When we lose something or someone we love, we feel sad. Our sadness can instantly deflate our mood, leaving us feeling sleepy, lazy, and generally unwell. While it can feel pretty good to let out a good cry when you need to, too much crying can slowly become depression. Fortunately, a guided meditation for sadness can help you cope with these feelings to gain control of your mind to help you overcome sadness.
What is meditation for sadness?
Meditation for sadness is a way to notice your thoughts as they happen. If you’re feeling sad, you might notice that negative thoughts are floating around all over your mind. No wonder sadness is looming! Instead, by practicing a guided meditation for sadness, you’ll notice that these thoughts are what is causing the sadness. That way, you can climb out of sadness and learn to cope with the situation you’re dealing with in a healthy manner.
A sadness meditation will help you learn to cope with sad feelings with the help of an instructor guiding you along your journey. You can follow along to an audio recording, which will help you focus on your breath as you experience sadness.
As you practice a guided meditation for sadness each day, you’ll become better at noticing when sadness arises on your own and will know how to stop sadness in its tracks. That way, you’ll have full control over your emotions – even if you’re dealing with a really sad and challenging situation.
You can practice two types of meditations that’ll help you cope with sadness. First, you might try a loving kindness meditation if you’re feeling sad about a person. Maybe someone you love hurt you or left you. This type of meditation will help you be loving to yourself, to a stranger, and to someone you know. It’s a good practice to help you love despite how you’re feeling in a given moment.
The second type of meditation you can practice is a guided meditation for sadness. You’ll learn how to breathe slowly and deeply. You’ll place your attention on how you’re feeling without analyzing it. You’ll simply acknowledge and feel your sadness with a sense of curiosity.
Guided meditations for sadness
Meditation for sadness
This 15 minute guided meditation practice will help you feel better when you’re experiencing a bout of sadness.
Find more practices like this one in our free guided meditation app Declutter The Mind.
What causes sadness?
Sadness can be caused by many different events both externally and internally. For example, a chemical imbalance in the brain can cause sadness, particularly if your brain lacks serotonin. By increasing serotonin in your brain you can prevent or stop depression. For instance, an amino acid known as tryptophan (think turkey) is converted into serotonin. Or you can do high intensity workouts like jogging, aerobics, swimming, or dancing. Spending time outdoors, especially in the winter, can also boost serotonin levels in the brain. Thus, you can reverse the causes of sadness naturally.
Sadness can also be caused by an external event. For example, going through a stressful situation, being around people who are struggling, disagreeing with people, challenges in school or at work, poor sleep, or even a lack of exercise can cause sadness. In these examples, a guided meditation for sadness can help you clear your mind so you can tackle the problem head on. For example, if you’re living with someone who’s facing challenges, their stress might get projected onto you. A guided meditation for sadness can help you refocus and gain clarity so you can be more supportive for your loved ones. You can even recommend any other guided meditations on Declutter The Mind to them to help them cope too.
Sadness can also be caused by the quality of your thoughts. If your mind is constantly thinking positively, it’s quite unlikely that you’ll experience sadness. However, if your mind is regularly thinking negatively, your thoughts will cause you to feel emotions like sadness. You can be sitting in a room, where nothing bad is happening, have a sad thought surface in your mind, and notice momentarily that you’re crying. That’s the power of the mind. A guided meditation for sadness can help with the control of thoughts.
How meditation reduces sadness
Studies show that people who have depression are less likely to accurately remember specific life events and experiences. Since their memory isn’t able to recall these events well a guided meditation for sadness or even memory can help you better recall past events to reduce a downward spiral into depression.
Sadness and depression are often caused by stress, anxiety, or grief. Meditation is a great healthy tool you can use to help you cope with these feelings. Since a guided meditation for sadness helps you focus on your breath, it gives you a new point of center outside of your mind. And since most stress, anxiety, and sadness starts in the mind, learning how to focus on something outside of it helps alleviate many of the symptoms and causes of sadness.
A guided meditation for sadness also helps reduce sadness by helping you master your reaction. People who don’t meditate regularly often overreact to events that happen to them. This is because their mind acts as an amplifier. However, those who regularly meditate have a better control of noticing when thoughts are arising and are better able to tell their mind to cut it out.
Keep in mind that while meditation reduces sadness it doesn’t cure it. Sadness is an important part of being human. Sometimes, we go through life circumstances in which sadness is normal like losing a loved one, going through a breakup, losing your job, or failing a project. Yet, by doing a meditation for sadness, you can minimize the sadness you experience to prevent spiralling into a depression. It’s okay to be sad sometimes. And it’s also okay to look at a sad situation like losing a loved one and feeling immense gratitude for having been lucky enough to know that person.
How to meditate for sadness
To begin a sadness meditation, find a comfortable seat with your legs crossed and hands in your lap. If you’re laying in a bed, keep your arms by your sides.
Keep your eyes open as you gently breathe in and out concentrating on your breathing. For best results, breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth.
As one minute passes, close your eyes. Focus on your body. Can you find where in your body sadness is present? Is it in your head? Your chest? Maybe your stomach? Observe the feeling of sadness in your body non judgmentally. Continue breathing as you notice where your sadness is located. Watch the emotion of sadness as you continue this exercise.
What does sadness feel like? Understanding how it feels for you is a good way to catch yourself in the future when you feel sad every now and then. Notice the sensation of sadness in your body. Does sadness tingle? Does it feel almost like an emptiness? Maybe it’s as if something is lacking.
If you notice any tension in your body, aim to relax it. For instance, if you notice tension in your face, wiggle your face around to help relax the tension.
Continue focusing on your breathing. If you catch yourself getting lost in thought, that’s okay, remember not to be judgemental about it. This is a sadness meditation practice not meditation mastery. Simply, go back to focus on your breathing. Inhale….exhale.
Now, slowly open your eyes again. How do you feel? If you still feel sad, acknowledge your sadness. Accept it. And most importantly, notice it. If your mood has changed, notice that too.
Continue breathing a few more breaths, until you’re ready to get back to going about your day.
Other ways to deal with sadness
A guided meditation for sadness is an effective way to deal with sadness. Here are a few other ways to cope with sadness:
Let it out
Sadness manifests in tears. If you feel like crying, let the tears pour. Studies show that toxic chemicals are released through the tear ducts as you cry. So, rather than holding all those bad chemicals in your body, you’ll be letting them go as you shed a few tears. Crying is actually a very therapeutic experience. You might notice that you feel a bit drowsy or groggy but also better after a big cry. This is a normal and healthy body reaction.
Breathe in and out
As we mentioned, a guided meditation for sadness that focuses on the breath is a healthy way to deal with sadness. The practice of slowly breathing in and out helps our body calm down as we face difficult experiences. Often, when we cry we have difficulty breathing when the crying becomes intense. A gentle breathing exercise will help you regain control of that. Rather than doing deep breaths in and out, aim for gentle breathing to keep you at your calmest.
Listen to calming music
While your go to music when sad is often depressing music, it’s important to listen to peaceful music. This might be an instrumental to your favorite songs, classical music, nature sounds, or other sounds that don’t spiral you from sadness into depression. It’s key to avoid songs with depressing or triggering lyrics. That’s because the words are seeping into your mind, and that’s what you’re currently trying to regain focus of.
Write in a journal
When feeling sad, you might not be motivated to do anything. But one thing that will help you untangle sad feelings is writing in a journal. Expressing yourself through writing, artwork, or even music can help you sort through your difficulties. You might even look through your journal years from now and become proud of how well you handled your sadness and use it to help others.
Hug a loved one
Physical touch reduces cortisol, a stress hormone, and releases oxytocin, a happy hormone. If you’re grieving a breakup, death, or failure, sometimes what you really need is someone to hug you until you feel a bit better. You can also release your happy hormones through a massage, acupuncture, or other types of physical therapies.
Spend time with friends and family
Often, when we’re sad, we tend to isolate ourselves from others. But you actually need to do the exact opposite. This is the time when you should spend moments with friends and family. You might not feel your best, but by regularly spending time with others, you’ll begin to feel less sadness.
Sleep at night
A bad sleep or irregular sleep pattern can drastically affect mood. If you don’t sleep enough, you might naturally feel sadder than usual. You can try a guided meditation for sleep to help you unwind in the evening. Or you can read a book in bed in the evening to help your body fall asleep naturally. Aim for around eight hours of sleep each night.
Conclusion
Sadness is a common and normal reaction to difficult experiences. A guided meditation for sadness, or sadness meditation, can help you regain control of your mind to prevent a spiral into depression. Meditation is a healthy way to deal with sadness. You can find free meditations for sadness on the Declutter The Mind app or on our YouTube channel. With a regular meditation practice, you can control the process of thoughts leading to emotions like sadness and emotions leading into actions. The more you practice meditation, the better you become at managing emotions like sadness.
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