How to be BETTER at being SAD

Look, no one wants to be sad. But we've been so busy chasing after happiness that we've become quite bad at just sitting with sadness when it inevitably comes shuffling along. The fact is, you need a good wallow every so often, so the temporary sadness doesn't tip over into something more serious.

-  LIESL ROBERTSON

How do you become an expert at being sad?

Well, for author and journalist Helen Russell, it happened by accident. 'Having spent the past eight years researching happiness worldwide, I've inadvertently become something of a specialist in sadness,' she writes in her book, How to be Sad: The Key to a Happier Life.

Helen was living in London with a 'big, shiny' job at Marieclaire.com when her husband was offered his dream job working for Lego in rural Jutland, Denmark. Despite the fact that she could barely pick out Denmark on a map (of Denmark), she agreed to ditch it all and move to Scandinavia - in part, due to curiosity. The Danes are famous for being the happiest nation in the world, despite living in a cold, dark little corner of the planet and paying eye-bleedingly high taxes. So, what was their secret? And would she, too, be able to tap into it and become happier herself? The move resulted in Helen writing The Year of Living Danishly, a hygge bible of sorts, soon followed by The Atlas of Happiness, an exploration of 30 countries and their take on what it means to live a good life.

'I think one of the ones that really stood out for me was Brazil,' she says during an interview at an Action for Happiness event. 'In Brazil there's this concept saudade in Portuguese, which is "the bliss in melancholy" and that sort of bittersweet pleasure in the loss of happiness.' Stumbling upon this counterintuitive concept sent her 'down a rabbit hole', she says. 'I became fascinated by this idea that there was a nuance and there was an ambiguity to it, but it was still pleasure, it was still happiness. It's almost loving anything enough to miss it when it's gone and that sort of soul-expanding love and melancholy that we just don't perhaps have or indeed just articulate in English.'