Sadness and anxiety are your friends

Many people throughout their lives will encounter countless bouts of sadness and anxiety. In this post I am not talking about the severe types of sadness and anxiety, but rather by the types that we all experience throughout the day for relatively short periods of time. These casual types that manifest themselves in everyday situations are usually met with the same degree of aversion that we meet physical pains. In other words, we experience the pain and immediately pull our hand away. It’s a natural reaction to retreat from something that is painful and indeed it serves us well in the physical world, but this same reaction may be causing you more harm than good when it comes to psychological pain. Let me explain. Pain, put extremely simply, is your bodies way of alerting you that you are engaging with something that is harmful. However, if at every moment of pain you decide to pull away you will come to find yourself inexperienced enough to deal with bigger problems that arise from ignoring these smaller problems. Say for example that you’re fearful of meeting new people so you go about your life minding your own business in a manner that results in you becoming socially isolated. If you’re a student then this way of life could prove to be temporarily satisfying. Sure you feel lonely on certain occasions but overall the structure of grade school keeps you from feeling overwhelmed since you have your eyes set on some goal post graduation. However, after graduating and after achieving that which was your goal in grade school you begin to feel a lot more frequently. You attempt to fix this by finally making a serious effort to socialize but you find that your social skills are severely underdeveloped and slowly but surely your anxiety begins to significantly increase as you begin to fear the inevitable loneliness that awaits you. In this hypothetical scenario, your years of avoiding the pain of socializing brought you temporary comfort in grade school but this comfort came at a price of extreme loneliness. This scenario plays out every single day and it is only by way of extreme delusion, surrender, or self introspection that one can come to live with such a painful existence.

What does this tell us? In terms of emotional pains we shouldn’t be quick to runaway, instead we should take our time to understand why we are feeling like those emotions and then if it is something worth struggling for, then we should face it head on lest we face the consequences of not doing so. This is why sadness and anxiety are your friends, they’re like your own personal advisors that are attempting to nudge you in a better direction that will bring you a better life.