11 Types of sadness and their characteristics

  • Jul 26, 2021
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Types of sadness: characteristics and examples

Sadness is one of the basic emotions that each of us experiences when an emotional bond with someone important, but also with ourselves, is in danger. Sadness is, in effect, the name of the basic and generic emotion that is normally expressed by the lack of a smile and a languid look.

We feel sad because one of our basic needs has not been met and, normally, we do not like this emotion very much because it brings with it a state of discomfort. In reality, this emotion, like all the others, can be experienced with different degrees of intensity and there is no single type of sadness. In this Psychology-Online article, we will discover what are the different types of sadness, their characteristics and examples.

You may also like: How to manage sadness

Index

  1. Anguish
  2. Pain
  3. Mourning
  4. Despair
  5. Suffering
  6. Lack of hope
  7. Impotence
  8. Resignation
  9. Distraction
  10. Discouragement
  11. Disappointment

Anguish.

One of the types of sadness that refers to a state of mental and physical suffering characterized by intense feelings of anxiety and depression

, diffuse fear, lived with insecurity and imminent misfortune, also accompanied by physical, endocrinological and behavioral symptoms. Anguish may be associated with the following factors:

  • A temporary feeling: it will decrease when the same condition as the one that generated it comes to an end;
  • Existential: a situation that can last over time and is associated with a strong feeling of fear and a feeling of impending catastrophe. In this article, you will find more information about what is life anguish and how to overcome it.

When it is prolonged in time, it leads to states of intense melancholy, until it reaches true depressive states. Anxiety can be correlated with various problems, which, throughout life, have never been adequately addressed.

Pain.

There are times when the true essence of what we feel seems to be shrouded in pain. These are moments in which, in addition to the total absence of a possible exit, we perceive that we are no longer who we were before. We have difficulty concentrating, we feel tired, uninterested, or irritable.

It happens to many people to react like this to psychological pain. Is a normal reaction to adverse life events such as mourning, failure or major loss: it is the way we experience sadness, pain and loss.

When can sadness appear? On the one hand, perhaps someone happens to spend a lot of time in the past, living off regrets, perhaps remembering happy periods of a past life that will not return again. On the other hand, they also compare themselves to others, as if they seem to live a happier and more satisfied life than we do- We are stopped and blocked by our pain.

Mourning.

If you wonder what the types of sadness are, mourning is one of them. A condition, both subsequent and anticipated, to the loss of a loved oneBut it is not necessarily linked to death, since even the breakdown of a love relationship can cause similar feelings of abandonment and loss. A bereavement related to a job loss which can create depressive and anxious feelings and thoughts.

However, it should be noted that mourning the loss is a normal and inevitable reaction that has its own evolution divided into phases:

  1. Daze and confusion with disbelief.
  2. Anger and the search for the loved one.
  3. Despair.
  4. Acceptance of loss.

In this article, you will see information about how to overcome sadness over the loss of a loved one.

Despair.

The energies are extinguished, the hopes are weakened more and more, leaving us defenseless and empty in the face of situations to which we no longer know how to give any answer. Despair refers to abandonment of hope of salvation. In psychoanalysis and psychiatry it is a component of many "syndromes" and it indicates a tremendous combination of sensations: a strange death wish, mixed with a disarming feeling of smallness and futility that presents as fear of death herself.

Despair is like wanting to die to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware of how small and weak you are. They are feelings sometimes experienced also with people who are asked for help, insofar as urgency, helplessness and a sense of danger almost assume the form of solid objects.

Suffering.

There are different types of sadness. Suffering is a pain condition, which can affect both the body and the emotional life of the subject. It can stem directly from trauma, physical or emotional, or it can be an expression of a deeper inner grief, for which it may be difficult or impossible to find an objective foundation.

In particular, when suffering is linked to an internal condition of the subject and is prolonged in the time, that is, its intensity is such that it inhibits or damages the normal emotional and practical activity of the subject. It is a symptom of a psychological disorder, for example, in the pathological context of depression. In this article, we show you how to help a person with depression.

Lack of hope

Those who are hopeless hope that negative events will occur and that positive events cannot occur in their future. What's more, they believe there is nothing they can do to change This bleak scene

What feelings can we have with sadness? This negative attitude towards the future is often found in some psychopathological conditions such as depression, but with increasing frequency it is also present among those who do not have established psychological disorders. The hopelessness it is characterized by several components:

  • Thinking about the non-objective future.
  • Limited ability to imagine positive future events.
  • Impotence: feeling of inability to produce any significant change in one's life and to be the protagonists of this change. Feeling of worthlessness and inevitability of a negative outcome that makes you feel like you can't make changes.
  • Lock on goal setting- The pursuit of your own goals is hampered by feelings of surrender. A frequent thought in these cases may be the following "I will never get what I want and need, and that is really horrible." In view of

Impotence.

As we have seen, there are different types of sadness. In this case, the learned helplessness or learned helplessness it is a state of mind in which a living being, after having been exposed to frequent adverse stimuli, becomes reluctant to avoid the next encounter with these same stimuli, even if they are avoidable.

This is presumably because you have learned that despite your best efforts, can't control the situation. If this condition of helplessness continues to occur in more contexts or spheres of life, the brain can learn that in that particular situation or event, there is nothing we can do except wait for the result to be fully fatalist.

Therefore, helplessness indicates a situation of extreme impotence, the conception that, to the detriment of everything that can be done, the situation will never change. We are at the mercy of fate and neither I nor anyone else can do anything to avoid the inevitable. To overcome this situation, you will find this article on how to be happy when everything goes wrong.

Resignation.

If we talk about types of sadness, resignation is an ambivalent feeling. This attitude towards life helps to restart after a crisis. When it becomes a habit that we adopt in all walks of life, it can cut the legs off even the most promising situations.

Although we usually associate resignation with an idea of ​​defeat, failure and irreversible loss of hope, knowing how to live this feeling in some situations is often a winning weapon.

Resignation becomes a negative function when it is preventive, that is, when it is already present before facing something, or when it is immediate and arises at the first difficulty of a journey or project. Some of the typical phrases of a person with resignation are: "I know it will go wrong" or "I knew it would happen." A prejudice about oneself and about reality that extends to others or to all areas of life.

Distraction.

In this case, we are talking about one of the types of sadness known as distraction, a state of extreme worry, nervousness and embarrassment. It is also identified as the quality of being disturbed or agitated by doubt, by mental conflict or by pain.

Excessive distraction can be a message that our mind is sending to signal a moment of strong stress or tiredness. If this becomes chronic we run the risk of having a real emotional exhaustion.

Discouragement.

Discouragement is a state of psyche and of the physical parameters related to the asthenic pole of human self-consciousness, which is characterized by the listless mood and depression. Absolute discouragement is characterized by reluctance to do something and a lack of interest in your position and life. It is accompanied by a serious rupture and is a concomitant moment of a depressive disorder of the affective sphere.

This state is an example of sadness characterized by loss of sense of time, when there are no prospects for the future and emotional moments from the past are gradually erased. Each one becomes madly similar to the one before - not only all hope or passion, but also the very image of the person is lost in this monotony.

Disappointment.

Another type of sadness that we can find is disappointment. When a person tells us something that we do not share we can react in different ways, depending on our state of mind, of the confidence we have with her and of our habitual style of behavior passive, aggressive or assertive. The disappointment, then, is that feeling of disgust and sometimes, of irritation from a sudden annoyance.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Types of sadness: characteristics and examples, we recommend that you enter our category of Emotions.

Bibliography

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