The trick is to keep breathing
When a person you care about is feeling sad, the standard response in civilized society is to say “everything will be ok” in some shape or form. This decreases the perceived negativity of the situation, and that causes the person to lower their sadness to a level that corresponds to a new, more positive, outlook.
Unfortunately, some new research shows that there are drawbacks to downplaying a situation’s negativity too much. When you attempt to show a situation is not as bad as a person thinks, the implied message is that the person’s level of sadness is beyond what’s socially acceptable. After all, if the person should be this sad, you wouldn’t be telling them to cheer up. It turns out that perceived societal expectations about when a person should be sad play a big role in making negative emotions worse. Specifically, when people feel sad, but think that others don’t expect them to feel sad, their negative emotions are amplified.
