Evolution must have had something else in mind, though, or sadness wouldn’t still be with us. Being sad from time to time serves some kind of purpose in helping our species to survive. Yet, while other so-called “negative emotions,” like fear, anger, and disgust, seem clearly adaptive—preparing our species for flight, fight, or avoidance, respectively—the evolutionary benefits of sadness have been harder to understand…until recently, that is. With the advent of fMRI imaging and the proliferation of brain research, scientists have begun to find out more about how sadness works in the brain and influences our thoughts and behavior. Though happiness is still desirable in many situations, there are others in which a mild sad mood confers important advantages. Findings from my own research suggest that sadness can help people improve attention to external details, reduce judgmental bias, increase perseverance, and promote generosity. All of these findings build a case that sadness has some adaptive functions, and so should be accepted as an important component of our emotional repertoire. Here are some of the ways sadness can be a beneficial emotion:
Mindfulness Practice: Scan Your Body for Sadness
There is a bit of a cliché that “If you feel it, you can heal it.” Thoughts are fast moving, elusive, and hard to pin down. Sensations, though, are different. They are ponderous and slow moving, which means we can target them with our attention and tend to them with kindness and compassion. Locating the arising of sadness in the body (it is different in everyone) gives us a kind of steady place to direct our kind attention and begin to alter our relationship with sadness. Follow this sequence.
