Why do we cry? How come love hurts? And what's a happiness researcher doing writing about sadness, anyway? Well, it turns out the two aren’t mutually exclusive. After eight years of investigating into happiness, Helen discovered a startling fact: most of us are terrified of being sad. So phobic, in fact, that we jeopardise our chances of truly living at all. This needs to change, because we need our sadness: it’s a message. It can tell us what’s wrong and what to do about it. Researchers have found that allowing for temporary sadness, counter-intuitively, makes us happier. And trying to avoid sadness – even to the extent many of us do on a daily basis – is detrimental to our mental health. So the time has come to get better at having difficult conversations. How To Be Sad is part memoir, part manifesto for change in how we express our emotions, good and bad. Exploring why we get sad