456. Why does feeling sad sometimes feel so good?

0:05 Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speck and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s.

0:37 We talk a lot about emotion and we talk a lot about mental well-being very broadly on this podcast, but today I wanted to literally devote our full 30-minute episode to one emotion and one emotion only, sadness. Being sad in all of its forms, whether it's heartbreak, whether it's grief, whether it's yearning or loss, is something we naturally want to avoid. There is this core idea that humans run from pain and run towards pleasure. Sadness is the opposite of pleasure. It's the opposite of all things nice. We also can't deny that there is something about sadness that deep down just feels a little bit good sometimes. Listening to sad songs, for example, scratches an itch. Watching sad movies can leave us with this really intense form of clarity.

1:30 Just letting yourself cry, you know, or feel self-pity, that feels good. It kind of clears the air sometimes. The reason sadness feels so nice and kind of like a guilty pleasure is deeply psychological, and it comes down to something known as the tragedy paradox. Basically, what we think hurts us most also seems to give us a lot of pleasure, but also a deeper connection to our humanness.

1:58 Even the ancient Greeks, even the ancient Romans, they spoke about this. They spoke about specifically this human urge to dangle near the cliff of despair, as they put it, in a very dramatic sense. And it is a feeling that we still have today, albeit a little bit less dramatic. Another important factor at play is something called emodiversity. truly enjoying your life. And of course your twenties, you know, it doesn't just come from being happy all the time.

2:24 It comes from emotional variety and it comes from experiencing the shift between different emotional states that puts the different ends of the emotional spectrum into perspective. The deep joy of having a truly amazing, great day. It just wouldn't be as special if you didn't kind of at the back of your mind, remember what it felt like to have a really awful day. Some research even suggests that people who don't allow themselves to truly feel the full spectrum of emotions, don't allow themselves to feel sad, actually may be worse off psychologically, emotionally, socially, even if they seemingly look happier from the outside. So today I want to just explore why being sad sometimes feels so good,

3:12 but also that deep psychological, dare I say, benefit that we come across when we embrace sadness. If that sounds counterintuitive, if that sounds strange, if that sounds opposite to your experience, I promise the science and the research will make a lot more sense once we get into it. So without further ado, let's talk about sadness. Let's talk about why it feels so weirdly enjoyable. As a species and as a culture, I think it's safe to say we are incredibly wary of sadness and we are very, very quick.

3:48 to do anything in our power to just get rid of it, get rid of the feeling when it pops up, especially when it pops up on Invited. We quash it with all sorts of things. We quash it with layers and layers of distraction and with our phones, with elaborate wellness routines, with plans, with busyness, whatever you can, whatever you can think of. We will throw all of our available resources at this dark emotion until it kind of leaves us alone. I think the reason we do this is twofold. A, we have a lot of stigma towards these feelings, towards feelings of sadness, anger, madness, and that's wrapped up in our stigma towards poor mental health. And B, it's because we often confuse sadness with suffering or with sorrow.

4:31 And we are really fearful that if we were to let our sadness get too big, it would transform into this big monster of an emotion that is just so much harder to deal with. The thing is, they're very different. And this is why it's so important to distinguish between being sad, the feeling, and a state of true pain and suffering. If we want to access the benefits of being sad, you have to know the difference. And this is how I would distinguish them. Sadness is a temporary emotional state. It is usually tied to something specific that has happened, that has changed, that has been lost. And that might be a rejection. It might be disappointment that you didn't get a job or that you've missed out on something. It might be loneliness. homesickness, grief, maybe just

5:15 the awareness that like your life isn't the same as it once was. It's a very heavy emotion, but it kind of will pass. It softens after a while. Sorrow and suffering on the other hand are what we would call prolonged mental states. It's just more consuming. It lasts longer. It's a combination of a lot of things and it tends to bleed into all other states of being. So what I mean by that is you can be sad, but then you can Go to the movies or go for a walk with your friends and be distracted from that feeling. And pretty soon you cannot notice that you can shift to a different feeling. The same just can't be said for suffering or sorrow. They are always there.

5:56 Same with depression, for that matter. They're just, they're constants for the time being. The best way I've seen it described is that sadness is like the rain. Depression is the season of winter. So on face value, you know, the big reason I think we villainize sadness is Or any kind of so-called negative emotion is because we associate it with these bigger states of being that feel much more difficult to handle. But deep down, we know they're not the same. We know that sadness and sorrow are different.

6:24 And that is revealed to us through our enjoyment of sadness. Our enjoyment of sadness through art, through self-pity, and through catharsis. It kind of like sneaks into our psyche, right? There is this desire to be closer to this feeling that we are told to avoid. One explanation is that there is a fundamental difference between experiencing sadness and experiencing actual threat.

6:48 When something genuinely sad happens to you, the emotion usually arrives alongside a whole collection of other unpleasant experiences. If somebody breaks up with you, for example, you're not just sad, you are also anxious. You're anxious about what's on the other side of this experience. You are probably worried that you're never going to meet somebody else You're embarrassed about being rejected, about maybe not seeing it coming. One of my closest friends is going through this right now and it's not sadness that is the problem. Sadness is definitely there.

7:20 It's just all the other stuff that you don't expect when a relationship ends. Just being sad is the least of her worries. It's wrapped up in so much other stuff. So sad art, sad music, sad movies remove a lot of that threat whilst preserving the emotion. If I watch a movie where somebody loses the love of their life, I can empathize with that character and I can experience something that maybe resembles grief. Some part of me also understands that I'm still safe. Nobody I know has died.

7:52 It's a movie. My relationship hasn't ended. I haven't lost anything. I am detached. Researchers looking at pleasurable sadness, as we call it, talk about this in terms of psychological distance. And it's one of the reasons that allows sadness to become enjoyable. We get access to the emotional intensity without necessarily having to pay the real world price that normally produces it. It's why we all enjoy dramatic entertainment. I would say most of us do actually, because we enjoy it because it's not happening to us. There's a lot of research to back this up, which basically suggests when we're listening to sad music in particular, what we're experiencing isn't actually pure sadness, it's something a little bit more nuanced.

8:38 So there was one study published in 2014, it looked at 772 participants from around the world, and it found that it wasn't just sadness people were experiencing when they listened to sad music, it was nostalgia, it was what they called the reward of imagination, it was emotional regulation, it was empathy, and most importantly, it was all of that without real life implications. And if the songs did match a situation that somebody was going through, it actually provided a bit of a container for that feeling. You know, I listened to the sad song. I feel sad for the length of the song. The song ends. The sadness may also end. This actually makes even more sense when we think of sad movies. Sad music may give our

9:22 feelings like a backtrack or a soundtrack or a language. Movies give us comfort and they give us the structure of a story. In all sad movies, Marley and Me, Schindler's List, La La Land. There is a beginning. There is often a relationship. There's a loss. There's a reaction and there's an end. It's extremely neat. And by the end, things are wrapped up. Real sadness is really that way.

9:48 In real life, we don't know why somebody left. We don't know what somebody's thinking, whether we're ever going to see them again, what the lesson was. We don't know when we're supposed to move on. Movies compress emotional experiences into a story that we can understand from beginning to end. And if there's one thing the human mind loves, it's that kind of certainty and structure. Hence, why we leave the cinema or we finish a movie and we're crying in bed and it feels good. It feels nice. there is also an aesthetic component as well. Specifically, we're moving back to music, sorry, movies to music, back to music.

10:27 Music makes sadness feel beautiful rather than just miserable because it is wrapped up in this nice, wonderful, delightful packaging with somebody who probably has a beautiful voice. Another study from 2015 examined this further and basically found that Often it's the aesthetic experience of music, which is pleasurable, that mixes with the emotional experience of sadness, which isn't, and it creates something in the middle. And it's what we would call appreciation. Some people might call it judgment, but I call it appreciation. And it's a much gentler feeling.

11:02 It's much gentler than the full force of sadness. The other thing is that when we're up against a really big, awful, maybe uncomfortable situation or emotion, Sometimes we just don't want happiness that isn't going to be really helpful right now because it feels too inaccessible. Instead, we want to go further in. We want some emotional depth. We want some emotional clarity, maybe. We just want to feel really moved.

11:29 We want to feel everything, nostalgic, tender, reflective, heartbroken, maybe grateful all at once. And music and movies is an incredibly safe way of creating that experience because eventually the song will end. It's going to end. But it's also nice knowing that somebody else had to feel as bad as we did to make that art. Like they had to feel so bad, bad enough that they would make music that we are relating to and therefore we feel less alone. And sometimes that's the biggest comfort. I really do think that the biggest comfort when you're sad or heartbroken is knowing that you are not the only person who's ever lived through this and you will survive. So this also points to something else happening when we choose

12:09 sad music, especially when we're already sad. Seems counterintuitive. I think normally we think about emotional regulation as changing the emotion, taking us away from sadness. So if you're sad, put on something happy. If you're anxious, put on something calm. If you're angry, put on something peaceful, you know, take your feeling, find the direct opposite, pursue that. But humans don't always regulate emotion by trying to feel better. We also regulate emotion by trying to feel understood and trying to have a story for our emotion and trying to put our feeling in its correct spot, if that makes sense.

12:48 We want to give our feeling context in order to process it. We also want emotional validation. That's how we process emotion. And music allows us to do that. One 2020 paper by the researchers Ahrens and Stangler suggests that Why we listen to sad music is because we want to feel like our emotions are real. And by staying in our sadness, by making our sadness bigger so that we feel the emotion more, it means that it also feels more legitimate, that we deserve to be feeling this because we feel it so intensely. To explain this a little bit more, you know, if sadness is just lingering, sometimes it feels a bit silly. It doesn't feel valid.

13:26 But if sadness feels all consuming and it's loud and it's massive and we really like put fuel on the fire, it It feels less silly in the first place. It allows for a little bit more emotional validation. We're very complex creatures, but basically why we pursue sad art, sad books, sad music, whatever, especially when we're already feeling sad, is put simply because it gives that feeling a distinct shape and it gives it a distinct form and it validates it in a way that allows us to make sense of it and therefore process the feeling or at least feel a little bit good about the feeling whilst also feeling bad about it. There is another explanation here. It is perhaps my favorite, and that is the catharsis explanation.

14:09 And I think it's probably the one that you have heard of before. So we're going to take a short break here. When we return, let's talk about it and let's talk further about why we love to be sad. Stay with us. So there's another thing that deliberately making ourselves feel sad gives us, and that is a release.

14:33 It gives us a psychological and emotional outlet. Now, this is probably the oldest and most ancient explanation in this episode, one that has existed literally before psychology even existed, before any of this stuff about theories and evidence and science. It came from Aristotle, and he famously said, used the concept of catharsis when discussing Greek tragedy, and he proposed that by watching tragic stories, this somehow purges or purifies our own emotions, like pity, fear, sadness, all those things.

15:07 What he really meant when he said that, we still don't really know, but basically in simple English, Aristotle believed watching sad stuff lets us get the messy stuff out. Now, this popular model of catharsis often imagines emotions almost like you're like shaking a bottle. It's like pressure inside this container.

15:27 And if something bad happens, something sad happens, like it builds and builds and builds unless you let something out, unless you do something about it. And if you don't, it's going to explode. It's going to explode over everyone you love, over everyone around you. It's going to be messy if you don't have a release. And this is an incredibly intuitive idea. And it makes a lot of sense, but modern psychology would now tell us that it's probably a bit too simplistic. For starters, your emotions aren't physical substances, right?

15:56 They're not like accumulating somewhere in the body, waiting to be drained. There's not some limit that we all hit. And when we hit it, we either have to release it and go back to zero or we explode. It's a bit more complex. You know, expressing an emotion might not always actually help you feel better. There's a lot of research about this with anger, especially a recent paper that was published, I think just a year in the social psychology bulletin, where they essentially said Sometimes venting, sometimes ranting, sometimes letting anger out actually makes the emotion worse rather than eliminating it. And we kind of see this for sadness and other things as well. It's not that it's like releasing it and taking you back down to zero.

16:41 It's not that the sadness is leaving your body literally and that's why you feel good. It's more likely that when you get to feel this way, you finally feel safe. You know, If we only feel sad when we let ourselves feel sad, we'll probably do it when we feel safest to do so. So that feeling of finally feeling safe mixes with the feeling of catharsis and also mixes with the end of emotional suppression. The end of emotional suppression is a critical part of this because it also means the end of all of this effort that's required to keep these big and heavy feelings in. Suppressing your feelings is It's not the absence of a feeling. It's not like it's not there at all. It's the existence of one very big feeling or many feelings that you

17:29 are actively having to monitor. You are actively having to push down. And that takes a lot of mental and cognitive energy, a lot. And so when you stop doing that, yes, there is relief. There might be release, but also suddenly all these attentional and cognitive resources suddenly become available to you that were previously preoccupied with keeping everything down. All these resources come back online because they're not preoccupied with this other job. And now that you've got a bit of your attention back, a bit of your cognitive flexibility back, you now have the ability to notice all the good stuff as well, to be present, to handle other things that needed taking care of. All of that also makes

18:11 us feel better. Hence why letting yourself feel sad has a paradoxical effect of also letting yourself feel happy. Because suddenly you're not just only bothered with not feeling this way, not feeling this way, not feeling this way. You're allowed to kind of sit in the emotional complexity a little bit more, which means also letting happiness come in also.

18:31 This is where I think the distinction between sadness and suffering from earlier becomes really important. And I know I talked about it a lot, but it's going to come back in here one more time. Often the most painful part of an emotion isn't simply the primary emotion itself. It's everything that we layer on top of it. I'm sad, but I shouldn't be sad because if I get any sadder, it's going to get worse and then I'm going to lose control. I'm upset about this, but people have bigger problems.

19:01 So if I keep worrying about it, I'm going to be selfish. You're not simply allowing yourself to experience sadness. You're experiencing sadness plus shame, sadness plus anxiety, sadness plus plus self-criticism, and it becomes very complex and confusing. This is where we need to talk about the value of that thing we mentioned in the introduction, which is emo diversity, specifically why some of the most intelligent and well-adjusted people you know, know that sadness needs to be readily expressed if they want to function and have their best lives.

19:36 So emo diversity is essentially, how do I explain this? It's like the variety and relative abundance of emotions that make up your emotional life. The best way to describe it is, it is in comparison to biodiversity, but for your internal world. So a really healthy natural ecosystem doesn't just contain one species, even if that species is really beautiful, right?

20:02 It contains a lot of different species that perform a lot of different roles, including species that we don't really like. like flies or ants or bugs or pests, they are just as necessary as the butterflies and the puppies and the ponies. Even though those ones seem more beautiful, you need both for the ecosystem to function. If you get my metaphor, you need sadness, you need happiness, you need all the things. One of the most influential studies on this comes from a psychologist called Jordy Kowak and him and his colleagues, they conducted these two big studies in 2014.

20:36 And when I say big, These studies had 37,000 people in them. And what they found was that people who reported experiencing a greater variety of emotions tended to report better mental and physical health, including lower levels of depression, including fewer visits to the hospital. Emo diversity predicted these outcomes above and beyond happiness. So when they asked people, how often do you experience happiness? And somebody said, oh, I experience it a lot. That wasn't going to predict whether they were actually happy. If you said to somebody, how often do you feel a variety of emotions? Well, I feel it a lot. That was going to predict a well-rounded life. I want to be really precise here because the findings do not mean that sadness is the

21:23 secret to mental health or stopping you from getting sick and you should be deliberately ruining one day a week as part of a healthy life protocol. These studies were correlational, but what they did basically show evidence for was that emotional diversity directly causes better health for a couple of reasons. A, greater emotional acceptance meant less force. Basically, you are better able to flow with your emotions and you just have greater acceptance in life. Therefore, those emotions feel less stressful when you do experience them and they actually pass sooner.

22:01 Because if you're not fearful of them, you'll actually give them space that they need to exist and to move through what they need to move through. Two, emo diversity seems to give us greater coping skills. You know, you don't learn to cope if you don't let yourself experience. And so when emotions do get really unmanageable, if you don't have any skills, you're pretty screwed. And three is contrast. Now, this is probably the most important concept in this entire episode.

22:31 and one that I've already alluded to, but things just feel better when you have something to compare them to. More specifically, things feel better when you know what it's like to not have them. You know, if we were to just be happy all the time, our brains would get really used to that. And all that pleasure and happiness would actually not feel as great. It would feel a lot less good overall. There's a term for this in psychology. It's known as hedonic adaptation. And it basically says that after a while, the emotional intensity of even something really good tends to fade as we become accustomed to it. So if you want a million dollars tomorrow, you would be over the moon. You would literally not

23:21 know what to do with yourself. If you won a million dollars the day after that, you'd probably also feel really, really good. And the day after that, and the day after that, What about day 300? On day 300, I don't know if you'd be as excited as you were on day one. The same way we can adapt to hard things, we also adapt to good things as well.

23:42 And this is why emodiversity and also sadness has a vital function because it provides appreciation and nuance and contrast to life. There is no up without down. And even if that was its only role, If sadness was to just be a contrast to happiness as a way to make happiness brighter, it would still be important. But there is a little bit more to it. Beyond contrast, sadness also feels good because it gives our life meaning. Sadness is a natural reaction to things that are just sad because we cared about them a lot. It's sad to say goodbye to someone or to a pet or to close a certain chapter in your life. It's really sad.

24:24 when you are let down by a job or a friend or when you really wanted an opportunity and you didn't get it. And your sadness in these moments is an indication of how much something really meant. And I always think as deep as you can grieve and as deep as you can be frustrated and heartbroken and betrayed, it's about as deep as you can love and about as deep as you can be passionate and appreciate what you do have. sadness provides that. It provides meaning by showing you what you really care about. Plus, let's just be honest, sometimes self-pity feels really nice because for once you get to be the center of the universe. You didn't get the job. Your boyfriend broke up with you.

25:08 You just get to feel like for a moment, you know, yeah, I am the saddest person in the world right now. I do have the worst luck. Yeah, nobody has it as hard as me. Now, is that true? Probably not. But just for a brief second, our ego gets to just let loose against all its better judgment and against all of our typical shame for doing so and for feeling self-pity. It just lets to have that, it's like a cheat meal for our self-awareness. We just get to feel really, really shit. And something you may not know is that self-pity doesn't just feel pleasurable in the moment, it also makes you a better person. Literally, feeling self-pity, there have been quite a few articles about this, including a very good one by the psychologist called Nick Wignall.

25:54 And he essentially says self-pity reminds us to be empathetic. It motivates us to be compassionate. It inspires us to be curious. It makes us more creative. I think the reason why is because knowing how rotten it feels to be lonely or to get really, really let down by something and really going deep into the crevices of that feeling means that you can relate more when somebody else comes to you and says, I felt the same way, or I'm having this similar feeling. We have these very special neurons in our brain. They're called mirror neurons. And scientists actually believe that these cells are what allow us to feel what others feel. And they are the neural basis for empathy. The only way though, that these neural

26:37 pathways are built or can be primed is if we experience the emotions for ourselves. We do not have capacity to be as deeply empathetic unless we experience it firsthand and can therefore look at somebody else and say, I know exactly where I can feel that in your body, in my body. So your sadness has a pro-social function in that allows you to perhaps be a better friend, to be a better sibling, to be a better colleague, child.

27:04 Now that as a secondary benefit feels pretty nice. There is something really fulfilling about knowing exactly what words of support somebody needs to hear during a hard time, because those are the words that you would have wanted to hear. And it is a really nice feeling, really, really nice to realize that you help somebody and that you could sit with somebody in a hard time and make them feel better. And I know that that is not a direct positive association of sadness. And I know that's not why sadness feels great in the moment, but I do think it counts nonetheless. And just to make one final point on this, one final study, according to some research from Berkeley, sadness may also help you become more emotionally

27:51 intelligent overall in a very similar, in a similar way. So in these experiments, researchers induced either feelings of happiness or sadness into kind of like a group of students, group of participants. And then they asked them, they asked them to detect sadness deception. Detect deception in videotaped statements of people being accused of theft. Now, some of them were guilty. Some of them weren't. Some of them admitted it.

28:17 Some of them didn't. Participants who were made to feel sad were more likely to make a correct judgment. They were better able to detect whether somebody was deceptive or truthful. They had a higher EQ for the moment. And I think this is the final resounding truth about sadness. It feels really awful at times, but being able to tap into that state and feel it when you need gives you access to the full depth of human emotion and the full depth of the human experience. This is truly meaningful.

28:53 It's truly expansive. And I truly think it's helpful at times compared to somebody who kind of just ropes off this part of themselves and And never feels sad or only feels sad when the feeling is so large that it's hard to ignore and therefore never gets to feel like there's a benefit. So to summarize this episode, I want to just quickly say, I am not saying run full speed ahead towards your sadness, bathe in your sadness, indulge in your sadness constantly, live in your sadness. But sadness isn't this big evil monster in the emotional closet.

29:24 For starters, it's different to suffering. It actually feels really nice at times. Some would say even pleasurable. And it also feels fulfilling to kind of go deeper into your emotional state. It also connects you to a deeper reality about being human. and it provides emotional catharsis. It allows you to connect deeper with art. And it also provides that contrast that we know is so important. It just gives life more texture and flavor compared to just being happy and fine and calm all the time. And that, my friends, is the beauty of this emotion, the beauty of sadness. It gives you so much more than I think we realize. And I think that's why you've got to let, I know I said don't indulge in it,

30:09 but sometimes you've got to let yourself because there is something really special about listening to a really sad song and being like nothing and nobody has got me the way that this song does in this moment. Whoever wrote this song could be my soulmate. And being able to tap into that shared humanity through your sadness, even if you don't realize it in the moment, I think it feels pretty good. And I think it feels a little bit enjoyable. So I hope this episode has allowed you to reframe this experience, especially if you're going through a particularly tough season at the moment, or you just need a reminder that it's okay to not be happy and upbeat and jovial all the time. I think that's it

30:54 for me, actually. So if you enjoyed this episode, remember to subscribe. Remember to follow along wherever you are listening. Check out this episode and all of our other episodes on Netflix. It is the number one thing you can do to help us and help support the psychology of your 20s. You can also follow us on Instagram or Substack if you want more psychology research and studies direct to your email once a week. If you have made it this far, and you're still listening, and you're listening on Spotify, hello. How are you going? Leave a little comment down below. What is your favorite all-time sad movie or sad song? And I'm going to put together a little list and post it on Instagram. Maybe I'll make

31:35 a little playlist for us to all listen to. But yeah, leave a comment down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.