Helen Russell: ...how to get happier by being sad

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How can we best look after ourselves when we're sad? We find out on this episode with journalist Helen Russell, who is the bestselling author of two previous books on happiness. Her latest book explores how and why we could all benefit from learning the art of sadness.

Let’s face it. We all experience painful life events and we all endure periods of sadness. Helen’s new book reveals her own experiences with sadness and discusses the latest scientific thinking on the topic. The book is called, HOW TO BE SAD: Everything I’ve Learned About Getting Happier by Being Sad. Her website is helenrussell.co.uk.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Nobody Told Me.
0:13.5	I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.
0:15.6	And we are so delighted to welcome our guest on this episode, journalist Helen Russell.
0:20.6	Helen's the best-selling
0:21.6	author of two previous books on happiness and her latest book explores how and why we could all
0:26.8	benefit from learning the art of sadness. And let's face it, we all experience painful life
0:32.2	events and we all endure periods of sadness. Helen's new book reveals her own experiences with sadness and discusses
0:39.4	the latest scientific thinking on the topic. The book is called How to Be Sad, everything I've
0:45.7	learned about getting happier by being sad. Helen, thank you so much for joining us.
0:50.8	Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. This is a fascinating concept. Tell us more
0:56.5	about how the book came about. Yeah, well, I had been researching into happiness for about eight
1:02.1	years. And back when we could travel the world, I would go and speak to people and I'd do events
1:07.0	and things. And the question I got asked time and again was how can I be happy? And often
1:11.7	it was from people at a time in their lives when really that wasn't possible, say they just
1:15.6	lost a loved one. And I came to realize that actually many of us are quite phobic of feeling
1:21.2	sad, which, as you say, is a problem because sadness happens to all of us. But in much of
1:26.5	the world, we don't know how to
1:27.7	handle it. So I felt like this was something worth addressing. Why do you think the pandemic
1:33.6	brought about so much depression, so many mental health issues? Was it that people had the
1:40.3	opportunity to really sit and think to themselves, gosh, I really am sad. I'm not happy.
1:45.9	I think, yeah, there's a couple of things at play here. Absolutely. The normal busyness of life
1:50.1	just stopped for a while, didn't it, for many of us? So suddenly, we weren't racing around all the
	...

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