Sadness: Evolution, Coping, and Common Misunderstandings
Sadness is one of the basic emotions, often described as emotional pain. The feelings associated with sadness include:
- Feelings of inferiority
- Loss and grief
- Despair and disappointment
- Helplessness and worthlessness
- Frustration and bitterness
The most commonly reported causes of sadness are:
- Loss of loved ones, including:
- Relationship breakups or divorce
- Separation (moving away or others moving elsewhere), resulting in their absence from our daily lives
- Death of loved ones
- Illness (personal or of loved ones)
- Loss of possessions with emotional value
- Failure to achieve goals
- Bad news, via media or personal sources
- Loneliness
- Lack of pleasant experiences in daily life
Sadness is a mood that most people try to avoid. However, some people use counterproductive coping strategies to deal with it, such as:
- Rumination
- Attempting to drown out sorrow or sadness by:
- Not expressing it or denying its existence
- Using substances (like alcohol, drugs, etc.)
- Isolation (for short or extended periods)
The Evolutionary Function of Sadness in Humans
To understand sadness from an evolutionary perspective, we must first consider the basic emotions. A common feature among different emotional states is that they are brain reactions to external and internal stimuli. These stimuli are associated with positive or negative experiences (such as injury, punishment, reward, or danger).
Emotions have evolved to enhance survival. Fear, for example, helps a person avoid danger, while pleasure encourages the repetition of beneficial experiences.
People deal with sadness in various ways, and it’s an important emotion because it helps motivate us to face situations and challenges. When feeling sad, some people may become lethargic and withdraw from their social environment to recover. This reduces their attention to the outside world, allowing them to focus internally and conserve energy for problem-solving.
Typically, grief can make a person:
- Pessimistic
- Socially withdrawn
- Overly realistic about their personal skills
- Reluctant to initiate new relationships or projects
Sadness Does Not Equate to Clinical Depression
Unfortunately, sadness is often mistakenly associated with the pathological manifestation of depression. However, like any emotion, sadness manifests in both our physiology and behavior through our brain’s emotional systems, allowing us to adapt and interact with our environment.
In other words, our bodies adapt physically and psychologically to our environment, whether it’s stressful, scary, threatening, or pleasant.
The adaptive function of sadness relates to motivation—a person will try to avoid situations that caused sadness in the past. Additionally, sadness is associated with increased self-focus and self-reflection. A person tends to evaluate their priorities when experiencing a loss or contemplating such a possibility.
This evaluation provides feedback on our priorities, goals, and focus regarding our present and future.
Thus, sadness is a normal occurrence in our body and doesn’t always indicate a pathological condition like clinical depression.
In Conclusion
Sadness as an emotion aids in our self-preservation by improving our judgment and self-reflection, particularly in relation to our important relationships.
The pain we feel when we’re sad is entirely real. Although the pathways of physical and psychological pain differ, they ultimately converge and are processed in the same brain centers.
Unfortunately, throughout our lives—especially in childhood—we often learn that sadness is something negative to be avoided or repressed. We’re taught that only weak people are sad and cry.
A common refrain from adults during our childhood was:
“Don’t worry. Smile. You’re fine. Stop crying.“
This approach diminished our feelings of sadness, denying us the opportunity to express them. We may have felt (and may still feel) guilty and ashamed, believing that expressing sadness would lead to rejection. Consequently, we might have learned to avoid showing sadness, fearing it would bother or annoy others.
However, certain things continued to bother us and make us sad or upset. Based on the lack of acceptance from important people in our lives, we might have eventually thought:
“I’m probably wrong or weird for not being happy. I’m not like others who tell me not to be this way. I’m probably not normal.“
