Sit with your sadness..
It sounds obvious, but also… not?  When experts talk about feeling your feelings, they talk about noticing and acknowledging intense emotional reactions when they bubble up. That can include giving a name to those emotions, noticing where you feel them in your body, understanding why they were triggered in the first place, and—this is key—letting them exist without judging them or yourself. Our feelings are messengers, which means a story is always attached to why we feel the way that we feel so if you're hella sad, it might be because you’re also feeling abandoned by your friends, rejected by that hiring manager you thought you clicked with, or you’re grieving a loss. We shouldn’t need to say it, but we will—all those and more are majorly valid reasons to feel sad.
What doesn’t work is ignoring your sadness or making yourself too busy to even process it. That will only make you feel worse. When we don’t pay attention to sadness, it tends to come out in other ways. Maybe irritability, anger, frustration, feeling alone, unloved, or misunderstood. You could become even sadder, which can spiral into depression. Pretending you aren’t sad will only prolong feelings of grief and can even exacerbate other feelings like anger and rage, all because you are suppressing an important emotion that deserves to be processed.
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