We have always been a very moody species. Disappointments, anger, sadness, happiness – all of these are quite natural states of our mind. In today’s society, that is flooded with the commercials by the self-help industry, neglecting the bad moods and negative feelings while chasing happiness has become a cult.
Now it is time to re-assess a purpose of bad moods in our lives. We ought to recognize they are normal, and even an adaptive and useful part of being human. Moreover, this is assisting us to cope with many bland situations as well as challenges. As painful as sadness is, it is not completely bad. Moreover, psychologists have also discovered some amazing advantages of sadness that can help everyone make light of the emotion as well as the circumstances.
Purpose of bad moods
Acts as social signals
Bad moods or sadness act as social signals which can communicate disengagement, and also provides a protective cover. So, when we are in a bad mood, people are often concerned and they are inclined to assist.
Decision making
Few negative moods, such as nostalgia or melancholia will even provide comfort to you by calling on your past information in order to help guide and motivate your future plans and your ability to make right decisions.
Creativity stimulation
Bad moods have been found to enhance your compassion, moral, connectedness, empathy and aesthetic sensibility. Therefore, it serves as a catalyst for an artistic creativity.
Improved focus
The recent studies have been shown that bad moods act as an unconscious alarm signal, that promotes more detailed and at the same time attentive thinking style. In simple words, the sadness helps us to be more focused and attentive in tough situations. In contrast, the positive mood typically serves as a signal that indicates the familiar and safe results and situations in an attentive and less detailed processing style.
Psychological benefits of sadness
There is a perfect evidence for which few negative moods, like sadness, has psychological benefits.
To demonstrate this, researchers have been first manipulated people’s mood (by showing happy or sad films, for example), then measure changes in performance in various cognitive and behavioral tasks.
Feeling sad or in a bad mood produces a number of benefits:
Better memory
In one of the study, a bad mood (which is caused by bad weather) resulted in people better remembering the details of a shop they just left. Bad mood will also improve eyewitness memories by reducing few of the effects of various distractions, like irrelevant, false or misleading information.
More accurate judgments
A mild bad mood also reduces some biases and distortions in how people form impressions. For instance, slightly sad judges formed more accurate and also few reliable impressions about others because they processed details more effectively. We found that bad moods also reduced gullibility and increased skepticism when evaluating urban myths and rumors, and even improved people’s ability to more accurately detect deception. People in a mildly bad mood are also less likely to be confidence on simplistic stereotypes.
Motivation
Other few experiments found that when happy and sad participants were asked to perform a difficult mental task, those in a bad mood tried harder and persevered more. They will spend more time on the task, attempted more questions and produced correct answers.
Better communication
The more attentive and detailed thinking style which is promoted by a bad mood can also improve communication. We found few people who are in a sad mood are used more effective persuasive arguments to convince others, were better at understanding ambiguous sentences and better communicated when talking.
Increased fairness
Other experiments and also researchers found that a mildly bad mood caused people to pay greater attention to social expectations and norms, and they treated others less selfishly and more fairly.
There is something pure in embracing your sadness! Many of the greatest achievements of the human being spirit were accomplished as a result of sadness, and most of their producers were created as a result of embracing and transmuting it.
So sadness is not just as good for us as happiness and health, but by denying ourselves its virtues, we are possibly rejecting the most real, most human, and most valuable part of ourselves.
You are neither supposed to be happy nor to be sad all of the time, let the waves flow naturally. Sadness is a signal which tells us to give attention to ourselves, to make a little introspection and also reconnect with our truth.