The Hidden Cost of Sadness (And How I Finally Stopped Paying It) 🌞

Every time you fall into despair, the clock drains the good time right out of your life. That's not a metaphor — it's what actually happens. In this Daily Dose of Dawn, resilience coach Dawn Super shares how she gave away the first 41 years of her life to sadness, what finally shifted, and the specific strategies she used to build a happy life inside a body and brain that betray her every single day. From a 100-things-a-day gratitude marathon to understanding why happy matters most when you have every reason to feel otherwise — this one is for everyone living a challenging life who wants more out of it anyway.

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Imagine if you lost time every time you were sad. Whether you were sad about things that are happening now in your life or things that happened in the past, about people that would come or go, about things you could control and things you can't. Like if the clock just drained all the good times out of every time you let yourself fall into despair.

If sadness literally erased years of your life... you don't need to imagine it cuz that's actually what happens.

And if you're looking for a way out of that and you want to think about that for a few minutes, welcome in to your daily dose of Dawn at Dawn — videos designed to expand your thinking.

I gave away the first 41 years of my life to the clock of sadness. And then I discovered "happy matters" and understood deeply just how much it matters.

All of the work that I've done started with the way I thought about what I was taking on at the moment. I didn't know they call it metacognition, thinking about your thinking. I just call it surviving Tuesday.

A lot of the time I spent raising my kids, I was also reparenting myself. Having a mom who worked three jobs and was never around, I did not have parental supervision. I was not taught a lot of things that kids are taught at a young age. And then add in a disease in my brain from the time I was 11, making everything harder in my life. I got behind and it made me miserable.

So I taught myself some things and eventually got to a place where I had some real true friendships and that eased up a lot of the misery that I was dealing with. And along the way I understood that happy matters so much — especially for someone who's living in a faulty meatsuit whose brain betrays them on the daily. You have to keep helping yourself, holding your own hand every single day. And while it's very simple, there's nothing easy about it.

Bringing happiness into your life when you have so many challenges is a daily effort.

Can you live your best life when you're stuck in the suck? When every day is full of hard things? When tears fall easy and you often walk around feeling like a rusty bag of nails. I do. Let's see if you can too.

Registration opens soon for my life opening experience: How to stop being miserable even if still in misery. Get on the wait list - link below - and get early bird pricing.

One of the things that I did all those years ago was a gratitude marathon where I listed a hundred things a day that I was grateful for, for 30 days - an entire month. I walked around with my notebook so I could be ready when I encountered something that I was grateful for.

And when you get up into the 70s, you start having to really look around into your life. Like, what exactly is it that I'm grateful for today? It's the salt on the hot french fry that just hits you just the right way. Discovering you have baby wipes in the bottom of your purse when you've spilled your coffee all over your car. Happy that you belted in your backpack because you ended up having to slam on your brakes. And all of those just came from your morning commute.

Eventually all of these things added up to what is now my favorite coping strategy of all: What do I love about being a human being?

I always find it very humorous how many people are surprised how happy I am for no reason in particular. Then when they find out I have so many things wrong with me, they want to know how am I so happy with nothing going on.

Imagine if every time you were happy for no reason, a dollar floated down from above. You would certainly go around finding things to be happy about, wouldn't you? Now think about the fact that if you're happy for no reason, a dollar's worth of energy floats down into your being — or a dollar's worth of nervous system regulation becomes suddenly yours.

So all those years ago, I had to teach myself that if I wanted to hold on to happy, I had to learn how to let go of codependency. There were a lot of things I had to stop doing and then things I had to start doing.

No matter what your goal is — if you're going through a course in school, if you're trying to lose weight or get fit, or if you're trying to get happier and feel better even in a faulty meatsuit — you have to put the work in. You have to do things to help yourself stay on track. You have to write it down. Keep it in front of your face so you don't forget.

Am I saying never be sad and shove your sadness down and pretend that you're not sad? No, not saying that at all. What I'm saying is feel your feels, but keep your feet out of the fire.

And what does that mean? I get sad a lot. I have had a very, very challenging life. I'm living in a body that betrays me every day. I'm living in a brain where my chemicals are off-balance on a consistent basis and I have to be mindful to regulate myself. Sometimes I get sad that I have to do that and other people don't. And it's totally normal to feel sadness about your burdens.

This is going to be different for everyone, but for me, feeling your feels and keeping your feet out of the fire is letting myself cry. I cry a lot. It's like a tea kettle thing for me. I get overwhelmed to a point and I cry for a little bit and then I find more strength inside of myself to keep going.

Keeping going isn't a choice. A lot of people say, "Oh, you're so strong." Yes. Well, those of us who you're saying that to don't really have a choice. And of course I have a choice about continuing to make this video. I just didn't have a choice to continue going on in life — working hard to help myself feel good inside of a challenging life. And I do that by being good to myself and bringing in the helper feels. Compassion for myself, empathy for myself, being proud of myself for the things that I can accomplish despite all this adversity that I'm living with.

I know if you're still listening, you're also living a challenging life. And if you had told me all of this 20 years ago, I probably would have thought you were full of baloney. But you can't take it all on at once. You have to take it on in chunks. And you have to remove things that have been put there for a long time just to help you exist — coping mechanisms that you've taught yourself.

And I have a five week program coming up that's going to help you learn to let go and then to also build yourself up.

Click the link below to get on the waitlst and receive an early bird discount when registration opens. https://dawnsuper.com/freeyourself

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