How to Relieve Sadness

Sadness can feel like a dark cloud hanging over your head and dampen every action in your life. You might move more slowly, feel tired and sluggish, refuse to eat or interact with people. Sadness is a normal emotional response to stressful or tragic events in your life, such as receiving bad news at work or learning of the death of a family member or close friend. You can use various strategies to help relieve sadness and get your life back on track.

Instructions

• 1

  Acknowledge the event that created or led up to the feeling of sadness. You need to deal with the event so you can begin to overcome the emotion. Pretending it didn't happen or believing it will just go away on its own will perpetuate the feelings of sadness in your life and keep you from healing.

• 2

  Talk to people about the event that created sadness in your life. A trusted friend or family member can be a valuable ally and offer an objective opinion during this trying period of your life. You may not need this person to say a word; just having someone to listen to you vent is sometimes enough to relieve your negative emotions.

• 3

  Channel your sadness into written words by keeping a journal of your emotions. Write down how you are feeling every day and why you think you are feeling this way. Note how you dealt with your sadness and whether or not the coping mechanism worked. You can reread your journal during other periods of your life to remember how you handled these dark feelings.

• 4

  Spend time with friends, read a good book or exercise -- engaging in activities that promote happiness can help you move past feelings of sadness.

• 5

  Repeat this phrase every day until you feel better: "This too shall pass." Knowing that sadness is a natural but temporary response to a negative event will help you work through the feeling and get back to a more positive state of mind.