Someone who's blue feels sadness, like a little girl whose best friend has moved away. Use the noun sadness when you're talking about sorrow. An interesting thing about sadness is that its original meaning was "seriousness." It wasn't until the 1600s that it came to mean "full of sorrow."
Our tendency to avoid sadness is almost instinctive. From a very young age, we try to avoid sad feelings. As adults, we’re quick to shush wailing babies or offhandedly say to sobbing children, “Don’t be sad. Cheer up. You’re fine. Stop crying.” Though not intentional, we tend to pass on the message that sadness is bad and should be avoided. Yet, research has shown that sadness can be an adaptive emotion with real benefits. So, why is it that we are so afraid to feel sad?
Often sadness is mistakenly confused with depression (link is external). Unlike depression, sadness is a natural part of life and is usually connected with certain experiences of pain or loss or even a meaningful moment of connection or joy that makes us value our lives.
Depression, on the other hand, can arise without a clear explanation or can result from an unhealthy, non-adaptive reaction to a painful event, where we either steel ourselves against our natural reaction to the event or get overwhelmed by it.
When we’re in a depressed state, we often feel numb or deadened to our emotions. We may have feelings of shame, self-blame or self-hatred, all of which are likely to interfere with a constructive behaviour, instead creating a lack of energy and vitality. Sadness, on the other hand, can be awakening.
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