How does Mindfulness help regulate sadness?

Let's see how Mindfulness helps us to deal with sadness in the best possible way.

Sadness is an emotion as human and natural as any other emotion.However, this does not mean that it is completely harmless.

If it becomes excessively intense or is prolonged over 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 become accustomed to managing sadness in a dysfunctional way, so that not only does it not help us get better, but it also becomes part of the problem.

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

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness (in Spanish, also known as Plena Attention) is a set of practices of attention management inspired by Vipassana meditationIt is a millenary tradition originating in South Asia and related to the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

This concept was initially developed mainly by the researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the late 70s of the last century created, from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, a Mindfulness program designed to help people reduce stress and anxiety in the face of 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 the regulation of emotional management.

Over the years, much research has been carried out (currently there are more than 1,500 scientific articles) on the effects that Mindfulness has on people, and it has been seen that its benefits go beyond the mitigation of stress and anxiety. This, coupled with the simplicity of many of these exercises, has led to the fact that currently the techniques of Mindfulness are widely used in psychotherapy, in psychological intervention in teams and companies, and even in the educational context.Even children can practice Mindfulness with proper supervision.

How does Mindfulness work in the face of excessive sadness?

Sadness is often a consequence of a vicious circle 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. feeding a tragic narrative about our life, and interpreting reality and our own lives.and interpreting reality and our own memories through this prism of pessimism.

In other words, sometimes we wallow in sadness, feeding it without realizing it, because this way of seeing things gives a clear and univocal meaning to experiences that we want to explain because they affect us so much. It is an emotionally painful interpretation of the facts, 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 that happens around us to remind us that we feel bad, and that we (supposedly) have reason to feel that bad. Thus, the contents of our memory reinforce a pessimistic interpretation of the present, and vice versa..

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

Thus, putting the focus on the present allows us to stop obsessing over biased past interpretations and futures that only exist in our head as the result of our discomfort. as a result of our discomfort.

In short, Mindfulness provides practical exercises with a common element: acceptance, attentional focus on the present and its thoughts and sensations, and the renunciation of trying to completely eliminate the discomfort, so that we do not give it more importance than it has and it weakens by not over-reacting to it.

Are you interested in professional psychological assistance?

At the center Eli Fisaslocated in Irun, we offer training in Mindfulness, support in the field of coaching, and intervention through systemic family therapy and couples therapy. We also offer the possibility of online sessions by video call.