Sadness and Grief in the Stuck Zone

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Traumatic life events set off all-encompassing grief and sadness, as do moments of small annoyances like mild discomfort that build over time. Whether sadness comes from a known source, or a seemingly unknown source, feeling stuck incites mild or severe panic and anxiety, which can cyclically snowball into greater feelings of stuckness. Understanding grief and sadness while in the Stuck Zone is a major step in finding relief from emotional self-entrapment:

• Sadness should be distinguished from depression and anxiety: these feelings are pervasive, latching their jaws onto you and refusing to let go. Sadness just is.
• What being stuck in sadness sounds like: “Am I ever going to feel less sad? I don’t want this to be my new ordinary.”
• Beware how burnout intensifies grief and sadness. Signs of burnout include heightened irritation with the self and others, sleeplessness, mild to heavy anxiety, and boredom, to name a few.

When we think of grief, sadness is what we immediately associate it with: in our culture, grief is often reduced to a sub-type of sadness. Yet, grief moves you unpredictably through many phases, of which sadness is just one. Coming up next: moving through the Stuck Zone into the Ally/Superpower Zone.