn’t go away, if it takes over everything or if thoughts of death appear, talk to your doctor. And don’t carry it on your own. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.

Letting it be

The opposite of running from sadness is not sinking into it. It is letting it stay as long as it needs, without fighting it.

There is evidence to support this idea. A team from the universities of Toronto and California, Berkeley, with Brett Ford and Iris Mauss, brought together in a 2018 article three studies with more than thirteen hundred people: those who tended to accept their difficult emotions and thoughts without judging them felt less distress when facing everyday problems and, six months later, had better psychological health. At the University of Queensland in Australia, Brock Bastian’s team found something complementary: when people believe that others expect them to be happy all the time, they feel sad more often and more intensely. Sadness weighs more when you are also ashamed of it.

Some ways of letting it be:

• Telling yourself what is going on in one sentence: “I’m sad because…”.
• Crying if the tears come. It often brings relief, as you can read in why crying sometimes brings relief.
• Telling someone who will listen without rushing to fix it.
• Giving it a place in the day: a walk, some music, a little silence.
• Looking after the basics: sleeping, eating, not shutting yourself away completely.
• Not demanding that you feel well before your time.

A sad day

You don’t need to be well to come to A shared universe. A star with “What weighs on me” is enough to say that today you are sad, without explaining any more. The sadness will still be there, but perhaps someone will leave you a touch.