How to Be Unsad

Whenever your life gets in some way worse than it was, you feel sad. This can be a quick little hit of sadness, like when you realize your grocery store no longer carries your favorite snack, or it can be quite sharp and last several days, like when a relationship ends. In its extreme form, and especially when the bad thing is the death or other loss of someone you love, we often call this emotion grief. Grief and sadness are words describing different intensities of the same base emotion. As the same emotion, the underlying mechanics and how your mind processes them are fundamentally the same. And the means of getting rid of or “getting over” these feelings is fundamentally the same process. Fortunately, your mind learned how to deal with sadness at a very young age, and for most small sadness, it gets dealt with and resolved imperceptibly and almost immediately. That’s convenient. But as a side effect, when we have to deal with a large sadness, it takes the mind much longer to deal with it, and with our own ignorance of what’s going on under the covers, it can feel like something is broken inside you, and you start to worry that your “sadness fixer” mechanism has stopped working altogether. This just adds the emotion of fear on top of the sadness, as you imagine a life where you feel this way forever, and makes the grieving period even less bearable and can often lead to a loss of hope for the future, which is what leads to depression.

In this article, I am going to show you what your Cognizant mind is doing under the covers to move you past sadness when it is a small sadness, and how it performs the same process when you experience a big sadness like grief. The end goal of your Cog Mind is to reach acceptance, and especially with that in mind, you might expect me to talk about Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ work on the five stages of grief. But, while I don’t intend to directly contradict Dr. Kübler-Ross, I think I feel confident in saying that her stages of grief apply mainly to those who are unfamiliar with what I am about to detail. If you understand how your grief works and work the process intentionally, it affords you the option of arriving at acceptance without struggling with the other stages.

The best way to think of this process is to imagine that whenever something bad happens to you, life hands you a bucket of some wholly unpleasant and awful tasting liquid, and you must drink it. Sometimes, it’s a small bucket, maybe even the size a shot glass. In extreme cases it can be the size of a small house. But the important rule to remember is - there is absolutely no way around it. Those are just the rules of the universe: the bucket must be drunk one way or another. And while you can still move and mostly function while there is still sadness in the bucket, nothing will feel quite right, and some areas of your mind that feel most like what makes you you will be shut down - your creativity (either artistic or problem-solving), your resiliency and often your patience or empathy for others¹. So, unfortunately, not drinking the bucket isn’t really an option. However, the second rule is just as important: no matter how large the bucket, it is always a finite amount. Once you have drunk all the sadness out of that bucket, you get to throw the bucket away and never drink from it again². Once you understand that, the next epiphany comes when you realize that how fast you drink the bucket is very much up to you, with varying pros and cons attached to each end of the spectrum.

On one hand, you can opt to drink the bucket as fast as possible. You choose this option by really diving in and forcing yourself to feel the sadness. Focus on the thoughts that cause the hardest, deepest sadness in you. Roll them over in your mind like a loose tooth, playing with the pain. Suck on it. Chase the pain rather than running away from it. Our instinct is to do the opposite - to avoid pain as much as possible. But you can choose to override that instinct and force yourself to drink as deeply as possible. As you might expect, this is not a fun time. I do not recommend doing it while driving, or at work, or any other situation where breaking down and sobbing in the fetal position would be overly problematic. It is best to find a time when you have no pressing responsibilities, where you can find a quiet corner in your home or other location that is both comfortable and private, and sit and focus on drinking the pain. For particularly large buckets, this may require several sessions. Especially with the fast-as-possible approach, you are likely to hit the false bottom (see below). If you do, just get up and go about your day, and schedule another session at least a few hours later, if not on the other side of some sleep. The downsides of this approach are fairly obvious, but the benefits are also clear. It is the fastest way to put your grief behind you and get back to normal life.

Alternatively, you could choose to sip from the bucket³. This takes the form of trying not to think about it. Distract yourself with work or other activity. Avoid situations where you are alone with your thoughts. Drown yourself in entertainment in whatever form that takes for you; anything to keep your mind off it. It is impossible to completely stop the pain from entering your mind now and again, which is why I am referring to this method as sipping, rather than just not drinking at all. No matter how hard you try, while you are carrying that bucket around with you and trying to do normal life, inevitably, some will spill out and trickle down your throat (admittedly, the metaphor slips a little, there). So you can never truly stop yourself from drinking the bucket, but you can slow it down tremendously, which causes your experience to be a long sequence of many but much smaller pains. Obviously, from a pain-management perspective, this is in many cases preferable. The main cons to this approach are much less obvious. For one, remember that certain portions of your identity and personality are suppressed while this grieving process is going on. For quick, small buckets, this isn’t much of a problem. Your life can withstand you not being creative or empathetic for a period of 5 minutes without much in the way of repercussion. For large buckets, however, if you stretch that grieving process out over months or years, this could have long-term if not permanent effects on your life as a whole. You may miss important opportunities to make your life better, or you may do harm to important relationships (generally, those closest to you will have a buffer of tolerance when they know you are going through a tough loss, but those buffers are not infinite, and if you drag it out long enough, your loved ones will eventually start avoiding your negativity). The other major disadvantage to the drawn out approach is that, when left inside you for long enough, your sadness can sour and turn to bitterness or resentment. I won’t go into the gritty details here, but suffice it to say, when you act in a certain way long enough, your cog mind starts to normalize the behavior. So a curt or cutting comment that might be forgivable when you are in fresh pain, becomes part of your normal demeanor, and that will have a lasting impact on your personality, and thus your ability to maintain a healthy support system.

Perhaps the most distressing and obfuscating part of the grieving process is that, as the drinker, you never really know for sure just how big your bucket is, or how far along you are in the process. While you might be able to guess at the general size of the bucket just from context, there can be any number of factors that make it larger or smaller than you might guess, and there is no indication how much is left Your final sip from the bucket is indistinguishable from your first. You are afforded no progress bar, no light at the end of the tunnel, no sense of progress at all. This is an unfortunate aspect of the process, and the only comfort I can offer is the knowledge of that fact. No matter how dark it feels in the moment and how interminable the process feels, the very next sip could always be your last - or it could not be. The bucket is always finite, however, and every sip you take does move you closer to finishing the bucket, no matter how bottomless it may seem.

When you do finally drink the entire bucket, there will be a very marked and immediately noticeable change within you. There will be a tremendous lightness and an unveiling of your minds eyes. Like awaking from a bad dream or stepping out of a dark forest into a bright meadow. Not to be confused with happiness, this is merely a feeling of relief from the oppressing sadness and an increased awareness of yourself as all your previously suppressed mental processes stir to life once more. That is how you will know you have reached the end of your bucket, and you will have reached the point where you have accepted your loss - not that you are happy about it, or no longer wish it hadn’t happened (or still wish that you could reverse it), but that you have accepted in both your op and your cog that this is both something that has happened to you, and something you have no power to undo. From here on out, while you will still feel the loss, you will no longer feel the oppression of grief (at least for this event).

It is important to note that, especially in deep and large buckets, there is another phenomenon to be aware of - the false bottom. Sometimes, as you are grieving, especially in particularly painful and hard moments, you may feel a sudden evaporation of the pain. One moment will be the most unendurable pain you’ve ever felt, and the next you will just feel nothing - emotional numbness. This is not the end of the bucket, but is a safety valve going off. Your mind has a safety valve that, in instances of extreme emotional pain, will just shut down the emotional center completely for a short time. This isn’t the feeling of lightness or coming out of the forest, but just straight emotional numb. When this happens, it is just your mind saying “Ok, I think it’s time to take a break.” Take its advice and go do something else for a while. You will know when the safety valve has reset itself when the pain crops up again, and you can reengage the grieving process according to your own preferred regimen.

Defeating the feeling of sadness is probably the most unpleasant process of managing your emotions out of all of them. Defeating anger or fear or disgust, while they may be unpleasant, can all be done in mere moments if you know how and apply concerted effort. Sadness it the only one that requires such a long-term commitment of work in order to break. Hopefully though, knowing the underlying mechanics at play can help you form a game plan and set your chin for the long fight ahead.

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