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Why Do I Feel Sad Essay

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Choosing Sadness: The Irony of Depression

• emotional regulation

I knew a man some years ago who suffered from serious and chronic depression. He also lived what seemed to me a melancholy life, listening to sad, sentimental music, reading dreary existential novels, and rarely venturing out of his dark and gloomy house. I cared for this man, and I was perplexed by this. I knew that he suffered from a debilitating disease, but he also didn’t seem to be taking simple steps that might lift his mood. It was almost like he was choosing sadness.

This seems like an ungenerous thought, I know, but it turns out there may be some truth to it. Hebrew University psychological scientist Maya Tamir and her colleagues have been studying how people with depression regulate their emotions, and they may have an explanation for my acquaintance’s paradoxical and forlorn lifestyle choices.

Emotional regulation is the process of changing one’s current emotions into more desirable ones. We all do it all the time. It’s well known and not all that surprising that depressed people have difficulty with emotion regulation, but Tamir believes that we have been looking at emotion dysregulation the wrong way. Specifically, we’ve been assuming that depression is linked to deficits in regulation strategies, when in fact the problem may have to do with regulation goals.

The distinction between strategies and goals is crucial. Some strategies are adaptive and others not. For example, cognitive reappraisal is a healthy strategy for most people, one that involves rethinking and changing the meaning of situations so that they generate different emotions. Situation selection is another—choosing positive stimuli like movies and music. Rumination, very common in depression, is an example of a maladaptive regulation strategy. There is some evidence that depressed people use maladaptive strategies, but Tamir thinks that focusing on the effectiveness of emotional regulation may be missing the point.

The problem may be more basic. It may instead be that depressed people are choosing the wrong emotion regulation goal to begin with. That is, depressed people may be effective enough in regulating their emotions, but they may be choosing to regulate in a direction that reinforces their negative mood. This raises the possibility that depressed people are actually more motivated to experience unpleasant emotions like sadness, as strange as this sounds.

Tamir and her colleagues tested this provocative idea is a few experiments. In one, for example, they asked depressed and healthy subjects to choose between looking at sad pictures or amusing ones (or neutral ones). So all the subjects were using the same stimuli selection strategy, but the depressed subjects still chose significantly more of the sad images—even though they clearly had the option of avoiding them. In a second similar study, subjects chose music, and again depressed subjects chose to listen to sad tunes more often than healthy controls did, even when upbeat music was available. Finally, even when depressed subjects were explicitly trained to reappraise situations in more positive ways, they chose not to use the strategy as often as healthy controls.

So across studies, as reported in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science , depressed subjects clearly chose to engage with stimuli that caused them moderate to intense sadness. The findings show that depressed individuals, compared to healthy controls, regulate their emotions in a manner that is likely to maintain sadness. But they did not choose to decrease happiness. They chose more happy images than sad images, and what’s more, they said they preferred happiness to sadness.

So why, if they prefer happiness, would they deliberately choose regulatory goals that undermine that happiness? One possibility, the scientists say, is that depressed people use emotion regulation to verify their emotional selves. In other words, sadness is more familiar to depressed people, so they are motivated to experience sadness as a way of reaffirming who they are. Depression is also closely tied to low self-esteem, and it may be that depressed people believe that they deserve to feel bad.

My depressed friend wanted relief from his misery, sometimes desperately. He struggled, yet ironically, he often acted in ways that maintained—rather than alleviated—his misery. Apparently he’s not alone in this sad choice.

Follow Wray Herbert’s reporting on psychological science in The Huffington Post and on Twitter at @wrayherbert.

‘–to verify…’

More specifically, as depression may begin at a time when we have not developed our cognitive selves in any material way, and, added to this is the survival impulse which instructs that we, ourselves, must solve this perplexing, even mysterious personal drama, there abides in us an essential inclination to *verify*–in what is likely to be a limited way–as much of the characteristics of this, our innate ‘enemy.’

That is–and, at least initially–we may not have the wherewithal to address the depression in the most effective way, e.g., to analyse accurately, disencumber ourselves from immediate issues that usually arise in order to address the ‘main event,’ get out of harm’s way, etc., so that, invariably, we repeat the very first inclination–verifying–so as to, at the very least, not lose ‘contact’ with the upset within.

This is akin to an inarticulate speaker attempting some semblance of good communication, but lacking those skills, s/he dwells on salient terms, pausing to repeat with added vocal stress on just the one word or phrase, sometimes several times in a row.

The initial trauma served to inculcate the earliest ‘weapons,’ and this early self-training abides…an emotional heuristic that becomes a well-worn rut: verify what is happening, confirm it, label it, know the enemy, etc.

Unfortunately, the ‘know-the-enemy’ tactic, though probably initially consoling for the hurting subject, turns out to be a less than adequate long-term answer to the issue at hand

The way out, it would seem, is to consider what it means to be a complete Self. The early depression trauma has likely stunted any holistic development of a fully human Self, so that s/he must now realize that addressing the depression via verification/confirmation is the merest first reaction, and not a programme for Being, let alone a design for living out one’s life potential, which fully-functioning resourceful Self will then displace the vulnerable, nascent, impoverished Self which yet abides…

Lana: Love and Truth are precious, earnestly seek them. There is an over-soul. There is no death. Eternity lies before us, yet we are enshrouded with hurt. Why do we hurt? Seek.

I’ve never commented anyone before, but I decided to reply to you bc it’s short and sweet…. I happen to believe people choose to hurt nc they are not educated on that subject. I used to choose hurt from my mother all my life, I hated myself for it, but then when I was able to sit still long enough to focus on getting educated about different personalities and why they do The things that they do, my hurt and my hatred and bitterness, slowly began to fade. But when she died all of that poison controlling my life , went in the grave with her. And now I understand . And I finally am able to forgive her and become who I really am with all my personality and talents I never knew I had. Fuck I feel amazing. And I have my mother to thank for it..

I said this was short and sweet didn’t I?

I’m happy for you.. Same is the case with me. I just want everyone to know that abusive parents aren’t only the ones who drink or physically abuse you.. Hurting someone emotionally, never appreciating them, shattering their kid’s self esteem by demotivating words. That’s what abusive is, for me. I can’t think of her dying but I guess that’ll be my only way out..

It is perfectly healthy for a normal person to on occasion crave melancholy. I don’t know why but it’s somethibg that happens to me periodically. I’m 57 years old and sometimes out of the blue i will crave feeling melancholy and play a haunting song just to feel that way. I don’t understand it but it happens and i think I’m perfectly normal. lol

So I listen to Pink Floyd and read Sartre, and don’t take Zoloft because I think depression is normal. This is nothing new although unusual in society flooded with antidepressant taking people. Question is : Why do they want to be happy? (Hapiness is gone once you realize your mortality.)

Haha! This is the awesome truth Lana!!

On the contrary, realising our mortality often makes people realise that every moment is precious, therefore even the smallest things, like breathing, smelling, and seeing, waking up in the morning, bring them joy. Life is a gift, when you know how precious it is. Perspective and a change of heart changes. It is a choice though.

Could this possibly mean that we are not raising children well enough by not giving them the emotional regularity skills they need to be happy? Are we not teaching them what happiness is? And why would a person reinforce those negative feels if they have the emotional regulatory skills they need to be happy. How would one go about changing their focus? I seem to just be filled with questions. I think depression is only normal if its a temporary feeling of depression that can be self regulated, thus allowing a person to feel more then just depression all the time.

One of the reasons that I choose to be low is as a sort of self preservation response. Like when some flowers are threatened, their petals will close for a time. For me, when I’m impacted by a situation where my thoughts have become low on myself, I’ll stay in the low place for a while, a few hours. This is my safeguard against having to move from a good to a low place again when threatened. As my petals reopen, I feel humble. I cannot be hurt because I am no longer worried about myself, but now empathetic toward others’ feelings.

Well, so what would be a good way to fix these choices? I mean, what i could do, for example? I feel i’m like choosing to stay depressed, i can’t get out, i still keep being angry and sad, i don’t know what happiness feels like…

Hi, I feel exactly what you wrote below….

Well, so what would be a good way to fix these choices? I mean, what i could do, for example? I feel i’m like choosing to stay depressed, i can’t get out, i still keep being angry and sad, i don’t know what happiness feels like…

Do you feel better now? And, if so, how did you get there?

Thank you for your time

Well put article. It would be better if solutions were included too . Like the guy up there is saying, what to do next? Might be obvious to exercise choosing happy regulating emotion but still i feel i need a “how to”. Just my thoughts. sorry for my English.

Few possibilities: “the evil I know is better than the evil I do not know”. Thusly a way to avoid being anxious or fearful. Another possibility is that they have hormone imbalances and the more subdued stimuli offers a weakened adrenal/thyroid etc. system more protection. The more depressing stimuli is already in a state which renders no further possibility where a positive stimuli has the possibility of going in many mental directions. This could tax a fragile hormonal system. Too much expectation. Better to live life in a “flat” manner as a way of protection.

“Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey. But, sorrow is at least an arriving.”

I find myself in this trap, right now.

Somehow, when you get depressed, and everything begins to look ugly and feel bad, it becomes more important to affirm the truth of this feeling than to “be happy.”

Perhaps there was a component of disillusionment that also takes place when depression moves in, accounting for the shift in world view.

Deep down, I can’t help but wonder whether people generally would rather be right than be happy.

So just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you’re depressed, it’s your own fault. You can choose (evidently) to not be. Get out of your head. Stop moping. Fix yourself.

I say that to myself every day. E-v-e-r-y day. And I pray that one day soon I won’t wake up so I won’t have to say it again.

Why would you say that to yourself? That’s completely untrue and is so incredibly inaccurate of depressed people…

There is an entrance to depression, an event or occurance, that tells your Self to feel depressed. Therefore, please know that there is an equally strong opposing potential. That is the simple yet very effective strategy (perhaps it is a coping skill?) I have learned. Choose to change your mind. Think outside of the box (of depression) into which you have somehow chosen to place yourself. You may never be able to fix other people, but you can willfully and beautifully choose to fix yourself. Nobody else can. Choose to be the best and do the best that you can. If somebody else has a problem with you, it’s their choice.

Neaely all the people thag ive known said that being sad is a choice but why would sadness not be a choice and happiness be one…..feeling heppy and sad are both emotions that you can control…you choose to remain sad..with all my love hoping that one day youll be fine.

Emotions are NOT controllable. Happiness is not a choice and neither is sadness. Emotions happen because that’s our perceptions at work. You obviously have never been depressed, why are you here?

Okay, FIRST OF ALL Sadness is not a CHOICE I don’t choose to be sad all the time, OKAY! it’s just how I relate to things sad pictures,”sad music”, it is how I relate to things how I feel and how the song is represented to me (the actual meaning of the song) which I try to figure out so I can actually understand the person behind the voice’s feelings and what they’ve been through, again it’s how I relate and sadness just comes to me I don’t choose it and triggers that make it worse, it just happens

Wonderful, amazing. To the point. I guess what’ve been described in here is so deep and make sence. I reached to this article when searching the subject “should we go out of sadness”. The answer is clear. Now I need help. How to conquer this inclination to wanting/ choosing sadness!!!

I became interested in this subject when I walked into work and my co worker. ( who is normally pretty depressing) was listening to angry and sad music at 6:15 AM. I like to start my day out happy. But I get his point. We cling to the emotions we are feeling. It’s what we know, and sometimes we are afraid that even if we try to make ourselves happy. It won’t work making us even sadder. I had a bad few weeks about a year ago where nothing I did would make me happy. I went and ate dinner and saw movies with friends and could hardly smile even though I wanted to. It made me even sadder that I couldn’t be happy even with good friends and doing activities that I loved. My friends also criticized me for being a downer. I eventually went outside got lots of sunlight and started to go into nature more and that helped dramatically. Just a theory on why we may stick closer to sad pictures or sad songs. Thank you for reading.

Thank you for your post. When I have been severely depressed it has been because I felt hopeless, trapped, like I cant win, like I am being controlled. I hate those feelings.

Life is a series of growing closer to others and then growing apart slowly. But as we age we lose more close relatives and friends due to natural death.The sadness is the loss of a dear friend. Sadness becomes a major part of us. In Spanish the word is Triste to sound like Christ. Depression is knowing the fact that those we loved are no more.so we feed ourselves feel good words lk

Sadness, fear and anger are the only emotions I really feel, so maybe i listen to sad music to feel that emotion to a higher level. We all need to feel something, but anger and fear are too negative and not emotions that most of us want to feel on purpose.

When you’re sad, happy things just seem so disgustingly fake and obnoxious. Being this dark, mysterious, brooding figure has so much more appeal to me; it gives me this power that I can’t get anywhere else. If I try to avoid it, if I avoid anything that would trigger it, I end up no happier, but empty and emotionless. It makes me feel like I have no purpose in life, like I don’t know who I am, like I’m watching life move by me without any way for me to control it. So I stay sad. I like having power, I like feeling real emotions, and I’m willing to sacrifice my non-existent happiness for it.

This is in reply to Ruth Grayburg back from May 2018

At first when reading your post I got upset, thinking you must not understand true clinical depression. But then your last thought said it all. It speaks loudly and with familiarity. Every day you tryfrom the moment you wake up work to not choose sad.That’s exhausting. So exhausting that you just don’t want to do it again.

I truly understand. Even taking medication for depression and bipolar disorder I struggle with those thoughts in bouts. I hope that you have people in your life who get it, and even if they don’t, are supportive I hope that you have found a way to manage this and for even a brief period of time those thoughts dissipate a little.

Sending you understanding thoughts and virtual hugs.

We perhaps need for ourselves some breaks and care less about our thoughts and emotions. Shift emotions is wonderful talent, or skill. Choose to move on, forget all about them, and have no obligation to change things happened are wise ways out of doomed trap. It is not easy but eventually we do.

Sadness is familiar. A comfort zone. A way of knowing you can’t be let down by anything else because you’ve prepared yourself for it. Despite people trying to make you happy, you feel safer in that pit but it can never be understood by most.

As a person diagnosed with acute depression,I would like to pitch in here as to the reason of the aforementioned choice.

I agree that I deliberately choose to watch/listen to depressing things or movies with sad endings. When I do, I feel less alone, I feel understood. Moreover watching or listening to things that portray other people as happy increase feelings of being alone in the struggle, remind me of what I don’t have and also cause jealousy and bitterness. With debilitating depression those feelings are difficult to control and one involuntarily acts on them. This in turn leads to guilt. Instead of getting help you become the jealous, bitter person no one wants to be around and they will not mince their words.

Lastly, feeling happy is dangerous, because the depression claws it’s way back in. The higher you climb the farther you will fall, the worse it hurts. I guarantee that. It’s safer to stay in the depression zone, so you learn how to live with it.

For someone with long term acute depression or manic depression this is how it works. Depression medication has so many side effects it’s almost poison. Therapists are also human,they sometimes say the wrong things.

All that said, if you have suddenly noticed mental health issues creeping up on you, by all means fight it and do whatever you can before choosing to learn how to live with it.

There is a fatal flaw in this study. They only used depressed people when depressed. When in the grip of depression of course generally you are in such a bad place sad or not fantastic stuff vibes with you more and or is more comforting. That’s still not an ACTIVE healthy choice but yet another SYMPTOM of a depression. To confirm the findings one would need to find people with depression who are currently reporting it to be In “remission” i.e. they aren’t suffering from depression and are morewhat they consider to be their in depressed state. I think one may find in a statistically significant number that those do NOT choose sad items. Besides depression is so much more than just being sad which is a visible symptom but it is a serious debilitating illness which this study and article dangerously depict back towards the myth of blaming the person suffering from it.

I completely agree with Mike. Wanting or choosing to be sad is a symptom of depression not a cause. Furthermore, ANY emotional state is preferable to the blankness of severe clinical depression. Sadness is a little easier to access than the other emotions and brings a sense of release and catharsis. Also accessing art that recognises those feelings brings a sense of connection which is again often absent in severe depression. The article is extremely limited, ill informed and inaccurate.

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Communicating Psychological Science: Neurodiversity in the Workplace

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WHAT IS SADNESS?

Feeling sadness.

Sadness can also be experienced along with other emotions, such as:

• Anger (e.g., having a loved one abandon you)
• Fear (e.g., that we will not be able to cope or move on with life)
• Joy (e.g., reminiscing about time spent with the lost person or thing; pleasure from the comfort provided by others)

WHAT MAKES US SAD

The universal trigger for sadness is the loss of a valued person or object, though this can vary greatly between individuals based on their personal definitions of value and loss.

COMMON SADNESS TRIGGERS

• Rejection by a friend or lover
• Endings and goodbyes
• Sickness or death of a loved one
• The loss of some aspect of identity (e.g., during times of transition at home, work, life stages)
• Being disappointed by an unexpected outcome (e.g., not receiving a raise at work when you expected it)

MOODS AND DISORDERS

The key  difference between mood and emotion  is duration, or how long it lasts. Sadness is one of the longer-lasting emotions and often cycles through periods of protest, resignation, and helplessness. It’s important to note, however, that sadness is different from depression, which is a common but serious psychological disorder described by recurrent, persistent, and intense feelings of sadness and hopelessness that interfere with daily living.

For more information about depression, read  here .

RECOGNIZING SADNESS

FACIAL EXPRESSION OF SADNESS

One very strong and reliable sign of sadness is the angling-up of the inner corners of the eyebrows. Few people are able to manipulate these muscles voluntarily, making it especially difficult to fake (unlike some other facial movements).

VOCAL EXPRESSION OF SADNESS

Depending on the type and intensity of sadness, someone’s voice can either become lower in pitch and softer in volume, or higher in pitch and louder in volume (e.g., wailing).

SENSATIONS OF SADNESS

Common sensations include tightness of the chest, heaviness of the limbs, stinging in the throat, and/or watery eyes.

POSTURE OF SADNESS

There is often a loss of muscle tone, a lowered or hunched posture, and looking away and/or downwards.

THE FUNCTION OF SADNESS

The universal function of sadness is to, in some way, signal for help. This can be a signal to others saying that we need comforting, or to ourselves to take some time and recoup from our loss.

RESPONDING TO SADNESS WITHOUT OURSELVES

Some people can derive pleasure from their sadness and may even seek out experiences that evoke sadness for a cathartic effect. Others, however, have an extreme aversion to sadness and may go to great lengths to avoid situations which they believe may trigger the emotion. This may even cause some to avoid attachment or commitment since it could leave them vulnerable to loss and sadness.

RESPONDING TO SADNESS IN OTHERS

Knowing how someone is feeling doesn’t necessarily mean we want to acknowledge it -it depends on the context and the relationship. In some situations, simply acknowledging that you are sorry for another person’s loss might be helpful, whereas for others it may not be.

Spotting sadness when it is subtle tells you that something important is happening or has happened, that it involves loss, and that this person probably needs some form of comforting. The expression itself, however, doesn’t tell you whether you are the right person to give that comforting, or if this is the right time to offer it.

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Learn to recognize and respond to the emotional expressions of others with our online  micro expressions training tools to increase your ability to detect deception and catch subtle emotional cues.

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Build your emotional vocabulary with the Atlas of Emotions , a free, interactive learning tool created by Drs. Paul and Eve Ekman at the request of the Dalai Lama.

Read Dr. Ekman’s guide to emotions, the best-seller Emotions Revealed .

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135+ Sad Writing Prompts to Stir Deep Emotions in Readers

By: Author Hiuyan Lam

Posted on Last updated: October 20, 2023

Categories Writing Prompts

The benefits of using sad writing prompts

Unlocking creative depths.

Enhancing writing skills

Exploring emotions and improving mental health

Sad writing prompts to unleash creative depths

Exploring health challenges and personal struggles.

Tackling social challenges and environmental crises

Delving into personal relationships and trust issues

Artistic expressions of emotions

Sad writing prompts to develop students’ writing skills

Addressing academic pressure and anxiety.

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Sad writing prompts to facilitate emotional expressions and personal growth

Facing anxiety and fear.

Examining loneliness and isolation

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Unraveling betrayal, conflict, and misunderstandings

Do sad writing prompts have to be with a sad or tragic ending?

Conclusion: Gateways to emotional depth, imagination, and transformation

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All About Sadness: What Causes It, How to Cope With It, and When to Get Help

You may not particularly enjoy feeling sad. You may prefer experiencing other emotions. But if you try to avoid the emotion all together, mental health professionals want you to know not to.

People tend to think that sadness is always bad, says Meaghan Barlow, PhD , an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, who studies self-regulation, emotion, and aging. “That's absolutely not my view.”

Distinct from depression — which the World Health Organization notes is a leading cause of disability worldwide — sadness is a common emotion. Dr. Barlow says that in the right context, sadness can even be helpful.

A growing body of research supports her point of view. Here, Barlow and other experts explain what sadness is, how it impacts well-being, and how you can cope when it feels like too much.

What Is Sadness?

Sadness is “an emotional state of unhappiness, ranging in intensity from mild to extreme and usually aroused by the loss of something that is highly valued,” according to the American Psychological Association (APA) .

The Difference Between Sadness and Anger

Both sadness and anger can feel unpleasant and distressing, and researchers sometimes lump the two together under the umbrella of “negative affect.” (This category also includes shame, guilt, anxiety, fear, and irritability, according to research .) But sadness and anger are distinct emotions with different purposes, as other research has outlined.

Anger often occurs in response to a perceived injustice, according to the APA . So when you’re angry, you might have tunnel vision and feel motivated to deal with some kind of problem. “Anger is useful in overcoming resistance,” says Joseph Forgas , a doctor of science in psychology and Scientia Professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

For a long time, researchers didn’t know the purpose of sadness. But now researchers believe that sadness acts as a mild alert, says Dr. Forgas, who studies the emotion. Sadness tells you that you’re in an unfamiliar situation so you need to look out and be careful, he says. The emotion causes a slew of changes in thinking and behavior (more on that later), some of which Forgas detailed in a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science .

Think about a time you’ve experienced a major rejection, says Ethan Kross, PhD , a professor of psychology and management and organizations at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who studies emotion and self-control.

In the aftermath of the unexpected rejection, sadness might cause you to step back and try to better understand what implications that loss has for you. Withdrawing to reflect is a very different response from the quick action of anger, says Dr. Kross.

The Difference Between Sadness and Depression

According to the APA, persistent sadness is one of the two defining symptoms of a major depressive episode. But to experience sadness is not the same as having depression.

In nondepressed individuals, sadness comes and goes. But when sadness is experienced intensely and for a long time, and is accompanied by other hallmark depression symptoms (lack of interest or pleasure in most activities, fatigue, and changes in appetite), it may indicate the presence of a depressive disorder. “It’s really about the degree and duration,” says Kross.

Depression, in contrast to sadness, tends to be debilitating, making it difficult to perform everyday tasks, according to the APA (PDF).

“It is a very serious disease that has very serious consequences,” says Forgas. That differs from everyday sad moods, which occur all the time to all of us.

How Can You Tell if It’s Depression or Everyday Sadness?

It can be tough to tell whether you’re experiencing everyday sadness or depression. Depression doesn’t look the same in everyone, which can make it difficult to recognize sometimes, Kross notes.

However, if you experience symptoms including fatigue, changes in your appetite, withdrawing from friends, feeling low energy, and the inability to feel happy over a two-week period to the extent that they’re interfering with day-to-day functioning, consider talking to your doctor about getting screened for a mood disorder.

9 Football Players Who’ve Spoken Up About Mental Health

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What causes sadness.

Sadness is ultimately caused by the loss of something important.

The sense of loss has an element of emotional time travel, according to Steven C. Hayes, PhD , a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Nevada in Reno, who has developed therapeutic strategies that incorporate mindfulness and acceptance.

That means that when you experience sadness, Dr. Hayes says, you may be looking backward in time to something you once had or projecting forward and anticipating that your expectations won’t be met. For instance, you may feel sad about recent political upheaval because you hold an expectation for a future world that is more cooperative and kind, and that is threatened by current events.

This example highlights an important feature of a sadness-inducing loss: It touches on something you deeply care about.

What Does Sadness Feel Like?

You can recognize sadness in yourself and others through its telltale characteristics. According to a review published in 2020 in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews , the following can be signs of sadness:

• Social withdrawal
• Decrease in reward seeking
• Slowed movement
• Down-turned mouth
• Drooping or downcast eyes
• Slanted inner eyebrows
• Slumped posture
• Increased or decreased heart rate
• Increased or decreased skin conductance (a measure of a small electric current in the skin that can indicate someone's level of arousal or emotional response, according to APA )

People who are sad might say they feel lonely, distressed, depressed, anxious, or grief .

Researchers who study sadness, including Forgas, acknowledge that the word “sadness” has multiple meanings. These meanings may map on to different experiences.

For example, a study published in 2017 in  Frontiers in Psychology compared sadness caused by imagining the death of a loved one and sadness caused by imagining failing to reach a goal. Even though participants in both groups felt sad, the two types of sadness were associated with distinct physical and psychological responses.

It can be a useful exercise to find your own description for what sadness is like for you, says Deb Dana, LCSW , a clinician and consultant specializing in complex trauma and author of Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory .

Dana suggests comparing and contrasting your experience of sadness with how its opposite, happiness, feels. For example, for her, happiness includes moving through the world with lightness, while sadness comes with a heavy feeling in her body. These extremes can help you notice more subtle versions of the feelings. “It’s easier to tap into when they’re so far apart,” she says.

How Sadness Affects Your Health and Well-Being

The main message coming from a very large number of experiments, including his own lab, says Forgas, is that many positive benefits come from mild, temporary sad moods. Forgas authored a review on the topic, which was published in the journal Australian Psychologist .

Sadness, like all emotions, serves an important function by helping us respond to our circumstances in ways that set us up to take better care of our emotional health and well-being. As Kross notes, when we feel sad, we step back, reflect, and return more prepared to deal with what’s in front of us.

And sadness may not have as many negative implications for health as other distressing emotions. Research suggests that inflammation and negative affect are linked. Increased inflammation is concerning, says Barlow, because of downstream negative consequences for physical health.

But when you look at just sadness, it may not actually affect the body in this way. Research from Barlow’s team, published in 2019 in  Psychology and Aging , links self-reported anger with increased inflammation and chronic illness, but not self-reported sadness.

Here are some of the specific benefits that have been linked to sadness, and when sadness itself can be unhealthy.

1. Sadness Can Help Broaden Your Thinking

In familiar situations, we all rely on mental shortcuts and intuition to get by. When you feel sad, these automatic tendencies are reduced. Forgas says that when you’re sad, it’s almost as if you pay more attention to what’s in front of you.

This approach helps you think more clearly in different ways, many of which Forgas has studied over the decades. His lab conducted research showing that people had better eyewitness memory when in a slightly worse mood. Another study demonstrated that on what Forgas calls “sad mood days,” people had improved recall and attention to the environment.

More recently, in a paper published in 2019 in  Current Directions in Psychological Science , he described a series of studies that together make the case that a sad mood makes people less gullible.

All of this happens without your noticing it. By the time you recognize that you’re sad, sadness tends to go away, Forgas says. The takeaway, he says, isn’t that you should try to make yourself sad on purpose to think more clearly; it’s that when you happen to be sad, you can take solace that it may be helping you accurately process what’s going on so you can proceed in healthy ways.

2. Sadness Can Help You Communicate Better

You might think you should wait to have a conversation until you’re in a good mood. But Forgas has conducted research that demonstrates that people in a negative mood appear to communicate better than those in a positive one. “They understand ambiguities in sentences better. They're better at persuading other people,” he says.

Forgas says that these effects work automatically, not consciously, so the idea isn’t to try to become sad on purpose before a tough conversation. Rather, don’t put off a difficult conversation because it makes you sad; you may be able to better state how you feel in the depths of the emotion.

3. Sadness Can Help With Social Connection

One of the primary functions of sadness is to signal the need for social support, says Barlow. Consider two people: one who is sad and one who is angry. When you see someone who is sad, you have an innate urge to assist them. When you see someone who is angry, you automatically pull away.

Researchers have published findings that demonstrate this gut reaction isn’t just you. One study looked at sad facial expressions and another study examined tears, and both found that those signs of sadness appear to signal to others that we could use their help.

Sadness appears to improve certain interpersonal skills as well. A study that Forgas was part of showed that people in a negative mood tend to be more fair toward others, while other  research showed that they are more polite.

4. Sadness Can Help You Accept Tough Realities

One of the key functions of sadness is helping you accept tough situations and come to terms with loss, says Barlow. While facilitating disengagement isn’t always good, it can sometimes be necessary. “Sometimes there are things beyond your control that it's actually adaptive to let go of,” Barlow says.

These occasions tend to happen more often as you age, Barlow explains. The onset of chronic illness, for example, often requires that you let go of the goal of trying to reverse or cure something, and instead accept your diagnosis and try to manage whatever it is you’re dealing with, she says.

Sadness helps with this by causing changes in thinking and behavior that help people adapt to loss and move forward based on a new circumstances —  research  (PDF) backs this up). In other words, sadness promotes coping, Forgas says.

5. Sadness May Be Motivation for Healthy Behavior Changes

Other research published in 2021 shows that sadness increases healthy intentions, such as quitting smoking or increasing exercise. People who are sad may feel empowered to make these healthy changes because emotions cause us to see the world in certain ways. Sadness, which is associated with the sense that someone or something is responsible for what has happened, appears to increase people’s belief that circumstances are controllable.

6. If Sadness Becomes Depression, Health Suffers

Despite all of these potential benefits associated with sadness, when the emotion is experienced too intensely or for too long, it can indeed be bad for your health, says Kross.

When sadness persists and is accompanied by other symptoms, it’s considered depression , a clinically diagnosed mood disorder. Research has linked depression to a host of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, according to a review in the  European Heart Journal , and death from cancer, per a systematic review in Molecular Psychiatry .

Barlow says that whether sadness is bad for your health is all about the context. Ideally, momentary experiences of sadness trigger its adaptive functions, then the sad feelings go away. But, she says, when sadness is consuming in a way that interferes with different aspects of your life, the feeling no longer serves its proper function.

How to Cope With Feeling Sad

A healthy response to sadness begins with allowing yourself to feel sadness when it comes, says Hayes. He says that habits like meditation and prayer can help you notice your sadness without judging it. In time, these mindfulness practices let you stay present with the sometimes painful feeling.

But feeling sadness doesn’t mean you need to spend hours alone wallowing or feeling bad, says Hayes.

Instead, according to Kross, a healthy response to sadness includes the capacity to dial down how strong the feeling is and shorten how long it lasts. Kross has put together a list of science-backed tools  (PDF) that he says can help you do this. One option is to spend time in nature, which can have a calming effect, according to a research review published in Behavioral Sciences . Kross says that using these skills lets you benefit from sadness without experiencing the problems that come when the feeling is too intense or persists for too long.

One benefit of sadness comes when we learn from it, says Hayes. It can be helpful to see emotions as gentle guides, not dictators, that provide “one of several sources of information about our present moment,” he says. When you take time to reflect on this information, you can, hopefully, learn something that allows you to move on, adds Kross.

But it’s also true that the chronic experience of sadness is a valid reason to seek support, Barlow adds.

If your sadness interferes with living the life you want for more than two weeks, or if your coping tools aren’t helping, that’s a cue to get professional help, says Kross.

And if you’re ever not sure how severe it is, err on the side of taking your sadness seriously, says Barlow. Instead of going it alone, tell a person you trust about what’s been going on. Someone like your primary care provider can help you decide if you need further care and what to do next.

Other strategies for better coping with sadness include:

• Practicing mindfulness
• Normalizing the feeling
• Experiencing awe

Learn More About How to Cope With Sadness

Sadness Resources We Love

Favorite orgs for depression info.

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

NIMH is a federal agency that researches mental disorders, which means it’s a reliable place to get tons of free educational materials, research updates, and support for emotional wellness. If you are a visual thinker and want clear information to help you figure out if your sadness is actually depression (and where to get help if it is), check out NIMH’s infographics on the mood disorder.

Favorite Online Support Network

Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA)

ADAA is an international nonprofit dedicated to preventing, treating, and curing anxiety and depression. On its website, it hosts a free peer-to-peer community filled with people who get it. The website also features lots of personal stories and can be a great place to visit if you’re looking to feel less alone with any sadness you’re experiencing.

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

NAMI is the largest mental health nonprofit in the United States. Its website is packed with helpful resources, but what we love most is its support groups, which are free and geared toward people who experience mental health challenges and their families. You don’t need to be officially diagnosed with a mental health disorder to join — NAMI welcomes anyone who is looking for support with symptoms, including persistent sadness.

Favorite Movies

This 2015 Disney movie provides a surprisingly sophisticated take on our core emotions: joy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. The way that sadness is portrayed, in particular, beautifully maps on to what experts told us about this misunderstood feeling and the way it helps us change our goals and beliefs in the face of loss. In fact, during the course of research for this article, Inside Out came up several times, including in a  science-based book chapter about sadness (PDF).

Favorite Resources for Managing Feelings

Chatter Toolbox (PDF)

Want quick, simple ways to deal with distressing thoughts? Kross compiled 10 of them in what he calls the Chatter Toolbox. He says that these tips can help with any unpleasant feelings, including sadness.

Virtual Therapy

Online therapy platforms give you quick access to licensed therapists using your preferred mode of communication, from video sessions to messaging. Many platforms also include journaling exercises, worksheets, assessments, and other special features. Be sure to check out affordable and free online therapy options, too.

Common Questions & Answers

Everyday Health follows strict sourcing guidelines to ensure the accuracy of its content, outlined in our editorial policy . We use only trustworthy sources, including peer-reviewed studies, board-certified medical experts, patients with lived experience, and information from top institutions.

• Anger.  American Psychological Association .
• Sadness. American Psychological Association .
• Arias JA, Williams C, Raghvani R, et al. The Neuroscience of Sadness: A Multidisciplinary Synthesis and Collaborative Review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews . April 2020.
• Balsters MJH, Krahmer EJ, Swerts MGJ, Vingerhoets JJM. Emotional Tears Facilitate the Recognition of Sadness and the Perceived Need for Social Support. Evolutionary Psychology . January 2013.
• Barlow MA, Wrosch C, Gouin JP, Kunzmann U. Is Anger, but Not Sadness, Associated With Chronic Inflammation and Illness in Older Adulthood? Psychology and Aging . May 2019.
• Berto R. The Role of Nature in Coping With Psycho-Physiological Stress: A Literature Review on Restorativeness. Behavioral Sciences . October 2014.
• What Is Sadness?  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
• Forgas J. Can Sadness Be Good for You? On the Cognitive, Motivational, and Interpersonal Benefits of Mild Negative Affect. Australian Psychologist . July 2016.
• Forgas JP. Don’t Worry, Be Sad! On the Cognitive, Motivational, and Interpersonal Benefits of Negative Mood. Current Directions in Psychological Science . June 2013.
• Forgas JP. Happy Believers and Sad Skeptics? Affective Influences on Gullibility. Current Directions in Psychological Science . April 2019.
• Forgas JP. On Feeling Good and Being Rude: Affective Influences on Language Use and Request Formulations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . 1999.
• Forgas JP. When Sad Is Better Than Happy: Negative Affect Can Improve the Quality and Effectiveness of Persuasive Messages and Social Influence Strategies. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology . July 2007.
• Forgas JP, Goldenberg L, Unkelbach C. Can Bad Weather Improve Your Memory? An Unobtrusive Field Study of Natural Mood Effects on Real-Life Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology . January 2009.
• Forgas JP, Laham SM, Vargas PT. Mood Effects on Eyewitness Memory: Affective Influences on Susceptibility to Misinformation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology . November 2005.
• Gur T, Ayal S, Halperin E. A Bright Side of Sadness: The Depolarizing Role of Sadness in Intergroup Conflicts.  European Journal of Social Psychology . September 2020.
• Hare DL, Toukhsati SR, Johansson P, Jaarsma T. Depression and Cardiovascular Disease: A Clinical Review. European Heart Journal . June 2014.
• Herter MM, Borges A, Pinto DC. Which Emotions Make You Healthier? The Effects of Sadness, Embarrassment, and Construal Level on Healthy Behaviors. Journal of Business Research . June 2021.
• Karnaze MM, Levine L. Sadness, the Architect of Cognitive Change. In Lench HC, ed.  The Function of Emotion: When and Why Emotions Help Us . 2018.
• Reed LI, DeScioli P. The Communicative Function of Sad Facial Expressions. Evolutionary Psychology . March 2017.
• Shirai M, Suzuki N. Is Sadness Only One Emotion? Psychological and Physiological Responses to Sadness Induced by Two Different Situations: "Loss of Someone" and "Failure to Achieve a Goal."  Frontiers in Psychology . 2017.
• Slavish DC, Jones DR, Smyth JM, et al. Positive and Negative Affect and Salivary Markers of Inflammation Among Young Adults. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine . June 2020.
• Tan HB, Forgas JP. When Happiness Makes Us Selfish, but Sadness Makes Us Fair: Affective Influences on Interpersonal Strategies in the Dictator Game. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology . May 2010.
• Wang YH, Li JQ, Shi JF, et al. Depression and Anxiety in Relation to Cancer Incidence and Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Cohort Studies. Molecular Psychiatry . November 2019.
• Depression. World Health Organization . September 13, 2021.
• Skin conductance. American Psychological Association .

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Any techniques to make the reader feel sad and very sorrowful?

Are there any techniques which writers can use to really touch the character, and make them feel really emotional because of your writing?

I'm trying to improve a dystopian piece of writing.

I stood there, in front of it. I could feel my emotions toppling outside of my mind as I began unleashing my hatred upon the ones that did this. I could not hold back my sorrow, and I shed a tear. The creature stretched its great neck forward and my tear fell onto its long cheek. It ran down the beast's face and dropped onto the floor.

During this paragraph I focused on a tear, is this a good idea?

• creative-writing

• 1 If it helps, my high school English teacher forbade us from using the trope of "a single tear falling" because he had gotten tired of seeing it for 30 years. –  Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 20:00
• Is there any other ways I can express sadness physically (not feelings or things inside the character's head) while still keeping an extremely dystopian atmosphere? Throughout the entire piece of writing I have built a gray, sad atmosphere to build up to this paragraph where the character 'reveals' their feelings. –  Featherball Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 20:03
• The character can weep, sob, wail, cry, or blubber — I'm just commenting on "I shed a tear," that particular phrasing. –  Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 20:47
• 1 Write a book that is really bad and then charge a lot of money for it. Then when the reader realizes they were ripped off, they will feel very sad and sorrowful. :-) –  Jay Commented Dec 16, 2015 at 21:46

3 Answers 3

In order to find ways to invoke sadness in others, it's best to try to understand what makes you sad.

Everyone has been sad at some point in their lives, so it's easy to know what sadness looks like and feels like. However a lot of people don't really think about why those things make them sad. This can be said about a lot of emotions, but sadness is one in particular that people don't care to dwell on (for obvious reasons).

This is why it is probably it is one of the most difficult things to portray in pieces of writing. A lot of the times people attempting to create sadness create sad people to try to get others to be sad through empathy. But unless you already massively empathize with the character, it is difficult to pull off.

It is similar in your excerpt. From that short bit of writing I understand that the creature is sad, but that doesn't make me sad. When I then read some of the comments you had written about the backstory of the character and reread the question, it affected me more, as it was now in more of a context. I understood the creature better and could empathize a little with where its heartache stemmed from.

My suggestion is to watch/ read/ experience things that make you sad, and try to think about and analyze why they make you sad. You need to dig deeper and find out the emotions and reasons for how this sadness has developed.

Many things can evoke sadness: fear, loss, longing, pain (physical or emotional), regret, anger, disappointment, frustration. Even some positive emotions can incite sadness in the correct context. Off the top of my head I can think of 4 things that never fail to set me off into floods of tears, and they couldn't be any more different from each other.

It is all about making the reader become invested in something first, and then changing the thing in which they have become invested in a way that can cause sadness. Ultimately, sadness is the destination, the journey to get there will be accessing other emotions within the reader.

To make the reader sad I would focus more on what event is making the narrator sad rather than on describing their sadness. Not that there is anything wrong with describing emotion, and your excerpt seems pretty well written to me, but reading about how someone else feels sad is not what makes me sad. Describing their tears is certainly part of the story, but what is more likely to bring tears to my eyes is reading a vivid description of a good character dying, or suffering pain or bereavement, or being betrayed, or losing their chance of happiness.

Am I right in thinking that the "great creature" (I imagined it as a good dragon) mentioned in your quote has been wounded or harmed by the bad guys? That made me sad.

• 1 No, it is a massive gray creature with 6 spindly arms and too many black eyes to count. Its skin is pale and anaemic and its form is hunched. It was once human, it has been consumed by something I only described as 'ichor' earlier in the story. –  Featherball Commented Dec 16, 2015 at 6:57
• That sounds a truly pitiable fate, which is more or less my point - the way to evoke sadness in your audience in this case would primarily be to describe the suffering of the once-human creature, perhaps contrasting its wretched state now with the vigorous human it once was. Describing the sadness of the narrator at seeing this has its place too, but is secondary. –  Lostinfrance Commented Dec 16, 2015 at 7:32

I think the key to making the reader feel sad is to get them emotionally invested in the characters.

For example, I'm reminded of a book I read years ago where a character was introduced, and in the space of just a page or two the writer described some tragedy in her life and then described her crying and screaming. And I thought: That was way too fast. I haven't had time to get invested in this character.

That is, suppose that the person that you love the most in the world, your wife or your mother or the buddy that you went through hell in the war with or whatever, came to you with tears rolling down their face and said, "Oh, I just don't know what to do, please help me." It is likely that you would be instantly sympathetic and want to know what's wrong.

Now suppose you were walking down the street and some total stranger came up and did exactly the same thing. Your reaction would likely be to flippantly say, "Hey, I'm sorry, but I can't help you."

Likewise, if you want the reader to feel sorry for a character, you have to build up a connection between the character and the reader. You have to get the reader to like the character, to get him interested in what he or she is doing and what is happening to them. THEN we may care when they have problems.

Skillful wording of the description of their unhappiness is certainly a plus. But frankly I think it's the lesser element. I've read plenty of stories wherer the writer gets me involved with a character, and then throws in a totally stark description of a tragedy. Like, "And then George turned around and Sally was gone." If I care about George and Sally, and I understand that they are some place where being separated is a serious problem, this is enough to make me understand George's panic and fear. It doesn't need a lot of flowery words.

On the converse, though, if a story began, "George and Sally were travelling far from home. They were walking through the streets of a strange city when suddenly George realized that Sally was gone. He was filled with panic and fear. He could feel himself shaking. What, he wailed to himself, will I do?" The writer could go on and on and I probably still won't care, because I don't care about the character yet.

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It's okay to feel sad

Actions for this page.

• Sadness is part of the ups and downs of life.
• Feeling sad can prompt you to make choices that improve your life.
• Sadness is not depression.
• You can learn to manage your sadness.

On this page

About sadness, you may feel sad for many reasons, sadness will ease, supporting someone else who is feeling sad, sadness is different from depression, where to get help.

Everyone feels sad sometimes, just like everyone can feel joyful, angry, proud and plenty of other emotions. In other words, everyone has feelings, and those feelings are always changing.

Sometimes we feel happy (such as when we’re having fun) and sometimes we feel sad (such as when we lose a loved one). Whatever the feelings, it is real and part of living.

A negative emotion may even help you. Our world focuses on happiness and treats unhappiness as an unnecessary or useless feeling. But sadness can slow you down, and make you really think about your life, your feelings and the people around you. It can help you keep sight of your relationships and dreams.

In other words, being sad doesn’t mean you are not coping with a situation. Rather, it helps you come to terms with that situation and move on. It is an important emotion that can help you adapt, accept, focus, persevere and grow.

And there’s more good news: you can learn to manage your sadness.

We use different words to talk about sadness: agony, anguish, broken heart, hurt, sorrow, dejection, dismay, homesickness, distress, unhappiness and more. All these emotions can occur in response to a negative or unexpected situations, or life changes.

Sadness often occurs at the same time as other feelings, such as anger, stress, guilt, grief, anxiety or hopelessness. Sometimes, the other feeling may be so strong that you don’t realise you are sad. So what does sadness feel like? It may change how you feel physically. Perhaps you have a stomach ache or a headache, or you can’t sleep.

Sadness may also change how you feel emotionally. Perhaps you are teary, grumpy, bored or frustrated, or just keen to avoid other people.

But recognising your sadness, and understanding that it is okay to feel sad, is a sign of a stable sense of wellbeing .

Life is full of situations that may make people feel sad:

• having trouble at home (for example, family fights or domestic violence)
• having trouble at school or work, or feeling pressure there
• moving home
• losing a loved one or a friend
• being ill, or caring for someone who is ill
• experiencing chemical changes in your body (from puberty, drugs or medicines)
• experiencing changes in your thoughts (for example, developing an unhelpful thinking style such as being self-critical, or learning new information about subjects such as poverty or terrorism).

When you face these situations, you may have unhelpful or negative thoughts about your sadness. And those thoughts can make you feel worse.

So, try a different approach: try to acknowledge your sadness and the situation that prompted it. And give yourself time to deal with any problems and feel better. You also may want to call on resources that could help you (such as friends and family, a psychologist, or another health professional).

Feeling better can involve taking one step or many. It may happen quickly or over a long time. Just remember that emotions ebb and flow, and you can move through sadness to a more positive emotion.

First, acknowledge that you are feeling sad. Sometimes sadness may feel manageable, and acknowledging how you feel is enough – after all, it will pass over time. Sometimes you might want to actively do something to help manage your sadness. You may want to try some of these tips:

• Have confidence that things will improve. You need to trust that your sad feelings will lessen with time and effort.
• Be honest with yourself and the people around you. Talk to someone whom you trust.
• Do things that you enjoy and that are good for you. Find ways to make your life more pleasurable: listen to music, go for a walk, read a book, call a friend.
• Is there something you can do about the cause of your sadness?
• Tackle one problem at a time. It doesn’t matter if you start with the biggest or smallest problem, just make a list and begin. If things are out of your control, talk to someone you trust about your options, or try to work on accepting the situation as it is.
• Think about whether your sleep and eating patterns are good for you.
• Help someone else. Just improving someone else’s life, or being part of a community, can lift your spirits.
• Find a creative way to express your sadness. Writing your thoughts in a diary, for example, may help you find a new perspective.
• Seek help from a professional (a doctor, psychologist, or other health professional). You may need support, advice or a referral to a specialist.
• If a prescribed medication makes you feel down, let your doctor know. And talk to your doctor before taking any non-prescribed medications or complementary or alternative medicines.
• Keep yourself safe. If you feel at risk of hurting yourself , let someone know immediately.

Maybe you know someone else who is feeling sad. Being supportive isn't always easy, because it’s sometimes hard to know why someone is sad and how they are coping.

Here are four basic tips:

• Ask the person if they are okay. Just checking shows you care.
• Listen without judging and try to understand why they are feeling that way.
• If the person is reluctant to ask someone for help (such as a school counsellor, a workplace HR representative or a doctor), you may be able to help by offering to go with them, finding the contact information for them to make the call, or even by finding them some helpful information from a trusted and credible source External Link .
• Reassure them that sadness is a valid emotion, and can be overcome.

For more ideas about how to support someone who is sad, read the tips from beyondblue External Link .

Feeling sad does not mean you have depression . But if your mood starts to interrupt your life and how you function, then you may have become depressed.

Key differences between sadness and clinical depression relate to the cause for the change in mood and how long you have felt that way, and other symptoms that might be present.

If your mood relates to a recent event, such as a relationship breakup, then you may well be feeling sadness. But if that breakup was months ago, or you can see no clear reason for your change in mood, you could be depressed, and it might be helpful for you to chat to your GP about what’s causing you to feel the way you do.

Let’s look the differences between sadness and depression.

• is part of life’s regular ups and downs, but it is not constant
• is a common reaction to an upset or setback, and is usually not a cause for worry
• is interrupted by times of laughter and contentment
• is an emotion that can involve negative thoughts but does not usually involve suicidal thoughts.

Depression:

• is a longer term feeling (more than two weeks) of severe sadness or or loss of interest or pleasure in activities, and other symptoms. These symptoms may include sleeplessness, low energy, concentration problems, pessimism, loss of hope, suicidal thoughts and appetite issues.
• has complicated causes, which may involve genetic or biological components. Maybe the person has experienced a traumatic event or psychological stress
• can lead to significant weight change or sleep disruption.
• is mentally painful and can be life altering.
• beyondblue has a checklist for working out whether you might have depression External Link .
• Everyone feels sad sometimes.
• Feeling sad does not mean you are experiencing depression
• If you have been feeling persistently sad for more than two weeks or you have lost interest in most of your usual activities, you might be depressed. In this case, it is important to seek help.
• Your GP (Doctor)https://www.beyondblue.org.au/get-support/online-forums
• Connect with SANE’s free counselling service online External Link or on 1800 187 263 , between 10am-10pm Monday to Friday AEST/AEDT.
• SANE Forums External Link are full of people who want to talk to you and offer support.
• headspace External Link Tel. 1800 650 890
• Lifeline External Link Tel. 13 11 14
• Kids Help Line External Link Tel. 1800 551 800
• Beyond Blue External Link Tel. 1300 22 4636
• Beyond Blue’s chat service and Forums External Link
• SuicideLine External Link Tel. 1300 651 251
• Australian Psychological Society External Link – Find a psychologist service Tel. 1800 333 497 (outside Melbourne) or (03) 8662 3300 (in Melbourne)
• mind External Link Tel. 1300 AT MIND (286 463)
• Being sad can be good for you External Link , Body and Soul.
• 'Inside out': a movie shows us why we need sadness External Link , Everyday health.
• Is it depression or sadness? Learn the signs External Link , November 2016, Healthline.

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Describing Sadness in Creative Writing: 33 Ways to Capture the Blues

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on August 25, 2023

Categories Creative Writing , Writing

Describing sadness in creative writing can be a challenging task for any writer.

Sadness is an emotion that can be felt in different ways, and it’s important to be able to convey it in a way that is authentic and relatable to readers. Whether you’re writing a novel, short story, or even a poem, the ability to describe sadness can make or break a story.

Understanding sadness in writing is essential to creating a believable character or scene. Sadness is a complex emotion that can be caused by a variety of factors, such as loss, disappointment, or loneliness. It’s important to consider the context in which the sadness is occurring, as this can influence the way it is expressed.

By exploring the emotional spectrum of characters and the physical manifestations of sadness, writers can create a more authentic portrayal of the emotion.

In this article, we will explore the different ways to describe sadness in creative writing. We will discuss the emotional spectrum of characters, the physical manifestations of sadness, and the language and dialogue used to express it. We’ll also look at expert views on emotion and provide unique examples of describing sadness.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how to authentically convey sadness in your writing.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the emotional spectrum of characters is essential to creating a believable portrayal of sadness.
• Physical manifestations of sadness can be used to convey the emotion in a more authentic way.
• Authenticity in describing sadness can be achieved through language and dialogue, as well as expert views on emotion.

33 Ways to Express Sadness in Creative Writing

Let’s start with some concrete examples of sadness metaphors and similes:

Here are 33 ways to express sadness in creative writing:

• A heavy sigh escaped her lips as a tear rolled down her cheek.
• His eyes glistened with unleashed tears that he quickly blinked away.
• Her heart felt like it was being squeezed by a cold, metal fist.
• A profound emptiness opened up inside him, threatening to swallow him whole.
• An avalanche of sorrow crashed over her without warning.
• His spirit sank like a stone in water.
• A dark cloud of grief descended on her.
• Waves of sadness washed over him, pulling him under.
• She felt like she was drowning in an ocean of melancholy.
• His eyes darkened with sadness like a gathering storm.
• Grief enveloped her like a wet blanket, heavy and smothering.
• The light in his eyes dimmed to a flicker behind tears.
• Sadness seeped through her veins like icy slush.
• The corners of his mouth drooped like a wilting flower.
• Her breath came in short, ragged gasps between sobs.
• A profound melancholy oozed from his pores.
• The weight of despair crushed her like a vice.
• A haunted, hollow look glazed over his eyes.
• An invisible hand squeezed her heart, wringing out all joy.
• His soul curdled like spoiled milk.
• A silent scream lodged in her throat.
• He was consumed by a fathomless gloom.
• Sorrow pulsed through her veins with every beat of her heart.
• Grief blanketed him like new-fallen snow, numbing and icy.
• Tears stung her eyes like shards of glass.
• A cold, dark abyss of sadness swallowed him.
• Melancholy seeped from her like rain from a leaky roof.
• His spirit shriveled and sank like a deflating balloon.
• A sick, hollow ache blossomed inside her.
• Rivulets of anguish trickled down his cheeks.
• Sadness smothered her like a poisonous fog.
• Gloom settled on his shoulders like a black shroud.
• Her sorrow poured out in a river of tears.

Understanding Sadness in Writing

Describing sadness in writing can be a challenging task.

Sadness is a complex emotion that can manifest in different ways. It can be expressed through tears, sighs, silence, or even a simple change in posture. As a writer, you need to be able to convey sadness effectively to your readers, while also avoiding cliches and melodrama.

One way to approach describing sadness is to focus on the physical sensations and reactions that accompany it. For example, you might describe the feeling of a lump in your throat, or the tightness in your chest. You could also describe the way your eyes become watery, or the way your hands tremble.

These physical descriptions can help your readers to empathize with your characters and feel the same emotions.

Another important aspect of describing sadness is the tone of your writing. You want to strike a balance between conveying the depth of the emotion and avoiding excessive sentimentality.

One way to achieve this is to use simple, direct language that conveys the emotion without resorting to flowery language or overwrought metaphors.

When describing sadness, it’s also important to consider the context in which it occurs. Sadness can be a response to many different situations, such as loss, disappointment, or rejection. It can also be accompanied by other emotions, such as anger, confusion, or melancholy.

By considering the context and accompanying emotions, you can create a more nuanced and realistic portrayal of sadness in your writing.

Finally, it can be helpful to draw on examples of how other writers have successfully described sadness. By studying the techniques and descriptions used by other writers, you can gain a better understanding of how to effectively convey sadness in your own writing.

In conclusion, describing sadness in writing requires a careful balance of physical descriptions, tone, context, and examples. By focusing on these elements, you can create a more nuanced and effective portrayal of this complex emotion.

Emotional Spectrum in Characters

In creative writing, it’s important to create characters that are multi-dimensional and have a wide range of emotions. When it comes to describing sadness, it’s essential to understand the emotional spectrum of characters and how they respond to different situations.

Characters can experience a variety of emotions, including love, happiness, surprise, anger, fear, nervousness, and more.

Each character has a unique personality that influences their emotional responses. For example, a protagonist might respond to sadness with a broken heart, dismay, or feeling desolate.

On the other hand, a character might respond with anger, contempt, or apathy.

When describing sadness, it’s important to consider the emotional response of the character. For example, a haunted character might respond to sadness with exhaustion or a sense of being drained. A crestfallen character might respond with a sense of defeat or disappointment.

It’s also important to consider how sadness affects the character’s personality. Some characters might become withdrawn or depressed, while others might become more emotional or volatile. When describing sadness, it’s important to show how it affects the character’s behavior and interactions with others.

Overall, the emotional spectrum of characters is an important aspect of creative writing. By understanding how characters respond to different emotions, you can create more realistic and relatable characters. When describing sadness, it’s important to consider the character’s emotional response, personality, and behavior.

Physical Manifestations of Sadness

When you’re feeling sad, it’s not just an emotion that you experience mentally. It can also manifest physically. Here are some physical manifestations of sadness that you can use in your creative writing to make your characters more believable.

Tears are one of the most common physical manifestations of sadness. When you’re feeling sad, your eyes may start to water, and tears may fall down your cheeks. Tears can be used to show that a character is feeling overwhelmed with emotion.

Crying is another physical manifestation of sadness. When you’re feeling sad, you may cry. Crying can be used to show that a character is feeling deeply hurt or upset.

Numbness is a physical sensation that can accompany sadness. When you’re feeling sad, you may feel emotionally numb. This can be used to show that a character is feeling disconnected from their emotions.

Facial Expressions

Facial expressions can also be used to show sadness. When you’re feeling sad, your face may droop, and your eyes may look downcast. This can be used to show that a character is feeling down or depressed.

Gestures can also be used to show sadness. When you’re feeling sad, you may slump your shoulders or hang your head. This can be used to show that a character is feeling defeated or hopeless.

Body Language

Body language can also be used to show sadness. When you’re feeling sad, you may cross your arms or hunch over. This can be used to show that a character is feeling closed off or defensive.

Cold and Heat

Sadness can also affect your body temperature. When you’re feeling sad, you may feel cold or hot. This can be used to show that a character is feeling uncomfortable or out of place.

Sobbing is another physical manifestation of sadness. When you’re feeling sad, you may sob uncontrollably. This can be used to show that a character is feeling overwhelmed with emotion.

Sweating is another physical manifestation of sadness. When you’re feeling sad, you may sweat profusely. This can be used to show that a character is feeling anxious or nervous.

By using these physical manifestations of sadness in your writing, you can make your characters more realistic and relatable. Remember to use them sparingly and only when they are relevant to the story.

Authenticity in Describing Sadness

When it comes to describing sadness in creative writing, authenticity is key. Readers can tell when an author is not being genuine, and it can make the story feel less impactful. In order to authentically describe sadness, it’s important to tap into your own emotions and experiences.

Think about a time when you felt truly sad. What did it feel like? What physical sensations did you experience? How did your thoughts and emotions change? By tapping into your own experiences, you can better convey the emotions of your characters.

It’s also important to remember that sadness can manifest in different ways for different people. Some people may cry, while others may become withdrawn or angry. By understanding the unique ways that sadness can present itself, you can create more authentic and realistic characters.

If you’re struggling to authentically describe sadness, consider talking to a loved one or best friend about their experiences. Hearing firsthand accounts can help you better understand the nuances of the emotion.

Ultimately, the key to authentically describing sadness is to approach it with empathy and understanding. By putting yourself in the shoes of your characters and readers, you can create a powerful and impactful story that resonates with your audience.

Language and Dialogue in Expressing Sadness

When writing about sadness, the language you use can make a big difference in how your readers will perceive the emotions of your characters.

Consider using metaphors and similes to create vivid images that will help your readers connect with the emotions of your characters.

For example, you might describe the sadness as a heavy weight on the character’s chest or a dark cloud hanging over their head.

In addition to using metaphors, you can also use adjectives to describe the character’s emotions. Be careful not to overuse adjectives, as this can detract from the impact of your writing. Instead, choose a few powerful adjectives that will help your readers understand the depth of the character’s sadness.

For example, you might describe the sadness as overwhelming, suffocating, or unbearable.

When it comes to dialogue, it’s important to remember that people don’t always express their emotions directly. In fact, sometimes what isn’t said is just as important as what is said.

Consider using subtext to convey the character’s sadness indirectly. For example, a character might say “I’m fine,” when in reality they are struggling with intense sadness.

Another way to use dialogue to convey sadness is through the use of behaviors. For example, a character might withdraw from social situations, stop eating or sleeping properly, or engage in self-destructive behaviors as a result of their sadness.

By showing these behaviors, you can help your readers understand the depth of the character’s emotions.

Finally, when describing sadness, it’s important to consider the overall mood of the scene. Use sensory details to create a somber atmosphere that will help your readers connect with the emotions of your characters.

For example, you might describe the rain falling heavily outside, the silence of an empty room, or the dim lighting of a funeral home.

Overall, when writing about sadness, it’s important to choose your words carefully and use a variety of techniques to convey the depth of your character’s emotions.

By using metaphors, adjectives, dialogue, behaviors, and sensory details, you can create a powerful and emotionally resonant story that will stay with your readers long after they’ve finished reading.

Expert Views on Emotion

When it comes to writing about emotions, it’s important to have a deep understanding of how they work and how they can be conveyed effectively through writing. Here are some expert views on emotion that can help you write about sadness in a more effective and engaging way.

Dr. Paul Ekman

Dr. Paul Ekman is a renowned psychologist who has spent decades studying emotions and their expressions. According to Dr. Ekman, there are six basic emotions that are universally recognized across cultures: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.

When it comes to writing about sadness, Dr. Ekman suggests focusing on the physical sensations that accompany the emotion.

For example, you might describe the heaviness in your chest, the lump in your throat, or the tears that well up in your eyes. By focusing on these physical sensations, you can help your readers connect with the emotion on a deeper level.

While sadness is often seen as a “negative” emotion, it’s important to remember that all emotions have their place in creative writing. Disgust, for example, can be a powerful tool for conveying a character’s revulsion or aversion to something.

When writing about disgust, it’s important to be specific about what is causing the emotion. For example, you might describe the smell of rotting garbage, the sight of maggots wriggling in a pile of food, or the texture of slimy, raw meat.

By being specific, you can help your readers feel the full force of the emotion and understand why your character is feeling it.

Overall, when it comes to writing about emotions, it’s important to be both specific and authentic. By drawing on your own experiences and using concrete details to describe the physical sensations and causes of emotions, you can create a more engaging and emotionally resonant piece of writing.

Unique Examples of Describing Sadness

When it comes to describing sadness in creative writing, there are many unique ways to convey this emotion to your readers. Here are some examples that can help you create a powerful and moving scene:

• The crying scene : One of the most common ways to show sadness is through tears. However, instead of just saying “she cried,” try to describe the crying scene in detail. For instance, you could describe how her tears fell like raindrops on the floor, or how her sobs shook her body like a violent storm. This will help your readers visualize the scene and feel the character’s pain.
• The socks : Another way to show sadness is through symbolism. For example, you could describe how the character is wearing mismatched socks, which represents how her life is falling apart and nothing seems to fit together anymore. This can be a subtle yet effective way to convey sadness without being too obvious.
• John : If your character is named John, you can use his name to create a sense of melancholy. For example, you could describe how the raindrops fell on John’s shoulders, weighing him down like the burdens of his life. This can be a creative way to convey sadness while also adding depth to your character.

Remember, when describing sadness in creative writing, it’s important to be specific and use vivid language. This will help your readers connect with your character on a deeper level and feel their pain.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some effective ways to describe a person’s sadness without using the word ‘sad’.

When describing sadness, it’s important to avoid using the word “sad” as it can come across as cliché and lackluster. Instead, try using more descriptive words that evoke a sense of sadness in the reader. For example, you could use words like “heartbroken,” “bereft,” “devastated,” “despondent,” or “forlorn.” These words help to create a more vivid and emotional description of sadness that readers can connect with.

How can you describe the physical manifestations of sadness on a person’s face?

When describing the physical manifestations of sadness on a person’s face, it’s important to pay attention to the small details. For example, you could describe the way their eyes become red and swollen from crying, or how their mouth trembles as they try to hold back tears. You could also describe the way their shoulders slump or how they withdraw into themselves. By focusing on these small but telling details, you can create a more realistic and relatable portrayal of sadness.

What are some examples of using metaphor and simile to convey sadness in creative writing?

Metaphors and similes can be powerful tools for conveying sadness in creative writing. For example, you could compare a person’s sadness to a heavy weight that they’re carrying on their shoulders, or to a storm cloud that follows them wherever they go. You could also use metaphors and similes to describe the way sadness feels, such as a “gnawing ache” in the pit of their stomach or a “cold, empty void” inside their chest.

How can you effectively convey the emotional weight of sadness through dialogue?

When writing dialogue for a character who is experiencing sadness, it’s important to focus on the emotions and feelings that they’re experiencing. Use short, simple sentences to convey the character’s sadness, and avoid using overly complex language or metaphors. You could also use pauses and silences to create a sense of emotional weight and tension in the scene.

What are some techniques for describing a character’s inner sadness in a way that is relatable to the reader?

One effective technique for describing a character’s inner sadness is to focus on their thoughts and feelings. Use introspection to delve into the character’s emotions and describe how they’re feeling in a way that is relatable to the reader. You could also use flashbacks or memories to show why the character is feeling sad, and how it’s affecting their current actions and decisions.

How can you use sensory language to create a vivid portrayal of sadness in a poem or story?

Sensory language is an effective way to create a vivid portrayal of sadness in a poem or story. Use descriptive words that evoke the senses, such as the smell of rain on a sad day or the sound of a distant train whistle. You could also use sensory language to describe the physical sensations of sadness, such as the weight of a heavy heart or the taste of tears on the tongue. By using sensory language, you can create a more immersive and emotional reading experience for your audience.

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Seven minutes to grieve with ‘Bluey’

The jaunty intro music plays and two tiny heads whip toward the television. I settle onto the couch with my young sons and some of my stress melts away because I’ll have the next seven-ish minutes to feed myself, complete a small task, scroll, or just sit and enjoy “Bluey” with them. Usually, I choose to watch. Like many adults, I’ve fallen in love with the Heeler family. My husband and I routinely lust after their house. We cry as the emotional roller coaster of parenthood is reflected back at us. For me, the show has also been a surprisingly useful tool: Bluey and Bingo are helping me grieve.

As I snuggle my boys, their small bodies constantly wiggling, their tiny hands and pudgy feet overlapping with mine, I float back to the hospital bed set up in my parents’ living room, poorly disguised with bright sheets. I held my little sister Kelsey’s hands and they were as soft as my sons’ are now. I snuggled up with her the same way, two years ago, as we helped her die. 

Hospice was torturous but precious. My family had the gift of time to say goodbye. Each day I laid with her, I knew it could be the last. She couldn’t speak, but I believe she heard me, felt me and found peace in the closeness we’d been sharing since she was born. She was 31, two years younger than me, and I begged the universe for another minute, another day, while simultaneously wanting her suffering to end. Every time I drove away from my childhood home to return to my own child, my heart beat out of my chest and the air left my lungs. 

I expected the grief after her death to feel like falling off a cliff into the ocean, but it wasn’t. I’d been grieving for Kelsey for years. I’d swung between fight, flight and freeze for as long as we knew she had cancer, close to a decade. I’d bargained with the universe and convinced myself that science would advance enough to allow her to live. I betrayed my own faith that she wouldn’t die by cataloging moments in my mind, just in case. I have a hard time remembering many things but can close my eyes and see Kelsey singing along with George Ezra at his concert. I can play the memory on a loop and be right there, swaying next to her.

Before I became a parent, I didn’t appreciate the value of my personal time. Uninterrupted visits to the bathroom, full nights of sleep, and a gym membership I actually used. I could ignore my emotions without fear of them bubbling back up at an inconvenient time, like during a toddler tantrum, when they might overtake me and turn me into a person I don’t want to be with my kids. I don’t know how I would have experienced her death if I wasn’t a parent. But as a relatively new mom, I function as someone’s parent first and an autonomous person second. Grief is highly inconvenient. Prior to my sister’s death, what I feared most was a life without her. Our lives and spirits were entwined. There was no me without her. I feared the version of me that would be left without her. The specter of the woman I might become haunted me; so, I refused myself the freedom to grieve the way I needed. Instead I limped along, missing a piece.

I function as someone’s parent first and an autonomous person second. Grief is highly inconvenient. ... I refused myself the freedom to grieve the way I needed. Instead I limped along, missing a piece.

To me, the depiction of the parent who checks out and lays in bed all day or goes off the rails is unrealistic luxury. I had little time to myself after Kelsey died. I walked around the house like a ghost. I looked for her around every corner and convinced myself she was speaking to me through her favorite songs. When I wasn’t talking to flickering light fixtures, I was entertaining a demanding toddler who had no clue what was going on. I would take a shower to cry. I dressed slowly and then came downstairs in mom-mode. Sobbing over Play-Doh would be scary. Melting down at the playground would lose my kid playdates. All that emotion locked up tended to come out on car rides to work or the grocery store. But driving and crying isn’t really recommended, so that ended too. Instead, it manifested as rage and anxiety, and still does. But I guess extra visits to the pediatrician and screaming at one’s husband don’t make for great entertainment so the grief tropes live on, unchanged.

In the Apple TV+ show, “Shrinking,” Harrison Ford’s character recommends a grieving daughter set a timer, pick a sad song, and feel deeply for 15 minutes. I could and should try this, but keep forgetting. What I don’t forget? My own kid’s screen time — he wouldn’t let me. That’s how I found myself one weekend watching the “Bluey” episode, “Relax.” In it, the Heeler family stay at a hotel and Bluey’s mom, Chilli, cannot remember how to relax and enjoy herself. She finally steps back, watches her daughters and sees the joy they feel being together, exploring a new space.

It was the sisters’ creative play that caught me off guard. Giddy over hotel soap, dressing as mermaids, over the moon to take a bath in a big fancy tub. I was back in my childhood. Dressing up, playing school and making witch’s brew with sand, rocks and dandelions. Reliving the memories loosened the grip I normally kept on my emotions. For the first time in months, I cried without worry. My baby was sleeping and my older son was glued to the screen, paying no attention to me or my tears. For once, I had my moment of deep sadness without having to hide or protect someone else from my feelings. Afterward I felt, not better really, but different. Maybe more peaceful, but definitely more connected to my sister through the memories “Bluey” brought to the surface. 

The episode only lasted a few minutes, but it was long enough to shift something for me. For a little while I was smiling through my tears, able to let joy in with the sadness. Remembering the moments that shaped us, that solidified our bond as sisters and best friends, was a gift.

We’ve watched the rest of the season, and each episode was better than the last. “Bluey” has opened a window I’d shut tight and helped me recall happy and hard childhood moments, all of which include Kelsey. My child-self misses her sister in such an acute way it feels like an injury. My current self is forced to acknowledge what her absence means — an endless list of what could have been. It’s been two years and now I’m less afraid of marinating in grief and getting trapped there. I welcome the cherished memories that leave me feeling the warmth of a hug. They are evidence of a deep love and enduring connection that cannot be erased. I’m grateful that “Bluey” celebrates the special relationship of sisters and for the wonder it inspires in its viewers. Mostly, I’m thankful that Bluey and Bingo’s love for one another has helped me process grief through memories in a safe little seven-minute package. The episodes’ brevity forces me and allows me to feel deeply; it is a reminder of how fast this life goes and that the credits will roll on my memories all too soon. 

Caitlin Flanigan is a New Jersey-based writer, speech language pathologist and founder of Garnet Pediatric Therapy . She writes about parenthood, family and the messy parts of life with the support of book inc , a community of writers she helped create in 2020. She is currently querying a novel.

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What Does Happiness Really Mean?

It's not the same for everyone

Verywell/ Jiaqi Zhou

How to Cultivate Happiness

How to be a happier person.

Happiness is something that people seek to find, yet what defines happiness can vary from one person to the next. Typically, happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction. 

When most people talk about the true meaning of happiness, they might be talking about how they feel in the present moment or referring to a more general sense of how they feel about life overall.

Because happiness tends to be such a broadly defined term, psychologists and other social scientists typically use the term ' subjective well-being ' when they talk about this emotional state. Just as it sounds, subjective well-being tends to focus on an individual's overall personal feelings about their life in the present.  

Two key components of happiness (or subjective well-being) are:

• The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.
• Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important.

Another definition of happiness comes from the ancient philosopher Aristotle, who suggested that happiness is the one human desire, and all other human desires exist as a way to obtain happiness. He believed that there were four levels of happiness: happiness from immediate gratification, from comparison and achievement, from making positive contributions, and from achieving fulfillment. 

Happiness, Aristotle suggested, could be achieved through the golden mean, which involves finding a balance between deficiency and excess.

Signs of Happiness

While perceptions of happiness may be different from one person to the next, there are some key signs that psychologists look for when measuring and assessing happiness.

Some key signs of happiness include:

• Feeling like you are living the life you wanted
• Going with the flow and a willingness to take life as it comes
• Feeling that the conditions of your life are good
• Enjoying positive, healthy relationships with other people
• Feeling that you have accomplished (or will accomplish) what you want in life
• Feeling satisfied with your life
• Feeling positive more than negative
• Being open to new ideas and experiences
• Practicing self-care and treating yourself with kindness and compassion
• Experiencing gratitude
• Feeling that you are living life with a sense of meaning and purpose
• Wanting to share your happiness and joy with others

One important thing to remember is that happiness isn't a state of constant euphoria . Instead, happiness is an overall sense of experiencing more positive emotions than negative ones.

Happy people still feel the whole range of human emotions—anger, frustrastion, boredom, loneliness, and even sadness—from time to time. But even when faced with discomfort, they have an underlying sense of optimism that things will get better, that they can deal with what is happening, and that they will be able to feel happy again.

"Even people who have experienced terrible trauma can still also experience happiness," says Hannah Owens, LMSW , "though it is important to recognize that it might be more difficult for them to obtain the balance generally associated with overall happiness, and that their happiness might look very different from others' who have not had to deal with such challenges."

Types of Happiness

There are many different ways of thinking about happiness. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle made a distinction between two different kinds of happiness: hedonia and eudaimonia.

• Hedonia: Hedonic happiness is derived from pleasure. It is most often associated with doing what feels good, self-care, fulfilling desires, experiencing enjoyment, and feeling a sense of satisfaction.
• Eudaimonia: This type of happiness is derived from seeking virtue and meaning. Important components of eudaimonic well-being including feeling that your life has meaning, value, and purpose. It is associated more with fulfilling responsibilities, investing in long-term goals, concern for the welfare of other people, and living up to personal ideals.

Hedonia and eudemonia are more commonly known today in psychology as pleasure and meaning, respectively. More recently, psychologists have suggested the addition of the third component that relates to engagement . These are feelings of commitment and participation in different areas of life.

Research suggests that happy people tend to rank pretty high on eudaimonic life satisfaction and better than average on their hedonic life satisfaction.  

All of these can play an important role in the overall experience of happiness, although the relative value of each can be highly subjective. Some activities may be both pleasurable and meaningful, while others might skew more one way or the other.

For example, volunteering for a cause you believe in might be more meaningful than pleasurable. Watching your favorite tv show, on the other hand, might rank lower in meaning and higher on pleasure.

Some types of happiness that may fall under these three main categories include:

• Joy: A often relatively brief feeling that is felt in the present moment
• Excitement: A happy feeling that involves looking forward to something with positive anticipation
• Gratitude: A positive emotion that involves being thankful and appreciative
• Pride: A feeling of satisfaction in something that you have accomplished
• Optimism: This is a way of looking at life with a positive, upbeat outlook
• Contentment: This type of happiness involves a sense of satisfaction

While some people just tend to be naturally happier, there are things that you can do to cultivate your sense of happiness. 

Pursue Intrinsic Goals 

Achieving goals that you are intrinsically motivated to pursue, particularly ones that are focused on personal growth and community, can help boost happiness. Research suggests that pursuing these types of intrinsically-motivated goals can increase happiness more than pursuing extrinsic goals like gaining money or status.  

Enjoy the Moment

Studies have found that people tend to over earn—they become so focused on accumulating things that they lose track of actually enjoying what they are doing.  

So, rather than falling into the trap of mindlessly accumulating to the detriment of your own happiness, focus on practicing gratitude for the things you have and enjoying the process as you go. 

Reframe Negative Thoughts

When you find yourself stuck in a pessimistic outlook or experiencing negativity, look for ways that you can reframe your thoughts in a more positive way. 

People have a natural negativity bias , or a tendency to pay more attention to bad things than to good things. This can have an impact on everything from how you make decisions to how you form impressions of other people. Discounting the positive—a cognitive distortion where people focus on the negative and ignore the positive—can also contribute to negative thoughts.

Reframing these negative perceptions isn't about ignoring the bad. Instead, it means trying to take a more balanced, realistic look at events. It allows you to notice patterns in your thinking and then challenge negative thoughts.

Avoid Social Comparison

Another way to cultivate happiness and to make sure that you are able to maintain your happiness, Owens says, is to stop comparing yourself to others.

"No two lives are alike, and focusing on what others have is a sure-fire way to feel envy and regret. Focus on the good things in your own life, and you'll be more likely to find contentment in them," she says.

Impact of Happiness

Why is happiness so important? Happiness has been shown to predict positive outcomes in many different areas of life including mental well-being, physical health, and overall longevity.

• Positive emotions increase satisfaction with life.
• Happiness helps people build stronger coping skills and emotional resources.
• Positive emotions are linked to better health and longevity. One study found that people who experienced more positive emotions than negative ones were more likely to have survived over a 13 year period.
• Positive feelings increase resilience. Resilience helps people better manage stress and bounce back better when faced with setbacks. For example, one study found that happier people tend to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and that these benefits tend to persist over time.
• People who report having a positive state of well-being are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors such as eating fruits and vegetables and engaging in regular physical exercise.
• Being happy may make help you get sick less often. Happier mental states are linked to increased immunity.

Some people seem to have a naturally higher baseline for happiness—one large-scale study of more than 2,000 twins suggested that around 50% of overall life satisfaction was due to genetics, 10% to external events, and 40% to individual activities.

So while you might not be able to control what your “base level” of happiness is, there are things that you can do to make your life happier and more fulfilling. Even the happiest of individuals can feel down from time to time and happiness is something that all people need to consciously pursue.

Cultivate Strong Relationships

Social support is an essential part of well-being. Research has found that good social relationships are the strongest predictor of happiness. Having positive and supportive connections with people you care about can provide a buffer against stress, improve your health, and help you become a happier person.

In the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that looked at participants over 80 years, researchers found that relationships and how happy people are in those relationships strongly impacted overall health.

So if you are trying to improve your happiness, cultivating solid social connections is a great place to start. Consider deepening your existing relationships and explore ways to make new friends. 

Get Regular Exercise

Exercise is good for both your body and mind. Physical activity is linked to a range of physical and psychological benefits including improved mood. Numerous studies have shown that regular exercise may play a role in warding off symptoms of depression, but evidence also suggests that it may also help make people happier, too.

In one analysis of past research on the connection between physical activity and happiness, researchers found a consistent positive link.  

Even a little bit of exercise produces a happiness boost—people who were physically active for as little as 10 minutes a day or who worked out only once a week had higher levels of happiness than people who never exercised.

Show Gratitude

In one study, participants were asked to engage in a writing exercise for 10 to 20 minutes each night before bed.   Some were instructed to write about daily hassles, some about neutral events, and some about things they were grateful for. The results found that people who had written about gratitude had increase positive emotions, increased subjective happiness, and improve life satisfaction.

As the authors of the study suggest, keeping a gratitude list is a relatively easy, affordable, simple, and pleasant way to boost your mood. Try setting aside a few minutes each night to write down or think about things in your life that you are grateful for.

Find a Sense of Purpose

Research has found that people who feel like they have a purpose have better well-being and feel more fulfilled.   A sense of purpose involves seeing your life as having goals, direction, and meaning. It may help improve happiness by promoting healthier behaviors. 

Some things you can do to help find a sense of purpose include:

• Explore your interests and passions
• Engage in prosocial and altruistic causes
• Work to address injustices
• Look for new things you might want to learn more about

This sense of purpose is influenced by a variety of factors, but it is also something that you can cultivate. It involves finding a goal that you care deeply about that will lead you to engage in productive, positive actions in order to work toward that goal.

Challenges of Finding Happiness

While seeking happiness is important, there are times when the pursuit of life satisfaction falls short. Some challenges to watch for include:

Valuing the Wrong Things

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but there is research that spending money on things like experiences can make you happier than spending it on material possessions. 

One study, for example, found that spending money on things that buy time—such as spending money on time-saving services—can increase happiness and life satisfaction.  

Rather than overvaluing things such as money, status, or material possessions, pursuing goals that result in more free time or enjoyable experiences may have a higher happiness reward.

Not Seeking Social Support

Social support means having friends and loved ones that you can turn to for support. Research has found that perceived social support plays an important role in subjective well-being. For example, one study found that perceptions of social support were responsible for 43% of a person's level of happiness.  

It is important to remember that when it comes to social support, quality is more important than quantity. Having just a few very close and trusted friends will have a greater impact on your overall happiness than having many casual acquaintances.

Thinking of Happiness as an Endpoint

Happiness isn’t a goal that you can simply reach and be done with. It is a constant pursuit that requires continual nurturing and sustenance.

One study found that people who tend to value happiness most also tended to feel the least satisfied with their lives.   Essentially, happiness becomes such a lofty goal that it becomes virtually unattainable. 

“Valuing happiness could be self-defeating because the more people value happiness, the more likely they will feel disappointed,” suggest the authors of the study.

Perhaps the lesson is to not make something as broadly defined as “happiness” your goal. Instead, focus on building and cultivating the sort of life and relationships that bring fulfillment and satisfaction to your life. 

It is also important to consider how you personally define happiness. Happiness is a broad term that means different things to different people. Rather than looking at happiness as an endpoint, it can be more helpful to think about what happiness really means to you and then work on small things that will help you become happier. This can make achieving these goals more manageable and less overwhelming.

History of Happiness

Happiness has long been recognized as a critical part of health and well-being. The "pursuit of happiness" is even given as an inalienable right in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Our understanding of what will bring happiness, however, has shifted over time.

Psychologists have also proposed a number of different theories to explain how people experience and pursue happiness. These theories include:

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

The hierarchy of needs suggests that people are motivated to pursue increasingly complex needs. Once more basic needs are fulfilled, people are then motivated by more psychological and emotional needs.

At the peak of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualization, or the need to achieve one's full potential. The theory also stresses the importance of peak experiences or transcendent moments in which a person feels deep understanding, happiness, and joy. 

Positive Psychology

The pursuit of happiness is central to the field of positive psychology . Psychologists who study positive psychology are interested in learning ways to increase positivity and helping people live happier, more satisfying lives. 

Rather than focusing on mental pathologies, the field instead strives to find ways to help people, communities, and societies improve positive emotions and achieve greater happiness.

Finley K, Axner M, Vrooman K, Tse D. Ideal levels of prosocial involvement in relation to momentary affect and eudaimonia: Exploring the golden mean . Innov Aging . 2020;4(Suppl 1):614. doi:10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2083

Kringelbach ML, Berridge KC. The neuroscience of happiness and pleasure .  Soc Res (New York) . 2010;77(2):659-678.

Panel on Measuring Subjective Well-Being in a Policy-Relevant Framework; Committee on National Statistics; Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council; Stone AA, Mackie C, editors. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience [Internet]. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US).

Lee MA, Kawachi I. The keys to happiness: Associations between personal values regarding core life domains and happiness in South Korea . PLoS One . 2019;14(1):e0209821. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0209821

Hsee CK, Zhang J, Cai CF, Zhang S. Overearning . Psychol Sci . 2013;24(6):852-9

Carstensen LL, Turan B, Scheibe S, et al. Emotional experience improves with age: evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling . Psychol Aging . 2011;26(1):21‐33. doi:10.1037/a0021285

Steptoe A, Wardle J. Positive affect and biological function in everyday life . Neurobiol Aging . 2005;26 Suppl 1:108‐112. doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2005.08.016

Sapranaviciute-Zabazlajeva L, Luksiene D, Virviciute D, Bobak M, Tamosiunas A. L ink between healthy lifestyle and psychological well-being in Lithuanian adults aged 45-72: a cross-sectional study . BMJ Open . 2017;7(4):e014240. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-014240

Costanzo ES, Lutgendorf SK, Kohut ML, et al. Mood and cytokine response to influenza virus in older adults . J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci . 2004;59(12):1328‐1333. doi:10.1093/gerona/59.12.1328

Lyubomirsky S, Sheldon KM, Schkade D. Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change . Review of General Psychology. 2005;9 (2):111–131. doi:0.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111

The Harvard Gazette. Good genes are nice, but joy is better .

Zhang Z, Chen W. A systematic review of the relationship between physical activity and happiness . J Happiness Stud 20, 1305–1322 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-9976-0

Cunha LF, Pellanda LC, Reppold CT. Positive psychology and gratitude interventions: a randomized clinical trial . Front Psychol . 2019;10:584. Published 2019 Mar 21. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00584

Ryff CD. Psychological well-being revisited: advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia . Psychother Psychosom . 2014;83(1):10‐28. doi:10.1159/000353263

Whillans AV, Dunn EW, Smeets P, Bekkers R, Norton MI. Buying time promotes happiness .  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A . 2017;114(32):8523‐8527. doi:10.1073/pnas.1706541114

Gulacti F. The effect of perceived social support on subjective well-being . Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences . 2010;2(2):3844-3849. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.602

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Essay About Sadness and Whether It Could Be Positive

As early as I could remember myself, my memories have been colored with melancholy and sad feelings. Yes, I admit it: I am a person who loves being sad. As a child, I loved gloomy fairy tales; as a teenager, I loved tragic novels and films, which made my parents worry a lot. I realized that I did not meet their expectations: in their ideal world, a happy person must irradiate joy all the time. In my view, this state of constant life enjoyment looked slightly idiotic. And I kept asking myself if sadness is really so bad.

One of the points, which I have discovered, is that people very seldom differentiate between sadness and misery and mistake one feeling for the other, although they are very different in nature. Misery can only be caused by some deeply traumatic experience; however, sadness in a natural middle between being extremely happy and feeling deep sorrow.

Another important issue is that sadness often accompanies the process of thinking, consideration, and evaluation. If, for example, you once watch the facial expression of a person who is writing something deep in thought, you will see that he/she looks sad.

Furthermore, sadness is absolutely natural: almost all our important events in life are colored with it. We feel it when we have to leave a place where we felt good, we experience it when we are happy because deep down we all know it will not last forever, when parents see their children getting married, they are happy, but at the same time they are sad, because their kids have grown up.

So, sadness is positive. Next time you wake up in the morning and realize you feel sad, do not get upset, it only means you are normal and experience the whole range of emotions.

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I Gave Myself a Month to Make One New Friend. How Hard Could That Be?

Americans have become terrible at forming and keeping friendships. But there must be somebody out there who wants to grab a burrito with me.

In my twenties, I had a friend who used to show up at my doorstep uninvited with a six-pack of Red Stripe. She had a terrible job and a worse boyfriend, and whenever either was bumming her out, she’d plop down on the orange couch that my roommate had gotten from her dead great-aunt and tell us everything. In 2017, she moved to Montana, and I suppose if I had to pinpoint it, I’d say that’s when the trouble began.

One day it became undeniable that I had a friendship void in my life. I didn’t lose my friends. There was no big dustup or disaster. No romantic rivalries or fights about politics had gotten in the way. They didn’t even go missing, exactly—I knew where they were. After Red Stripe landed in Missoula, the couple whose deck we used to grill sausages on decamped to Vermont. Around the same time, L. A. started acquiring my friends at an alarming rate, and the ones who remained all seemed to have colicky babies or punishing home-renovation projects on their hands. I admitted to myself that I’d had a hand in it, too: After all, I hadn’t changed cities in fourteen years, a job in five, or a romantic partner since Obama’s first term.

I am not alone. (Except, I guess, literally.) Americans have become terrible at making and keeping friends. Here’s an incomplete list of phenomena that experts in the subject have blamed for this: apartments without dining rooms, Covid-19, “technology,” babies, not enough hiking. Whatever the cause, we’re a nation afflicted. This is particularly true for men. (If you cannot name even a single close friend, you’re not the only one: 20 percent of single men are stuck in the same position, trapped in what is being dubbed a “friendship recession.”) In 2023, a surgeon general’s advisory declared loneliness and isolation an “epidemic,” and I was showing worrying symptoms. I had a spouse, a child, a dog, a career—and almost nobody else to hang out with.

But the magnitude of my problem didn’t become overwhelming until a gorgeous spring evening when I texted the group chat after one member reported having “a shitstorm of a day.” Did anyone want to grab a bite and talk it out? Not one person said yes. I was, in fact, ridiculed for the very suggestion. (“You love a last-minute plan lol” came the reply.)

I knew that I technically had friends, but none of them ever seemed to want to hang out. Even if the six-pack friend still lived in Brooklyn, I had a hunch that now that she has a toddler, her visits wouldn’t be as frequent or as spontaneous as they had been a decade ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I had gotten a text that said something like “what’s up tonight?”

Why it’s so hard to make friends as an adult isn’t rocket science. Dr. Marisa Franco, a psychologist and the author of the book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends , described what it takes to Boston radio station WBUR . There are basically two conditions that need to be met for people to develop a friendship “organically”: “continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability.”

This made intuitive sense to me. I do have friends, close ones (have I said that enough yet?), but with few exceptions, they’re people I met in high school, college, or those years after college when “shared vulnerability” is less of a precondition for friendship than it is an entire lifestyle. When you’re in college, “continuous unplanned interaction” is the name of the game. When you live with roommates, same deal. “Shared vulnerability” is almost impossible not to feel when you’re on your third or fourth Natty Light at the house party.

It also helped me feel less embarrassed about the fact that although I’m friendly with my coworkers, I can think of only one who might reasonably describe me as a “friend” to a third party. In an office, there’s plenty of continuous unplanned interaction, but vulnerability rarely goes much further than shared gripes about budget cuts or the boss man. Outside of work, it takes a Herculean effort and untold Google Calendar server space to coordinate so much as a happy hour.

I liked Dr. Franco’s description so much that I bought her book. But things got off to a rocky start from the jump, with these words:

I’m so proud of you, reader, for embarking on this journey.

Proud of me? Insulting! Didn’t Dr. Franco hear me when I said I already had friends? They were just busy right now!

I collected myself. I realized that I sounded like a sixth grader describing his beautiful girlfriend “from camp” and read on.

Dr. Franco rightly points out that people destroy their own chances at friendship by fearing rejection. I was guilty of that, no doubt. She’s big on authenticity and vulnerability. Sometimes she verges on the obvious, suggesting that readers “share helpful information with friends” as a way of expressing generosity, but for the most part—and to my great dismay—the advice in the book is pretty much sound. I felt confident that enacting it would be excruciating. I was going to have to “muscle through [my] fear of rejection to say hello.”

I decided to give myself one month to make one friend.

That was it. If I couldn’t do it in a month, I figured I probably couldn’t do it at all. To keep myself accountable, I would write about it. I’d start with a list of rules.

First, I’d have to define “friend” for our purposes. Deceptively tough. Would meeting for one coffee do the trick? Surely not. What about four? What if we did something a little more involved, like seeing a concert or taking a cooking class? We’d have to develop some recurring jokes, memories, shared enemies for it to count. Friendship requires a knowledge base, too: Can you really declare yourself friends with someone if you don’t know their brother’s name or what their girlfriend does for a living? How much work should it take? I wound myself up trying to make a discursive distinction between that which makes someone a friend and that which makes someone a good friend before the damn project had even started. I had to cut my losses. I just needed someone I really—I mean, really—enjoyed hanging out with, someone whose problems I could take on as my own, someone who would take on mine as well.

More guidelines: An entirely new person entering my life and becoming a friend was the purest form of this assignment, I decided, but the upgrade of a friendly acquaintance into a friend was also permitted. Setups were allowed, as were recreational activities, but long-distance friendships were not. They had to be in town, with no plans to move to L. A. Reinvigorating closeness with an old friend wouldn’t cut it, either. (This rule brought me great pain when my husband and I spent a delightful afternoon getting drunk with my best friend from elementary school—whom I hadn’t talked to in a decade—and her absolute nutcase of a husband. In under an hour, we were exchanging “No, you were cool in high school”s.) Next!

Then came the question of method. The resounding advice was “Get a hobby.” But I had only a month, and I didn’t think I could learn a new skill while trying to make friends. I imagined myself at some kind of adult surfing camp with horror. I supposed I could call my dog a hobby and meet someone at the dog park. But I recalled the mixed results I got last time I tried that. (I found myself spending more time with the dog of my alleged dog-park friend than with the friend herself, as she dumped poor Caleb at my doorstep every time she had to leave town, which was suspiciously often.)

A friend who, I regret to tell you, lives in L. A., where she has a thriving social life, offered wise advice. “I think because I’ve dated a lot in my thirties, I’ve come to think of it in a similar way, where you almost have to treat it like a hobby in that it’s time-consuming and something you have to work at. And in its best version, I think you learn a lot about yourself, because you learn how to tell your story to people who don’t know your context and learn theirs.”

So no hobbies. This would be my hobby. Anyone who cared about my story already knew it by heart, and I hadn’t told it in years. I wasn’t even sure I knew what my story was anymore.

I entered the project like a newborn horse—happy to be here but awkward and unsure which way to run. I was feeling shy, so I figured I’d read up on the theory before putting anything into practice. I started with Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic How to Win Friends and Influence People . I was less interested in influencing people than in winning friends, but I wouldn’t object to some incidental influencing. The book has much to offer the reader who agrees with the statement “Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business.” It has less to offer a reader like me, who is looking for someone to text on a Thursday for a burrito in a couple hours. But still, it has a few nice lessons.

Carnegie explains that people crave appreciation “almost as much as they crave food.” He has nice little bons mots like “Let’s realize that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home.” His basic message is that you should make a sincere effort to notice good things about the people around you and make a point of telling them you’ve noticed. Try to be less critical, because everyone hates criticism.

I toted the book around with me for the first week of the project, hoping someone on the bus would ask me what was up with that. No one did, so I seized the initiative. “I’m doing this project where I try to make a friend in a month, so I’m reading this cheesy book,” I’d say to various strangers wearing AirPods. (Should I even bother telling you this didn’t work?)

I abandoned the book but not the bus. One morning I sat across from a dad who was trying to persuade his child to eat an allegedly yucky banana. “Bananas are such drama,” I said to him in sympathy, then asked how old the kid was. This question is the universally understood invitation to a conversation between parents. His kid was three, mine is one, and it turned out we were headed to the same day care. Play it cool, I thought to myself, this is a potential friend.

We talked for a few blocks about how much he loves the Knicks, and he told me about his wife’s job at a nonprofit. We agreed it was helpful to have one parent who works from home. At drop-off, I suggested getting together sometime. I didn’t bother to ask for his number; I figured I’d see him tomorrow doing battle over another banana. But I never saw him again.

No problem. The lesson was that I needed to be more deliberate. Friends weren’t just going to happen to me. Babies may have been partly to blame for the disappearance of my old friends, but perhaps they could also be a solution. When we first had our baby, people went out of their way to tell us how easy it would be to make friends now that we had a kid. So I signed my daughter up for a parent-and-me swim class that met every Saturday morning at a high school. We arrived early so I could scope out the friend potential. She sat on my hip in her towel with a dinosaur tail and sucked her thumb. I felt the same way.

“Have you done this before?” I asked the dad of a kid who looked on the verge of tears. Before he could answer, the child started wailing. The class itself was no better. We paraded the babies around while singing water-themed songs, which required most of our faculties of concentration. “I can’t believe how warm this water is,” I offered to a mom during a break in the action. “Sorry, what?” she asked over the din of indoor splashing. I repeated myself, and she said she couldn’t hear me again. “ We would like to welcome Felix / to the swimming pool ,” the class sang to a weeping Felix in the gentlest tones any of us could manage, and I began to despair of the baby-bonding plan.

The indignities continued to pile up. Worst of all was when people I thought were already my friends, upon hearing of the project I was undertaking, offered to become my friend. This happened for the first time (but not the last!) at a one-year-old’s birthday party. My intention was to ask a friend to set me up with one of her friends. After realizing her mistake, she vigorously reassured me of our status as already-friends for the next half hour as I glumly munched on birthday cake. She promised to put me in touch with a friend of hers by text. The next week, she invited me to a basketball game. She began the invitation by saying, “Since we are already friends. . .”

I asked another friend to hook me up with a friend of hers, and bless her, she obliged. In terms of efficacy, blind dates were an obvious improvement over carting Dale Carnegie around on the bus, but they only seemed to heighten my weird behavior. Everything I did on these friend dates was aggressive, pathetic, or insane. In a text message during the lead-up to one of them, I referred to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens as “the CG,” a nickname no one has ever used. I showed up ten minutes early to one hang and sat at the bar reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir about getting stabbed in the eye. Another time, I lied about my age (I subtracted a year), then had to keep up the lie throughout an extended story about my junior year of college. I cannot explain why I did this.

Part of the issue was how interested the dates were in the project itself. This is understandable and I should have anticipated it, but it ate up a ton of time as I talked about myself, against Dale Carnegie’s warning that people care less about you than about whether you care about them. On the date where I lied about my age, my potential friend expressed no hope that I could make one friend in one month. “It’s so inorganic,” she said.

She had recently befriended a group of senior citizens at her local library who gathered each week to play Scrabble, so she was eager to share advice. (“You should go tomorrow!” she said.) In fact, she’d gotten so close to this group that she and Barbara, seventy-four, were writing a romance novel together. None of what she was describing appealed to me at all. I told her I would never do that, and she shrugged as if to say, “Maybe that’s why you don’t have any friends.”

As much as I would rather eat a bowl of Scrabble pieces than ask if I could join Barbara’s tournament, the story filled me with longing to be friends with someone who would do that. It occurred to me that it had been a mistake to seek out people who were similar to me. My existing friendships were safe, predictable, and pure pleasure. But maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. Those relationships may have become logistically complex, but they were so cozy that it was sometimes hard to discern where I ended and a friend began. This new person was telling me her story, and the contrast with mine made me feel more legible—like I was really a person in the world. I remembered my single friend’s words: “. . . in its best version, I think you learn a lot about yourself, because you learn how to tell your story to people who don’t know your context and learn theirs.” This was it! I was doing it!

My potential friend suggested, as a kind of expressway to intimacy, that we share a secret with each other that we’d never told anyone else. Mine made me sound like a psychopath, but hers made me adore her all the more. By the second round of drinks, I knew what kind of books her older sister reads and what her parents’ divorce was like (not great). She now knew all about the death of my brother’s dog and what my parents’ divorce was like (also not great).

The spell broke when she checked her watch. We split the check and said thank you for the round we’d each bought. We’d do it again! Soon! While we were at the bar, a rainstorm had begun, so we darted away with purpose. It had been a totally fun night, but as I watched her shuffle around the corner, I knew in my heart that she would never show up to my home with a six-pack after a terrible day at work.

It was public knowledge around the office that I was undertaking this project. At our morning meeting each day, my coworkers would ask if I’d made a friend yet. At first there was a breeziness to the question, but the more I answered no, the more knitted the brows around the table got. Their worry seemed to be escalating, so in the early hours of the morning a couple days before my allotted month ran out, I downloaded an app called Bumble for Friends. I’d been hesitant to do this, because, well, obviously. But time was running out. With great humility, I tell you that I composed the following profile: “Writing for a men’s magazine, mom of a toddler, owner of a very bad dog. More or less always trying to drink a beer in the sun.”

I will not debase myself by telling you how long it took me to write that, but I will share that an early draft contained the regrettable phrase “I love to keep it low-key.” I spent a great deal of time trying to decide if I should include my political views. Could I ever really befriend someone who didn’t share them? I thought about how much pleasure I got from hearing about the Scrabble friend’s life and decided I should at least try. Profile complete and free from any mention of Karl Marx, I swiped through blurry image after blurry image of transplants from Amsterdam who spent their free time baking and exploring all the city has to offer. Nurses who loved house music. Owners of rescue dogs who reported that their real friends had all moved to Austin. There appeared to be some sort of law requiring each profile to mention yoga.

I scoffed at profiles that read “Up for anything but especially exploring new restaurants and adventures ;)” as though I did not enjoy those very things. Swiping also had the effect of alerting me to the superficial qualities I seemed to like and dislike in people, and I didn’t love what I saw. (Cat ownership struck me as a red flag, which was nonsensical, since many of my closest current friends own cats. And woe betide the person whose idea of a perfect Sunday included “crafting.”) Although I was, by definition, the same as everyone else on the app, I judged them in a way that was not at all Dale Carnegie–approved. All of these people were admitting to some measure of loneliness and excited to remedy that with a pottery class. The longer I swiped, the more I hated myself for not loving these openhearted potential friends.

I also hated myself for failing to be empathetic in the past toward my existing friends who had to do this in search of romance. I’d underestimated the injury that comes along with having to distill yourself into a bio this short, and the low-grade but unmistakable fear that a swipe in the wrong direction could mean kissing a possibly wonderful future goodbye.

The worst of it, though, wasn’t imagining myself meeting one of these people for a kickboxing class; it was wondering what came next. We’d just be two people floating in a little world of brunch, outdoor concerts, and keeping it low-key? It filled me with loneliness more unbearable than what I’d started with. I texted my existing friends, “I can’t believe I thought this would be a fun assignment.” It was 3:00 A.M., but they were awake. After all, they live on the West Coast.

I realized I didn’t really want one friend at all; I wanted a bunch of them. I wanted them to come over for a burrito, to meet after work when someone had gotten laid off, or broken up with, or hired. I wanted a congress of nonexperts to examine my suspicious-looking moles. To pick up my kid when I was stuck at work late. To happen to be around the corner, wondering if I could go for a bagel. I wanted something that no one person could possibly supply, and that was to live better. What I really wanted was something that, for some reason, despite its near-universal popularity, we’ve constructed society to make nearly impossible: hanging out casually when the mood strikes, with a bunch of people who know us deeply and love us anyway.

“Priests in the Middle Ages distrusted friendship,” Dr. Franco writes, “fearing its love could eclipse our love for God.” Could you blame them? If you don’t have friends, you’re not in much danger of talking to anyone who might, in quiet tones, reassure you that you’re not crazy—those wafers really are just wafers. Capitalism hums on for much the same reason. Without true friends, there’s no way to trust that it’s safe to say, “Hey, this is stressful.” It’s much easier for the boss if employees, in their intimacies only with themselves, shrug and figure that’s just the way life is. The place where most of us spend most of our waking hours works best if your main use for winning friends is influencing people.

On the last day of the month, I broke the news to my coworkers: I hadn’t added to my friend tally. It was almost a relief. The better world I was sure was possible would take more than a month to build. Put another way: I had failed. I’d resigned myself to a life of catch-up coffees, halfway intimacies, and adult softball leagues. I told myself it took bravery to confront this reality. Maturity. A group of friends was not going to appear on my stoop one day with a basket of cookies and a decade of shared memories. “You’re just what our intimate collection of souls was missing,” they would not say, before plopping themselves down on my rug as though my casa were their casa. To get there, I’d have to start with one friend. I’d have to do as Dr. Franco said and muscle my way through an immense amount of discomfort, and then I’d have to do it again. My coworkers nodded respectfully before moving on to the next agenda item.

To make a friend requires so much bravery, so much energy, so much work. I supposed I just didn’t have it in me. Then my phone lit up with a text, interrupting this grim thought. It was Scrabble woman! She wanted to hang out again. She wanted to hear more secrets. I wanted more, too. It would be hard to make a date to hang out again, I knew, but it suddenly struck me as harder not to. It would take more energy and even more bravery to steel myself for an existence in which I didn’t learn more of Scrabble woman’s secrets. Yes, I’d love to hang out. I’d love to embarrass myself again, to expend time and energy I didn’t have. I’d love to take a risk and maybe to suffer. I’d love to be friends.

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How to Write a Dark or Sad Story

Last Updated: April 11, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was reviewed by Gerald Posner . Gerald Posner is an Author & Journalist based in Miami, Florida. With over 35 years of experience, he specializes in investigative journalism, nonfiction books, and editorials. He holds a law degree from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He’s the author of thirteen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, the winner of the Florida Book Award for General Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also shortlisted for the Best Business Book of 2020 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 269,138 times.

Do you want to give your story or writing project a dark or tragic turn? Are you unsatisfied with your ability to write anything but happy stories? With practice and planning, you can write a story that will chill and/or depress even your most lighthearted readers.

Sample Stories

Writing Your Own Story

• If you would prefer not to get wet, carry an umbrella with you.

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• You don't have to be a serious person to be a serious writer. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
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• Don't copy other people's work. Thanks Helpful 202 Not Helpful 31
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• ↑ https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/process/reverseoutlines/
• ↑ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1171691.pdf
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/transitions/
• ↑ https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/writing/punctuation

About This Article

When you’re writing a dark or sad story, you’ll want it to be as realistic and engaging as possible. Try listening to sad music and dimming the lights to set the mood for your writing session. You can also do research about whatever you’re writing. For example, if you’re writing about someone with cancer, read other stories about it or watch vlogs from people dealing with cancer for inspiration. Then, start to plot the main events of your story in a rough outline. Don’t worry if your story changes while you write it, since the outline should only be a guide. While you’re writing, try to put yourself in your character’s shoes and imagine everything they think and feel. For a sample gothic short story, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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What Makes Me “Me”, Essay Example

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A man’s personality is shaped by his genetic potential, the environment in which he grows up, parental guidance and the way he is imparted his education. I was born in Iran, which despite its rich culture and historical past, has stayed a bit off-track from rest of the world in the last few decades of the twentieth century. I was the last child of my parents and therefore had my elder brothers and sisters to watch and emulate. My parents are enlightened individuals who raised their kids in the most appropriate manner, with traditional religious values interspersed with modernity in thought as well as action.

Despite the heavy influence of my elder siblings, I always had an independent streak in me which allowed me to be fiercely adventurous in thought as well as action. A car was my favorite toy as a child and as a teenager I was greatly fascinated by motor sports, which I saw on the television. My father bought me a go kart which I enjoyed riding thoroughly. Though not popular in my native country, I always wished to partake in motor sports somewhere else in the world. With this single minded devotion, which enraptured me during early teens, I started participating in small events in my locality where I and a few friends raced on their personal cars. After this I started participating in professional racing and although I did not win any title, my kart was admired for completing a lap in the fastest time which was due to the modifications in the engine which I carried out myself. This continued for a year or two until I was involved in a serious accident in which I escaped with only minor injuries. This was a wakeup call for my parents who forbid all such activities and asked me to concentrate on academics and finish school before I could consider any ambitious aspirations of becoming a racer. I complied with their directions and concentrated on my studies. But I always felt restricted from within and when I saw life in the United States on television, I always aspired to move there and get myself the best education this world had to offer. I decided to move to the USA when I attained the age of sixteen and although my parents were reluctant to allow me to do so, they complied with my wish and I was allowed to move to the United States to complete higher education. I left Iran with a heavy heart as I started missing my family and the safe haven of my home right at the juncture when I was about to board a flight to America, the land of my dreams. I was feeling very anxious on the flight and was almost panic struck at the idea of living alone in a new land with a culture entirely different from my own. But as I nurtured the ambition to achieve something in life I was excited and fully confident of my ability to carry on with my life as a student, and later as a professional engineer. I moved to Plano in Texas where I pursued my studies and am now a senior at Plano West Senior High School. I have a good academic record throughout my student life and my present OGPA is 3.60/4.00. In addition I possess a good physique and am quite active in sports. I play soccer and represent my school team in local tournaments.

Personally, I feel that I have a creative mind as my thought process is always directed towards discovering and inventing new things, especially anything connected with an engine which fascinates me thoroughly. Designing new engines and cars is my passion and I read a lot about the latest inventions in magazines and the internet. Physics is my pet subject at school and I never miss a class and thoroughly enjoy the lectures from my able and respected teachers. I follow all the major motor sports activities around the world which include formula racing as well car rallies and dirt track racing. I watch motorcycle as well as car races on the television and always enjoy the thrill at the finish line, although I know that somebody else is driving the car, and not me. I dream of building my own racing car someday and race along with the professionals, although it seems very farfetched and ambitious at this stage of my life.

Despite my unique cultural background and different outlook on life, I have blended well into the American society and feel quite at home with my American friends. American society is a great blend of people from different ethnicities and religious backgrounds who live together in a modern mutual relationship. This great country has a rich cultural heritage and offers unique opportunities to everybody and one can make or mar one’s career depending upon the qualities one possesses from within. I work passionately for whatever is my immediate target, in my educational pursuits as well as social interactions. The experiences in my native country have inculcated in me the qualities of hard work, perseverance, passion and responsibility. I aim at working hard throughout in life and do something productive for myself as well as the society in which I live. I feel that a person must leave an indelible impression on the face of earth so that he is remembered for his contributions by the following generations.

If granted the scholarship, I intend to thoroughly reciprocate the honor bestowed on me and work with renewed passion to fulfill the targets set forth before me. I aim to excel academically and increase my knowledge under the guidance of professional teachers and subject experts. Given the opportunity I will fully try to keep up with the academic and practical tasks I am assigned. I am fully confident of my abilities and as I come from another country it is all the more important to prove myself and be a worthy son of my parents whom I intend to make proud of me in the future.

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What JD Vance told me about his ‘childless cat ladies’ attack line

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David’s view

The View From Democrats

“I’m going to get in trouble for this,” JD Vance warned his audience at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. “This isn’t being recorded, is it? Broadcast live?”

Three years ago, when his U.S. Senate campaign polled in single digits, Vance told a friendly crowd about an idea he’d been kicking around. Conservatives needed to “take aim” at “the childless left,” whose “rejection of the family” was undermining their country. No one in the “next gen of the Democratic Party” — Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — had biological children at the time.

“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have children?” he asked. “Why is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”

Vance knew he was being recorded, and ready when Democrats pounced on his comments. Five days after the speech, he repeated the basic “childless left” message on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the show he’d launched his campaign on. Yes, he’d said that parents of children deserved a bigger role in democracy than the sad “childless cat ladies” of the left, and he meant it. He once again named Harris, a stepmother of two, as part of that group.

“When somebody calls out that ‘Look, if you’re a miserable cat lady, you should not force your misery on the rest of the country,’ they just get really upset about it,” Vance said.

On Monday, the influential anti-Trump commentator Ron Filipkowski posted part of that interview on X, where it took off. That clip didn’t include the caveats Vance had shared with ISI, that he wasn’t talking about people who, “even though they would like to have kids, are unable to have them.” Commentators seeing this for the first time asked whether Vance’s mouth had already hurt the GOP ticket, with an insult to millions of women who might have been gettable for Trump.

Vance had only directed the insult at the left — but he meant it. The line caught my eye at the time, and I talked to him about how it fit into his broader philosophy in 2022, when he was on the verge of winning the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Senate race.

Vance told me that the “childless left” idea grew out of a conversation with a friend who noted that Washington, D.C. was near the top of lists of cities where adults had the fewest children. (As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has noted , it’s partly due to the constant flow of young professionals who move later on).

“I was like — oh, that’s really odd, right?” Vance recalled. “The city that’s governing for the rest of the country is also the place that, in some ways, is the least like the rest of the country, where most people do want to have children, and most people do start families.”

The childless factor, said Vance, might explain why so many policymakers favored school mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. “When you have children, and you’ve interacted with children regularly, I think you realize how many of the left policies are really harmful to kids,” he said. “That was the most egregious example.”

A self-described “natalist” with three young children, Vance is now the most influential Republican advocate of a movement to encourage more marriage, and easier family formation. That might include cash and healthcare incentives that his party was doctrinally opposed to, but that self-described “national conservatives” wanted to try, after seeing them implemented in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. He’s also decried the prevalence of divorce and its impact on children, including with comments that have also attracted attention in recent days.

Those views didn’t make it into the new GOP platform, and Democrats believe they’re offering more credible pro-child policies this year. In her maiden speeches as the likely Democratic nominee, Harris promised more affordable child care and paid family leave. She’s also the stepmother of Cole and Ella Emhoff, and often mentions the name they call her: “Momala.”

Vance’s rhetoric also connects with another topic that’s consumed his corner of the intellectual right in recent years: Acceptance of the transgender community and their access to health care. In a 2022 criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, published by the American Principles Project, Vance fretted that “progressive gender theory” was being embraced by some parents who, instead of identifying the source of “mental confusion” in their children, gave them medication that delayed puberty and might affect their fertility.

“Gender dysphoria is good for business,” Vance wrote , arguing — without evidence — that big pharma was driving recent increases in treatment as part of a larger plot to boost profits. “Puberty blockers for 12-year-olds become antidepressants for 22-year-olds become fertility treatments for 32-year olds.”

Elon Musk has struck the same notes, on natalism (“population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”) and on gender identity . These are popular worries among Silicon Valley conservatives , many of whom Vance knows. Peter Thiel, whom Vance has called a “mentor,” helped fund his 2022 race and the Arizona U.S. Senate bid of his former foundation president Blake Masters. Now running for a safe GOP House seat near Phoenix, Masters has gone after Trump-endorsed opponent Abe Hamedeh, who’s 33, for not having children.

“I’ve got a wonderful wife. I’ve got four beautiful boys. That’s called skin in the game,” Masters said at an April candidate debate. “What we don’t need is someone with no wife and kids, right? No skin in the game.”

Buttigieg, who was in the process of adopting twins when Vance made the “childless left” remarks, has criticized the line repeatedly.

“The really sad thing is, he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg told CNN on Tuesday. “He couldn’t have known that but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.” The election should be about all Americans’ families, he added, not questions about the families of politicians.

• Vance’s “childless left” remarks drew some friendly fire on the right at the time; in the Washington Free Beacon, Matt Continetti asked why the candidate was fighting with Republicans like Mitt Romney, who had their own pro-child policies.

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20 things that make me sad, we all get sad sometimes..

By nature, I am a very emotional person. Sometimes I am crippled by unbearable sadness over a variety of things. Some of the things that make me sad are fairly trivial, while others are huge issues in our society. Whatever the case, I'm grateful that I am able to feel these human emotions—remorse, despair, sadness—no matter how upsetting these emotions can be. Without further ado, here are some of the things that make me sad:

1. I hate seeing dead animals on the road. They can't even get any peace when they keep getting run over again and again.

2. i only have one life to make something of myself., 3. i can never change the past., 4. not everyone gets to say goodbye to the people they love., 5. there are only a few restaurants i actually like that deliver., 6. while i worry about trivial problems, other countries are filled with people who are willing to risk their lives to escape into the united states., 7. three words: animal. abuse. commercials., 8. what if i never see some of the people i graduated with ever again, 9. the "vampire diaries" gets me. every. single. time., 10. my bank account makes me want to cry 9 times out of 10., 11. i'll probably never be able to afford my dream house., 12. i should have kept a journal of my entire life., 13. some people can't figure out the difference between "you're" and "your.", 14. people with low self-esteem don't know when they deserve better., 15. chinese restaurants aren't open on mondays., 16. chick-fil-a isn't open on sundays., 17. i can't afford, nor do i have the time, to take care of a puppy., 18. cats shed. a lot., 19. i'll never know if i could've been the world's greatest gymnast or something., 20. i have less than a year until i'll be done with school. aka i have less than a year to get my stuff together., subscribe to our newsletter, 25 beatles lyrics: your go-to guide for every situation, the best lines from the fab four.

For as long as I can remember, I have been listening to The Beatles. Every year, my mom would appropriately blast “Birthday” on anyone’s birthday. I knew all of the words to “Back In The U.S.S.R” by the time I was 5 (Even though I had no idea what or where the U.S.S.R was). I grew up with John, Paul, George, and Ringo instead Justin, JC, Joey, Chris and Lance (I had to google N*SYNC to remember their names). The highlight of my short life was Paul McCartney in concert twice. I’m not someone to “fangirl” but those days I fangirled hard. The music of The Beatles has gotten me through everything. Their songs have brought me more joy, peace, and comfort. I can listen to them in any situation and find what I need. Here are the best lyrics from The Beatles for every and any occasion.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

The End- Abbey Road, 1969

The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence- The White Album, 1968

Love is old, love is new, love is all, love is you

Because- Abbey Road, 1969

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be

All You Need Is Love, 1967

Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend

We Can Work It Out- Rubber Soul, 1965

He say, "I know you, you know me", One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come Together- Abbey Road, 1969

Oh please, say to me, You'll let me be your man. And please say to me, You'll let me hold your hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand- Meet The Beatles!, 1964

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They've been going in and out of style, but they're guaranteed to raise a smile

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-1967

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see

Strawberry Fields Forever- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Can you hear me? When it rains and shine, it's just a state of mind

Rain- Paperback Writer "B" side, 1966

Little darling, it's been long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it' s been here. Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright

Here Comes The Sun- Abbey Road, 1969

We danced through the night and we held each other tight, and before too long I fell in love with her. Now, I'll never dance with another when I saw her standing there

Saw Her Standing There- Please Please Me, 1963

I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all I want to say

Michelle- Rubber Soul, 1965

You say you want a revolution. Well you know, we all want to change the world

Revolution- The Beatles, 1968

All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong

Eleanor Rigby- Revolver, 1966

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

With A Little Help From My Friends- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better

Hey Jude, 1968

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday

Yesterday- Help!, 1965

And when the brokenhearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.

Let It Be- Let It Be, 1970

And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

I'll give you all i got to give if you say you'll love me too. i may not have a lot to give but what i got i'll give to you. i don't care too much for money. money can't buy me love.

Can't Buy Me Love- A Hard Day's Night, 1964

All you need is love, love is all you need

All You Need Is Love- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird- The White Album, 1968

Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more

In My Life- Rubber Soul, 1965

While these are my 25 favorites, there are quite literally 1000s that could have been included. The Beatles' body of work is massive and there is something for everyone. If you have been living under a rock and haven't discovered the Fab Four, you have to get musically educated. Stream them on Spotify, find them on iTunes or even buy a CD or record (Yes, those still exist!). I would suggest starting with 1, which is a collection of most of their #1 songs, or the 1968 White Album. Give them chance and you'll never look back.

14 Invisible Activities: Unleash Your Inner Ghost!

Obviously the best superpower..

The best superpower ever? Being invisible of course. Imagine just being able to go from seen to unseen on a dime. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to be invisible? Superman and Batman have nothing on being invisible with their superhero abilities. Here are some things that you could do while being invisible, because being invisible can benefit your social life too.

1. "Haunt" your friends.

Follow them into their house and cause a ruckus.

2. Sneak into movie theaters.

Going to the cinema alone is good for your mental health , says science

Considering that the monthly cost of subscribing to a media-streaming service like Netflix is oft...

Free movies...what else to I have to say?

3. Sneak into the pantry and grab a snack without judgment.

Late night snacks all you want? Duh.

4. Reenact "Hollow Man" and play Kevin Bacon.

America's favorite son? And feel what it's like to be in a MTV Movie Award nominated film? Sign me up.

5. Wear a mask and pretend to be a floating head.

Just another way to spook your friends in case you wanted to.

6. Hold objects so they'll "float."

"Oh no! A floating jar of peanut butter."

7. Win every game of hide-and-seek.

Just stand out in the open and you'll win.

8. Eat some food as people will watch it disappear.

Even everyday activities can be funny.

9. Go around pantsing your friends.

Even pranks can be done; not everything can be good.

10. Not have perfect attendance.

You'll say here, but they won't see you...

11. Avoid anyone you don't want to see.

Whether it's an ex or someone you hate, just use your invisibility to slip out of the situation.

12. Avoid responsibilities.

Chores? Invisible. People asking about social life? Invisible. Family being rude? Boom, invisible.

13. Be an expert on ding-dong-ditch.

Never get caught and have the adrenaline rush? I'm down.

14. Brag about being invisible.

Be the envy of the town.

But don't, I repeat, don't go in a locker room. Don't be a pervert with your power. No one likes a Peeping Tom.

Good luck, folks.

19 Lessons I'll Never Forget from Growing Up In a Small Town

There have been many lessons learned..

Small towns certainly have their pros and cons. Many people who grow up in small towns find themselves counting the days until they get to escape their roots and plant new ones in bigger, "better" places. And that's fine. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought those same thoughts before too. We all have, but they say it's important to remember where you came from. When I think about where I come from, I can't help having an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my roots. Being from a small town has taught me so many important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

1. The importance of traditions.

Sometimes traditions seem like a silly thing, but the fact of it is that it's part of who you are. You grew up this way and, more than likely, so did your parents. It is something that is part of your family history and that is more important than anything.

2. How to be thankful for family and friends.

No matter how many times they get on your nerves or make you mad, they are the ones who will always be there and you should never take that for granted.

3. How to give back.

When tragedy strikes in a small town, everyone feels obligated to help out because, whether directly or indirectly, it affects you too. It is easy in a bigger city to be able to disconnect from certain problems. But in a small town those problems affect everyone.

4. What the word "community" really means.

Along the same lines as #3, everyone is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand when you need one in a small town and to me that is the true meaning of community. It's working together to build a better atmosphere, being there to raise each other up, build each other up, and pick each other up when someone is in need. A small town community is full of endless support whether it be after a tragedy or at a hometown sports game. Everyone shows up to show their support.

5. That it isn't about the destination, but the journey.

People say this to others all the time, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a small town. It is true that life is about the journey, but when you're from a small town, you know it's about the journey because the journey probably takes longer than you spend at the destination. Everything is so far away that it is totally normal to spend a couple hours in the car on your way to some form of entertainment. And most of the time, you're gonna have as many, if not more, memories and laughs on the journey than at the destination.

6. The consequences of making bad choices.

Word travels fast in a small town, so don't think you're gonna get away with anything. In fact, your parents probably know what you did before you even have a chance to get home and tell them. And forget about being scared of what your teacher, principle, or other authority figure is going to do, you're more afraid of what your parents are gonna do when you get home.

7. To trust people, until you have a reason not to.

Everyone deserves a chance. Most people don't have ill-intentions and you can't live your life guarding against every one else just because a few people in your life have betrayed your trust.

8. To be welcoming and accepting of everyone.

While small towns are not always extremely diverse, they do contain people with a lot of different stories, struggle, and backgrounds. In a small town, it is pretty hard to exclude anyone because of who they are or what they come from because there aren't many people to choose from. A small town teaches you that just because someone isn't the same as you, doesn't mean you can't be great friends.

9. How to be my own, individual person.

In a small town, you learn that it's okay to be who you are and do your own thing. You learn that confidence isn't how beautiful you are or how much money you have, it's who you are on the inside.

10. How to work for what I want.

Nothing comes easy in life. They always say "gardens don't grow overnight" and if you're from a small town you know this both figuratively and literally. You certainly know gardens don't grow overnight because you've worked in a garden or two. But you also know that to get to the place you want to be in life it takes work and effort. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.

11. How to be great at giving directions.

If you're from a small town, you know that you will probably only meet a handful of people in your life who ACTUALLY know where your town is. And forget about the people who accidentally enter into your town because of google maps. You've gotten really good at giving them directions right back to the interstate.

12. How to be humble .

My small town has definitely taught me how to be humble. It isn't always about you, and anyone who grows up in a small town knows that. Everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, and since there's so few of us, we're probably best friends with everyone so we are as excited when they get their moment of fame as we are when we get ours.

13. To be well-rounded.

Going to a small town high school definitely made me well-rounded. There isn't enough kids in the school to fill up all the clubs and sports teams individually so be ready to be a part of them all.

14. How to be great at conflict resolution.

In a small town, good luck holding a grudge. In a bigger city you can just avoid a person you don't like or who you've had problems with. But not in a small town. You better resolve the issue fast because you're bound to see them at least 5 times a week.

15. The beauty of getting outside and exploring.

One of my favorite things about growing up in a rural area was being able to go outside and go exploring and not have to worry about being in danger. There is nothing more exciting then finding a new place somewhere in town or in the woods and just spending time there enjoying the natural beauty around you.

16. To be prepared for anything.

You never know what may happen. If you get a flat tire, you better know how to change it yourself because you never know if you will be able to get ahold of someone else to come fix it. Mechanics might be too busy , or more than likely you won't even have enough cell service to call one.

17. That you don't always have to do it alone.

It's okay to ask for help. One thing I realized when I moved away from my town for college, was how much my town has taught me that I could ask for help is I needed it. I got into a couple situations outside of my town where I couldn't find anyone to help me and found myself thinking, if I was in my town there would be tons of people ready to help me. And even though I couldn't find anyone to help, you better believe I wasn't afraid to ask.

18. How to be creative.

When you're at least an hour away from normal forms of entertainment such as movie theaters and malls, you learn to get real creative in entertaining yourself. Whether it be a night looking at the stars in the bed of a pickup truck or having a movie marathon in a blanket fort at home, you know how to make your own good time.

19. To brush off gossip.

It's all about knowing the person you are and not letting others influence your opinion of yourself. In small towns, there is plenty of gossip. But as long as you know who you really are, it will always blow over.

Grateful Beyond Words: A Letter to My Inspiration

I have never been so thankful to know you..

I can't say "thank you" enough to express how grateful I am for you coming into my life. You have made such a huge impact on my life. I would not be the person I am today without you and I know that you will keep inspiring me to become an even better version of myself.

You have taught me that you don't always have to strong. You are allowed to break down as long as you pick yourself back up and keep moving forward. When life had you at your worst moments, you allowed your friends to be there for you and to help you. You let them in and they helped pick you up. Even in your darkest hour you showed so much strength. I know that you don't believe in yourself as much as you should but you are unbelievably strong and capable of anything you set your mind to.

Your passion to make a difference in the world is unbelievable. You put your heart and soul into your endeavors and surpass any personal goal you could have set. Watching you do what you love and watching you make a difference in the lives of others is an incredible experience. The way your face lights up when you finally realize what you have accomplished is breathtaking and I hope that one day I can have just as much passion you have.

SEE MORE: A Letter To My Best Friend On Her Birthday

The love you have for your family is outstanding. Watching you interact with loved ones just makes me smile . You are so comfortable and you are yourself. I see the way you smile when you are around family and I wish I could see you smile like this everyday. You love with all your heart and this quality is something I wished I possessed.

You inspire me to be the best version of myself. I look up to you. I feel that more people should strive to have the strength and passion that you exemplify in everyday life.You may be stubborn at points but when you really need help you let others in, which shows strength in itself. I have never been more proud to know someone and to call someone my role model. You have taught me so many things and I want to thank you. Thank you for inspiring me in life. Thank you for making me want to be a better person.

Waitlisted for a College Class? Here's What to Do!

Dealing with the inevitable realities of college life..

Course registration at college can be a big hassle and is almost never talked about. Classes you want to take fill up before you get a chance to register. You might change your mind about a class you want to take and must struggle to find another class to fit in the same time period. You also have to make sure no classes clash by time. Like I said, it's a big hassle.

This semester, I was waitlisted for two classes. Most people in this situation, especially first years, freak out because they don't know what to do. Here is what you should do when this happens.

Don't freak out

This is a rule you should continue to follow no matter what you do in life, but is especially helpful in this situation.

Email the professor

Around this time, professors are getting flooded with requests from students wanting to get into full classes. This doesn't mean you shouldn't burden them with your email; it means they are expecting interested students to email them. Send a short, concise message telling them that you are interested in the class and ask if there would be any chance for you to get in.

Attend the first class

Often, the advice professors will give you when they reply to your email is to attend the first class. The first class isn't the most important class in terms of what will be taught. However, attending the first class means you are serious about taking the course and aren't going to give up on it.

Keep attending class

Every student is in the same position as you are. They registered for more classes than they want to take and are "shopping." For the first couple of weeks, you can drop or add classes as you please, which means that classes that were once full will have spaces. If you keep attending class and keep up with assignments, odds are that you will have priority. Professors give preference to people who need the class for a major and then from higher to lower class year (senior to freshman).

Have a backup plan

For two weeks, or until I find out whether I get into my waitlisted class, I will be attending more than the usual number of classes. This is so that if I don't get into my waitlisted class, I won't have a credit shortage and I won't have to fall back in my backup class. Chances are that enough people will drop the class, especially if it is very difficult like computer science, and you will have a chance. In popular classes like art and psychology, odds are you probably won't get in, so prepare for that.

Remember that everything works out at the end

Life is full of surprises. So what if you didn't get into the class you wanted? Your life obviously has something else in store for you. It's your job to make sure you make the best out of what you have.

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Amid the Mayhem, Trump Pumped His Fist and Revealed His Instincts

A bloodied Donald J. Trump made Secret Service agents wait while he expressed his defiance. The moment epitomized his visceral connection with his supporters, and his mastery of the modern media age.

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By Shawn McCreesh

• July 13, 2024

Donald J. Trump was back on his feet. He had just been shot at, his white shirt was undone and his red hat was no longer on his head. Blood streaked across his face as riflemen patrolled the perimeter of the stage. A pack of Secret Service agents pressed their bodies against his. “We’ve got to move, we’ve got to move,” one pleaded.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” the former president instructed, his voice a harried — but startlingly clear — command. Reluctantly, they halted. He peered out into the crowd.

And then his arm reached toward the sky, and he began punching the air.

The crowd started to chant — “ U-S-A! U-S-A! ” — as the agents inched Mr. Trump toward the stairs. When they reached the top step, they paused once more, so Mr. Trump could lift his arm a little higher, and pump his fist a little faster. The crowd roared a little louder.

It’s difficult to imagine a moment that more fully epitomizes Mr. Trump’s visceral connection with his supporters, and his mastery of the modern media age.

Mr. Trump would not leave the stage without signaling to his fans that he was OK — even as some were still wailing in fear. And he did not just wave or nod, he raised his fist in defiance above his bloodied face — making an image history will not forget.

He has always been highly conscious of how he looks in big moments, practicing his Clint Eastwood squint and preparing for his mean mug-shot grimace. But there was no time to prepare for this.

This was instinct.

As the agents coaxed him onto his feet, he stammered, “Let me get my shoes on, let me get my shoes on.”

“I got you, sir, I got you, sir,” an agent replied. Mr. Trump rose, his voice uneven at first, still repeating himself: “Let me get my shoes on.”

“Hold that on your head,” an agent told him, “it’s bloody.”

“Sir, we’ve got to move to the cars,” another said.

“Let me get my shoes on,” Mr. Trump said again.

Fierce one moment, he looked drained and stricken the next.

After the agents managed to hustle him off the stage, they led him toward an idling Chevrolet Suburban. He began to clamber inside, but before the door could close, he turned back toward the crowd again. His head appeared more blood-soaked than before. He raised his fist one more time.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-bidens-full-letter-announcing-the-end-of-his-2024-reelection-bid

Read Biden’s full letter announcing the end of his 2024 reelection bid

President Joe Biden announced he’s dropping out of the 2024 presidential race , following mounting calls from Democrats in recent weeks.

READ MORE: What political leaders have said about Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid

The president faced pressure to exit the race amid concerns about his age and ability to win in November after his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump in Atlanta last month.

Read the full letter here.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden said in a letter released on Sunday. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

Delegates are set to vote for their nominee in a virtual roll call on Aug. 7, weeks before the Democratic National Convention begins on Aug. 19 in Chicago. In a social media post following his initial letter, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Find more coverage

• What to know as Biden drops out of the 2024 presidential race and endorses Harris
• Judy Woodruff reflects on the historical context of Biden ending his campaign
• A look ahead at election laws as the Democratic Party picks a new nominee
• Biden ends his 2024 reelection bid and endorses Harris as his replacement to lead the ticket
• Here’s what could happen next as Biden drops out and endorses Harris in the 2024 race
• Harris could become first woman, second Black American to be president
• What political leaders have said about Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid

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Fuel Lyrics

How to Format Lyrics:

• Type out all lyrics, even repeating song parts like the chorus
• Lyrics should be broken down into individual lines
• Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc.
• Use italics ( <i>lyric</i> ) and bold ( <b>lyric</b> ) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part
• If you don’t understand a lyric, use [?]

To learn more, check out our transcription guide or visit our transcribers forum

The 9th track on Eminem’s 12th studio album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce) , features East Atlanta rapper, JID who appeared in the music video for Eminem’s “Doomsday Pt. 2” earlier this year.

Aptly titled “Fuel,” this high-octane collaboration between the two rappers serves as an assertion of their dominance in the rap game and their refusal to be silenced. JID sets the tone for the song with an opening verse that establishes his street credibility through references to the struggles and violence prevalent in his hometown.

Eminem follows with a verse that taunts his critics and doubters, weaving in contemporary references such as the Kyle Rittenhouse case, Halyna Hutchins' accidental death on set by Alec Baldwin, and sexual assault allegations against Diddy, as well as his alleged involvement in the death of Tupac.

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

No, “Fuel” marks the first collaboration between Eminem and JID.

“Fuel” debuted at #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the chart week ending July 27, 2024. The song marks JID’s first appearance on the chart in 2024.

• 1. Renaissance
• 4. Brand New Dance
• 6. All You Got (skit)
• 8. Antichrist
• 10. Road Rage
• 11. Houdini
• 12. Breaking News (skit)
• 13. Guilty Conscience 2
• 14. Head Honcho
• 15. Temporary
• 16. Bad One
• 18. Guess Who’s Back (skit)
• 19. Somebody Save Me
• 20. Steve Berman (skit) [2024]
• 21. Kyrie & Luka
• 22. Like My Shit

Genius is the world’s biggest collection of song lyrics and musical knowledge

Happiness Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on happiness.

Happiness is something which we can’t describe in words it can only be felt from someone’s expression of a smile. Likewise, happiness is a signal or identification of good and prosperous life. Happiness is very simple to feel and difficult to describe. Moreover, happiness comes from within and no one can steal your happiness.

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Every day we see and meet people who look happy from the outside but deep down they are broken and are sad from the inside. For many people, money is the main cause of happiness or grief. But this is not right. Money can buy you food, luxurious house, healthy lifestyle servants, and many more facilities but money can’t buy you happiness.

And if money can buy happiness then the rich would be the happiest person on the earth. But, we see a contrary image of the rich as they are sad, fearful, anxious, stressed, and suffering from various problems.

In addition, they have money still they lack in social life with their family especially their wives and this is the main cause of divorce among them.

Also, due to money, they feel insecurity that everyone is after their money so to safeguard their money and them they hire security. While the condition of the poor is just the opposite. They do not have money but they are happy with and stress-free from these problems.

In addition, they take care of their wife and children and their divorce rate is also very low.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Happiness Comes from Within

As we now know that we can’t buy happiness with money and there is no other shortcut to happiness. It is something that you feel from within.

In addition, true happiness comes from within yourself. Happiness is basically a state of mind.

Moreover, it can only be achieved by being positive and avoiding any negative thought in mind. And if we look at the bright side of ourselves only then we can be happy.

Happiness in a Relationship

People nowadays are not satisfied with their relationship because of their differences and much other reason. But for being happy in a relationship we have to understand that there are some rules or mutual understanding that keeps a relationship healthy and happy.

Firstly, take care of yourself then your partner because if you yourself are not happy then how can you make your partner happy.

Secondly, for a happy and healthy relationship give you partner some time and space. In addition, try to understand their feeling and comfort level because if you don’t understand these things then you won’t be able to properly understand your partner.

Most importantly, take initiative and plan to go out with your partner and family. Besides, if they have plans then go with them.

To conclude, we can say that happiness can only be achieved by having positive thinking and enjoying life. Also, for being happy and keeping the people around us happy we have to develop a healthy relationship with them. Additionally, we also have to give them the proper time.

FAQs about Happiness

Q.1 What is True Happiness? A.1 True happiness means the satisfaction that you find worthy. The long-lasting true happiness comes from life experience, a feeling of purpose, and a positive relationship.

Q.2 Who is happier the rich or the poor and who is more wealthy rich or poor? A.2 The poor are happier then the rich but if we talk about wealth the rich are more wealthy then the poor. Besides, wealth brings insecurity, anxiety and many other problems.

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Essay on Things That Make Me Happy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Things That Make Me Happy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Things That Make Me Happy

Introduction.

Happiness is a feeling that everyone enjoys. It comes from different things for different people. For me, there are many things that make me happy. They range from simple pleasures to cherished moments with loved ones.

Family Time

Reading books.

Reading books is another thing that brings me joy. Books take me to different worlds and let me live different lives. The thrill of a good story always makes me happy.

Helping Others

Helping others is something that gives me great joy. Seeing the smile on someone’s face when I help them is priceless. It makes me feel good about myself and brings me happiness.

250 Words Essay on Things That Make Me Happy

Happiness is a feeling that everyone cherishes. Each person has different things that make them happy. I also have a list of things that bring a smile to my face and fill my heart with joy.

The first thing that makes me happy is my family. Their love and support give me strength. We share laughter, stories, and meals together. These moments are very special to me.

My friends are another source of my happiness. We play, study, and share secrets together. Their company brings me immense joy. They are always there for me, in good times and bad, which makes me feel loved and valued.

Reading books is another thing that makes me happy. Books take me to different worlds and time periods. I learn about new things, people, and places. This knowledge and the journey of imagination that books provide make me very happy.

Music is like magic to me. It can change my mood in an instant. When I listen to my favorite songs, I feel a sense of joy that is hard to explain. It’s like the music speaks to my soul and makes me feel at peace.

500 Words Essay on Things That Make Me Happy

Happiness is a feeling that everyone cherishes. It is like a warm bubble of joy that fills our hearts and makes us smile. What makes me happy might be different from what makes you happy because happiness is personal. For me, there are many things that bring happiness. Some of these things are simple, while others are more complex.

Spending Time with Family and Friends

One of the main things that make me happy is spending time with my family and friends. Whether we are laughing, talking, or just being together, these moments bring me great joy. I feel loved and cared for when I am with them. They understand me and accept me just as I am. This feeling of love and acceptance is a big source of happiness for me.

Playing Sports

Helping others also brings me happiness. When I help someone, I feel a sense of satisfaction that is very rewarding. It makes me feel good to know that I have made a difference in someone’s life, no matter how small. This feeling of making a positive impact gives me a deep sense of happiness.

Nature’s Beauty

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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