Being Sad: A PSA
Sometimes you get Sad. This is a natural part of life and can be fixed quite easily, as I have discovered.
Step One: Get up from your desk.
Seriously. Put the book/laptop/homework down. Put it down. Step away from it.
Yes, outside. Get up, put on real non-pajama clothes, and go out of your house. Go out into the sunshine.
This step is important. You must look, really and truly, at the beauty of the flowers and the trees, the way the sun dapples the sidewalk, the colors of the bark and the texture of the stones. Open your heart to the immense beauty of it all. Let yourself feel overwhelmed by it. This may be hard at first, but you can kind of ease into it. Start slowly, by looking at random things, like a pebble on the sidewalk or a leaf on a tree, and say inside your mind, “wow, that’s beautiful.” Even if you don’t really believe it yet, this will help you open your mind.
Step Four: Get Sensory Overload
If you’ve done step three right, you will be walking around in a daze, laughing at fire hydrants because they happen to be blue, gaping in awe at a crack in the sidewalk, gasping for air at the sight of a leaf falling from a tree. Eventually, all the beauty in the world will cram into your head and you will develop a small headache and feel sort of dizzy. This means it is time to go back inside, or, even better, to find a quiet outdoors place and a book and read, or even just lay down on the grass in the sun with your eyes shut.
The goal of all of this is to take yourself out of yourself, so to speak. Of COURSE you’re unhappy! You’re introspecting, you’re taking your faults and failures out and hanging them prominently in the living room of your mind, you’re turning so far inwards that you’re becoming a black hole of misery and regret and bitterness. So you have. to. focus. outwards. You have to stop making yourself and your thoughts your main focus. Fill your brain entirely with external things- the birds, the clouds, the wind on your skin- and the internal things have no platform from which to berate you.
I speak from personal experience when I say that thinking about it only makes it worse. You can’t reason yourself out of a funk. The best solution is just to get out there and to see the beauty of it all.
True story one time I did this whole looking at the world thing and I couldn’t turn it off and I got really tired and it was great.
If you can you should definitely find a hammock because that will make everything better.
