The One Thing You Shouldn't Do When You're Sad
Sadness Has Many Benefits, But Don’t Open Your Wallet
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I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling sad. This week the world marked a grim milestone—six million people have now died from Covid-19. For anyone even vaguely familiar with the 20th century, that figure holds haunting memories. And speaking of the 20th century, Europe has its first shooting war since that deadly era. And when I manage to avoid thinking about either of these catastrophes, I’m reminded that my father died five months ago, and I’m still discovering new ways that event has changed my family. (In case you missed it, read my recent reflections on grief.)
As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in “The Rainy Day”:
My thoughts still cling to the moldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Scholars, however, paint a brighter view of darkness. Sadness is good for us!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge experienced severe depression and coined the phrase “a sadder and wiser Man.” Beginning in the 1970s, researchers reinforced this idea. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman described in his masterpiece, Thinking Fast and Slow, sadness is associated with “careful, deliberative” thought, i.e., slow thinking, as opposed to harried, impulsive thought or fast thinking. Slow thinking is generally considered a check on our fast-thinking instincts.
Lauren Alloy of Northwestern and Lyn Abrahamson of SUNY Stony Brok went even further. They coined the term depressive realism. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, they described how sadness makes you less enamored of your own importance, reputation, and abilities, which in turn encourage you to be more deliberative and test your assumptions. When the two researchers compared 144 depressed and 144 non-depressed students, they found that the non-depressed people made many more errors in judgment, largely by being overconfident.
“Our findings demonstrate the existence of cognitive errors made by non-depressed people.” Depressed students, for example, “accurately recalled the frequency of negative feedback on a laboratory task, whereas non-depressed students underestimated the frequency of negative feedback.”
When you’re happy, in other words, you dismiss legitimate criticism of your work; when you’re sad, you accept constructive feedback.
Sadness also makes us less prejudicial. Jaihyun Park or the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development along with Mahzarin Banaji of Yale found that shifts in mood affect how much we rely on stereotypes when evaluating people. A happy mood, they say, leads to a mental state that “predisposes” reliance on preexisting stereotypes, while a sad mood “dampens” that reliance.
Put more bluntly: you discriminate less when you’re sad because you’re less confident in your preexisting biases.
As sadness researcher George Bonnano summarizes these and other findings in The Other Side of Sadness, “with sadness comes accuracy.” We slow down, take our time making decisions, consider the pros and cons, and overall make better choices. “In general then, sadness helps us focus and promotes deeper and more effective reflection.”
We should all be happy we’re sad, then, right?
Not so fast.
There’s one area where these benefits don’t apply: $$$.
Jennifer Lerner is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard (and, I learned, after writing this article, a childhood friend of my wife). In a study she published in Psychological Science called “The Financial Costs of Sadness,” she introduces a concept she calls myopic misery.
“Sadness creates a myopic focus on obtaining money now versus later.” When we feel sad, she goes on, we feel “significantly increased impatience.” We crave immediate gratification in a way that we’re both unaware of and can’t control. And “immediate gratification,” she adds dryly, is “not an attribute associated with wisdom.”
Over multiple experiments, Lerner found that sad deciders, as she calls them, are more focused on making themselves happy today if that means they might be unhappy tomorrow. Among other practical consequences, she outlines, sad deciders “accept 13 percent to 34 percent less money today to avoid waiting three months for payment.”
She recommends that anyone feeling sad recognize this instinct they have toward “need-it-now” and remind themselves that they might just “need-it-later.”
Sadder, in other words, does not always make us wiser. Sometimes it makes us poorer.
So be sad out there, everyone. But don’t spend money. If you do, you’ll just feel sadder later.
PS: A footnote to this post. After writing it, I went to a salon on Ukraine and Danny Kahneman was there. I met him for the first time and we had a lovely chat about the psychology of warfare and off-ramps. I mentioned that I had quoted him in The Nonlinear Life. Almost as good as winning the Nobel!
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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.
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