When you suddenly feel sad

I’m mostly a happy and positive person. Sure, I lose my temper and get frustrated and fed up, but mostly I stay positive and cheerful. It’s part of how I see myself and how I present myself to the world.

 

But sometimes I get sad.

 

Sometimes I don’t know why I get sad. I just do.

 

It’s a dark cloud but I don’t feel it around my head, I feel it around my heart. It seems to constrict it, squeezing out the positivity and the optimism and the self love. It leaves behind a tainted mush that makes me feel unsettled.

 

Makes me feel sad.

 

It isn’t a big deal for me – I am fortunate that my sadness is not depression and I have a good life so it isn’t situational. Sometimes I just have waves of unhappy.

 

The thing about waves of sadness is that they’re just like waves of joy – they are transient. Both extremes wash over you, pulling you into the riptide or sometimes just lapping in the shallows. But they go. They might leave you surf battered, or in a beautiful floaty tranquility – but they go.

 

Sadness comes. It comes for all of us and we often don’t know why.

 

A friend once told me that sadness and happiness often don’t have a reason. They just are.

 

So what do you do while you wait for the tide to recede?

 

If it’s a particularly dark bout you might need to hang on to something or someone. Get some help to pull you back to shore.

 

If it’s the kind of sadness that makes you wonder if you need some sleep – you probably need more sleep.

 

Other things we can do to combat the sadness is to let it out – like writing this post – or combat it with active focus on the good things – like the Happy Jar, or talking with people we love.

 

I think, for me, the biggest thing is recognising sadness for what it is – an emotion that will come in, muck things up a bit, and then, after a short or long while, go away.