We all want to be happy as much as possible, don't we? After all, life is all about finding happiness and joy, or at least that is what we have been taught since our childhood.

But the very idea of happiness is so deeply wired in our minds that we end up underestimating the value of negative emotions in our lives, which are just as essential as the positive ones.

Negative emotions like sadness, regret, and guilt are often looked as something that you'd always want to avoid at all costs, but what we fail to realize is that all these emotions are a part of lives and trying to avoid them will only make things worse.

Always trying to be happy will eventually develop into anxiety and feelings of restlessness as you've subconsciously taught your brain into thinking that if you're not happy, that means something is wrong.

But we've only got one life, why waste time being sad?

Good question. Even though it may seem obvious to want to be happy forever, it comes with a price; and the price is the quality and genuineness of your happiness. If you keep ignoring your negative emotions and focus solely on trying to be happy, the richness of your happiness will start to fade. It basically means that you'll technically be happy, but it wouldn't feel that good.

The word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

- Carl Jung

How Sadness Teaches Us To Appreciate Happiness and Makes Us Grateful

If you've never been truly sad, you'll never be truly happy.

A research done on people with depressive symptoms found that "the more pressure a person receives from his social environment not to experience negative emotions, the more likely that person is to experience an increase in depressive symptoms."

The research gives us a fair idea that forcing ourselves to be happy, only makes us even sadder. On the other hand, people who have experienced great sadness in life, find greater happiness in places where others find only mediocrity.

Furthermore, sadness allows us to be more grateful about all the happy memories that we got to experience in our lives. It reminds us to appreciate what we had, still have, and possibly will have.

Now that obviously doesn't mean that you should start making yourself feel sad, no, that defeats the whole purpose of this post. What I'm trying to say here is, don't avoid sadness but instead embrace it for it makes you feel happy in a more authentic way.

Continue reading:

• What Makes A Genuine Smile?
• How To Have Deeper And More Fulfilling Conversations
• Why Some People Suck At Elevator Etiquettes
• Why You Need To Stop Regretting Over Your Mistakes

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