How does Mindfulness help regulate sadness?

Sadness is an emotion as human and natural as any other; however, this does not mean that it is totally harmless.

And it is that if it becomes excessively intense or lasts too long in time, this emotional phenomenon has a great capacity to erode our mental health.

However, although it is a painful experience, it can help us overcome situations in which we have become stuck. But sometimes, we get used to managing sadness in a dysfunctional way, in a way that not only does it not help us to improve, but it also becomes part of the problem.

Fortunately, there are currently effective therapeutic resources to overcome cases like this. Here we will talk about how Mindfulness will help overcome states of psychological discomfort.

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What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness (in Spanish, also known as Mindfulness) is a set of mindfulness management practices inspired by Vipassana meditation, ancient tradition originating from South Asia and related to the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

This concept was initially developed mainly by the researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn, who at the end of the 70s of last century created, from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, a Mindfulness program designed to help people reduce stress and anxiety against to the chronic pain.

Thus, Mindfulness is inspired by meditation but renouncing the mystical and religious content that this practice has traditionally had; in this case, the priority is to achieve objective changes and improvements in the quality of life of the person, and specifically, in their regulation of emotional management.

Over the years, a lot of research has been carried out (currently there are already more than 1,500 scientific articles) about the effects Mindfulness has on people, and its benefits have been seen to go beyond mitigating stress and anxiety. This, coupled with the simplicity of many of these exercises, It has led to the fact that Mindfulness techniques are currently widely used in psychotherapy, in psychological intervention in teams and companies, and even in the educational contextWell, even boys and girls can practice Mindfulness with proper supervision.

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How does Mindfulness work in the face of excess sadness?

Sadness is, many times, a consequence of a vicious cycle of negative thoughts. When we feel bad, we are more predisposed to focus our attention on everything that is negative for us feeding a tragic narrative about our life, and interpreting reality and our own memories from that prism of pessimism.

In other words, sometimes we indulge in sadness feeding it without realizing it, since this way of seeing things provide a clear and unambiguous meaning about experiences to which we want to give an explanation because they affect us much. It is an emotionally painful interpretation of events, but at least it is an interpretation.

And since this way of associating thoughts and memories with a very intense emotion touches us very closely, it is easy for everything happening around us reminds us that we feel bad, and that (supposedly) we have reasons to feel this way. wrong. A) Yes, the contents of our memory reinforce a pessimistic interpretation of the present, and vice versa.

Mindfulness helps to break this vicious cycle of thoughts that reinforce low moods. The exercises he proposes are based on focusing attention on the here and now without prejudging and without giving characteristics moral to those experiences: in Mindfulness, we accept the states of mind that emerge in our consciousness, and we observe them in their appearance, their development and their fading away as they they came.

Thus, focus on the present allows us to stop obsessing over biased interpreted pasts and futures that only exist in our heads as a result of our discomfort.

In short, Mindfulness provides practical exercises with one element in common: acceptance, attention focus in the present and in your thoughts and feelings, and giving up trying to totally eliminate the discomfort, so that we do not give it more importance than it has and weaken by not over-reacting before him.

• Related article: "Rumination: the annoying vicious circle of thought"

Are you interested in having professional psychological assistance?

In the middle Eli fisas, located in Irún, we offer training in Mindfulness, support in the field of coaching, and intervention through systemic family therapy and couples therapy. We also give the possibility of conducting online sessions by video call.