In our culture, normal human emotions like temporary sadness are often treated as disorders. Manipulative advertising, marketing and self-help industries claim happiness should be ours for the asking. Yet bad moods remain an essential part of the normal range of moods we regularly experience.

Despite the near-universal cult of happiness and unprecedented material wealth, happiness and life satisfaction in Western societies has not improved for decades.

It’s time to re-assess the role of bad moods in our lives. We should recognise they are a normal, and even a useful and adaptive part of being human, helping us cope with many everyday situations and challenges.

A short history of sadness

In earlier historical times, short spells of feeling sad or moody (known as mild dysphoria) have always been accepted as a normal part of everyday life. In fact, many of the greatest achievements of the human spirit deal with evoking, rehearsing and even cultivating negative feelings.

Greek tragedies exposed and trained audiences to accept and deal with inevitable misfortune as a normal part of human life. Shakespeare’s tragedies are classics because they echo this theme. And the works of many great artists such as Beethoven and Chopin in music, or Chekhov and Ibsen in literature explore the landscape of sadness, a theme long recognised as instructive and valuable.

Ancient philosophers have also believed accepting bad moods is essential to living a full life. Even hedonist philosophers like Epicurus recognised living well involves exercising wise judgement, restraint, self-control and accepting inevitable adversity.

Other philosophers like the stoics also highlighted the importance of learning to anticipate and accept misfortunes, such as loss, sorrow or injustice.

What is the point of sadness?

Psychologists who study how our feelings and behaviours have evolved over time maintain all our affective states (such as moods and emotions) have a useful role: they alert us to states of the world we need to respond to.

In fact, the range of human emotions includes many more negative than positive feelings. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, shame or disgust are helpful because they help us recognise, avoid and overcome threatening or dangerous situations.

But what is the point of sadness, perhaps the most common negative emotion, and one most practising psychologists deal with?

Intense and enduring sadness, such as depression, is obviously a serious and debilitating disorder. However, mild, temporary bad moods may serve an important and useful adaptive purpose, by helping us to cope with everyday challenges and difficult situations. They also act as a social signal that communicates disengagement, withdrawal from competition and provides a protective cover. When we appear sad or in a bad mood, people often are concerned and are inclined to help.

Some negative moods, such as melancholia and nostalgia (a longing for the past) may even be pleasant and seem to provide useful information to guide future plans and motivation.

Sadness can also enhance empathy, compassion, connectedness and moral and aesthetic sensibility. And sadness has long been a trigger for artistic creativity.

Recent scientific experiments document the benefits of mild bad moods, which often work as automatic, unconscious alarm signals, promoting a more attentive and detailed thinking style. In other words, bad moods help us to be more attentive and focused in difficult situations.

In contrast, positive mood (like feeling happy) typically serves as a signal indicating familiar and safe situations and results in a less detailed and attentive processing style.

Psychological benefits of sadness

There is now growing evidence that negative moods, like sadness, has psychological benefits.

To demonstrate this, researchers first manipulate people’s mood (by showing happy or sad films, for example), then measure changes in performance in various cognitive and behavioural tasks.

Feeling sad or in a bad mood produces a number of benefits:

• better memory In one study, a bad mood (caused by bad weather) resulted in people better remembering the details of a shop they just left. Bad mood can also improve eyewitness memories by reducing the effects of various distractions, like irrelevant, false or misleading information.
• more accurate judgements A mild bad mood also reduces some biases and distortions in how people form impressions. For instance, slightly sad judges formed more accurate and reliable impressions about others because they processed details more effectively. We found that bad moods also reduced gullibility and increased scepticism when evaluating urban myths and rumours, and even improved people’s ability to more accurately detect deception. People in a mild bad mood are also less likely to rely on simplistic stereotypes.
• motivation Other experiments found that when happy and sad participants were asked to perform a difficult mental task, those in a bad mood tried harder and persevered more. They spent more time on the task, attempted more questions and produced more correct answers.
• better communication The more attentive and detailed thinking style promoted by a bad mood can also improve communication. We found people in a sad mood used more effective persuasive arguments to convince others, were better at understanding ambiguous sentences and better communicated when talking.
• increased fairness Other experiments found that a mild bad mood caused people to pay greater attention to social expectations and norms, and they treated others less selfishly and more fairly.

Counteracting the cult of happiness

By extolling happiness and denying the virtues of sadness, we set an unachievable goal for ourselves. We may also be causing more disappointment, some say even depression.

It is also increasingly recognised that being in a good mood, despite some advantages, is not universally desirable.

Feeling sad or in a bad mood helps us to better focus on the situation we find ourselves in, and so increases our ability to monitor and successfully respond to more demanding situations.

These findings suggest the unrelenting pursuit of happiness may often be self-defeating. A more balanced assessment of the costs and benefits of good and bad moods is long overdue.

Turmeric is a yellow coloured spice widely used in Indian and South East Asian cuisine. It’s prepared from the root of a plant called Curcuma longa and is also used as a natural pigment in the food industry.

In the literature, curcumin is reported to be an antioxidant that protects the body against damage from reactive molecules. These are generated in the body as a result of metabolism and cause cell damage (known as free radicals).

It’s also reported to have anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial and anti-cancer properties, as well as encouraging the death of cells that are dangerous or no longer needed by the body.

Curcumin has been widely studied in relation to numerous ailments, but what does the literature say? Is consuming turmeric beneficial?

For aches and pains

Chronic inflammation has been linked to the development of numerous diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. There is some evidence curcumin reduces the levels of certain substances (cytokines) that produce inflammation.

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which combine data from several randomised controlled trials (where an intervention is tested against a placebo, while the subjects and those conducting the study don’t know who has received which treatment) support this finding to a certain extent.

A meta-analysis of nine randomised controlled trials showed taking curcumin supplements led to a significant reduction in cytokines that produce inflammation. But the authors claimed these reductions were modest, and it’s unclear if they would actually have a benefit in real life.

These trials were conducted with small sample sizes ranging from 10 to 50 people, which reduces the strength of the evidence. It’s difficult to draw a conclusion on a beneficial dose and how long you should take curcumin, or the population group that can benefit the most from curcumin.

A meta-analysis investigated the effects of turmeric/curcumin on pain levels in joint arthritis patients. The group supplemented with 1000mg of curcumin per day said they had reduced pain compared with the placebo group.

In this study, curcumin was found to be as effective as ibuprofen in terms of reducing pain levels in these patients. But the authors of this meta-analysis themselves suggested that due to small sample size and other methodological issues there is not sufficient evidence to draw definitive conclusions.

For diabetes and heart disease

Curcumin is also thought to be beneficial in preventing insulin resistance (which leads to increased blood sugar), improving high blood sugar and reducing the toxic effects of high blood glucose levels.

But these studies have been conducted in animals and are very few human trials have been conducted in this area.

One study that reported reduction in blood glucose levels in type 2 diabetes patients reports a change in blood glucose from 8.58 to 7.28 millimoles per litre after curcumin supplementation. People with levels above seven are classified as diabetics. So in clinical terms, the change is not that much.

Similarly in relation to heart disease, animal studies show benefits of curcumin supplementation in improving heart health, but there are very few clinical trials conducted in heart disease patients.

Smaller clinical trials looking at ten patients also show benefits of curcumin in reducing serum cholesterol, which is a risk factor for heart disease. But meta-analysis looking at combined effects of different trials does not show these benefits.

For cancer

Curcumin has also been widely studied in relation to its anti-cancer properties. Laboratory and animal studies support this claim, but the evidence for cancer prevention in human trials is lacking.

Although there are some small studies (in 25 cancer patients) that showed reductions in precancerous lesions, and two patients showed shrunken tumors, this small number is not enough to conclude anti-cancerous effects of curcumin.

There is some evidence curcumin lessens the severity of side-effects from radiation therapy such as radiation-induced dermatitis and pneumonitis (inflammation of lungs), but not the cancer itself.

Safety

Research shows not all curcumin we take orally is absorbed. This has led to the use of other things such as lipids (fats) and piperine (found in black pepper), to help it absorb into our system.

High intakes (up to 12 grams a day) of curcumin can cause diarrhoea, skin rash, headaches and yellow-coloured faeces. Looking at the Indian population, they consume about 100mg of curcumin a day, which corresponds to 2 to 2.5 grams of turmeric per day.

But they also consume these amounts over relatively long periods of time (typically their lifespan). There are reports of lower cancer rates in the Indian population and this has been linked to turmeric consumption, but there are no longer term trials proving this link.

It appears that in order to receive benefits from high doses over a short period of time, people are now resorting to injecting turmeric intravenously. There is no evidence to support the benefits of high doses of turmeric or IV injections of turmeric at all.

In fact, at very high doses, curcumin’s predominant activity switches from antioxidant to pro-oxidant, which means rather than preventing cells from damage, it promotes cell damage and has also been reported to cause tumours in rodents.

Although curcumin is showing some encouraging effects in reducing markers of inflammation in humans, the majority of the pharmacological effects of curcumin are in lab studies or animal experiments. Until there are more high quality randomised controlled trials conducted to confirm the benefits of curcumin or turmeric, it’s best to consume turmeric orally as a spice as part of a healthy, nutritious diet.