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When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). "We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up."
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Wakefield believes that in humans sadness has a further function: it helps us learn from our mistakes. "I think that one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while," he says. It might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place. The risk of sadness may deter us from being too cavalier in relationships or with other things we value, for example.
"Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost.The research involved over 600 people doing six different tasks, some involving detail, others creativity.
It really depends on the nature of the task."
"You are alive only if you embrace (some) volatility." ~ Nassim Nicholas TalebExcuses are like assholes, everybody has one. But there's nothing saying you can't take the necessary steps toward overcoming them.
Comment: See also: Probiotics don't just benefit the gut