*Difference between sadness and depression*

Are you sad or depressed? This question certainly arises in your mind when you are facing troubled times. It could be the loss of a job or messed up a project at work or it could be the death of a dear one or a broken relationship or simply facing failure or loss. Any of these can trigger sad, gloomy feelings and make you dread the deadly state of depression. But before you trouble yourself further understand the basic difference of these terms.


*Sadness*

Sadness is a basic human emotion. Sadness has both disappointment and despair which is characterized by feelings of disadvantage, loss, helplessness and grief.


*Sadness timeline*

Sadness has specific external triggers like a difficult, hurtful, challenging, or disappointing event, experience, or situation. Other feelings, such as anger, stress, guilt, grief, anxiety or hopelessness can also make you sad.

Sadness may feel all encompassing at times, but you may also be able to laugh or be comforted in between.

And when that external situation changes, when your emotional hurt fades, when you have adjusted or gotten over the loss or disappointment, your sadness remits.


*Sadness in the body*

Like all basic emotions, sadness expresses itself in the body. Crying is the most common behaviour seen in a sad person.

But even if the person doesn't depict any explicit sobbing behaviour, sadness can be identified with facial expressions of drooping upper eyelids and slight pulling down of lip corners.

Also, it is the best-recognized emotions in the human voice with a slow tempo, lower speech rate and mean pitch.

In terms of the entire body, a sad person has reduced walking speed and slumped posture.


*Sadness in the brain*

Sadness is associated with increased activity of the right occipital lobe, the left insula, the left thalamus the amygdala and the hippocampus which is linked with memory. Thus it makes sense that awareness of certain memories is associated with feeling sad.


*Goodness of Sadness*

Although sadness doesn't make you feel good, it has an evolutionary function, just like all other emotions. That means it has a positive purpose to help you adapt, accept, focus, persevere and grow. The main function of sadness is to connect you back to what you had lost. It also evokes empathy as a means of obtaining social support and strengthening of bonds. Even the diminished attention to the external world or social withdrawal is an energy conservation strategy.  It is associated with overcoming problematic life circumstances, by thinking more meticulously about the social environment to find alternative answers to solve them. Sadness also has a motivational function to search for a better future and avoid similar situations that can cause losses.


*Badness of Sadness*

Although sadness is an adaptive emotion when it occurs in an excessive and prolonged state, it becomes pathological, that is, a depressive disorder in which it causes harm.



*Depression*

Depression has
feelings of severe despondency and dejection. It is a mental illness that affects your thinking, emotions, perceptions, and behaviors in pervasive and chronic ways.


*Depression timeline*

Specific external triggers will often cause sadness, whereas depression may start without any identifiable cause.

Depression is a more recurring event with a depressed mood that lasts for most of the day, with noticeable signs of hopelessness and sadness and feelings of doubt that last longer than 2 weeks without any breaks in between.

Sadness is a major element of depression which confuses the two. However, the time factor can be used to easily distinguish them. So if your mood relates to a recent event, such as a relationship breakup, then you may well be feeling sadness. But if that breakup was months ago, or you can see no clear reason for your change in mood, you could be depressed.


*Depression in the body*

Anhedonia is the major behavioral symptom of depression. It refers to a loss of interest or a loss of feeling of pleasure in certain activities that usually bring joy to people.

Apart from this behaviour, depression also expresses itself in the body as aches and pains. Physical symptoms include chronic joint pain, limb pain, back pain, gastrointestinal problems, tiredness, sleep disturbances, psychomotor activity changes, and appetite changes. Elevated rates of suicidal thoughts are found in depressed patients with such chronic pains.


*Depression in the brain*

Depression marks itself with decreased size of the hippocampus which can lead to memory loss. Depression also causes the amygdala the emotional centre to enlarge due to excess influx of cortisol the stress hormone. This causes all your thresholds to be lower. This makes you impatient, quicker to anger and get frustrated, quicker to break down, and it takes you longer to bounce back from everything.

*Depression Treatment*

Depression is a disorder of the body as well as the brain, hence it needs to be properly treated with medication as well as lifestyle changes. Brain functioning is strengthened by giving hormonal treatment of serotonin and dopamine the feel-good hormones. Talk therapy also helps the depressed person to develop stress management skills and disengage from avoidance coping strategies.


*Summary*

Sadness and depression are part of a feedback loop that reinforces each other, as in a vicious circle. But depression is not just quantitatively different but qualitatively different from sadness.

When you experience everyday sadness, you are usually able to feel intimately connected with others. In contrast, when there is depression, you often feel marginalized and alone. There are distinct differences in the behaviour, body and brain expressions of sadness and depression.

Also, the sense of time is noticed differently in sadness and depression. Sadness is conceptualized as a normal, time-limited response to the loss, there is a feeling that this will soon be over, and in depression, there is a connotation that this will last forever, with a subjective feeling that time occurs more slowly. For the depressed person, there is no hope in the future and the past is an extremely negative moment making the disorder all the more disruptive.

Here's what to do if you or someone you know is depressed.