Face your emotions to overcome them. Overcome consistent sadness through facing, feeling, and understanding it, and yourself to grieve for it. Buried emotions or feelings fester. In general, facing, feeling, and reflecting on your emotions helps you manage them.
This doesn’t mean letting them dictate what you do and it doesn’t mean spending loads of time in those negative emotions. It also doesn’t mean acting on the emotions.
Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago, I was publicly awarded for some diligent work, and for some unexplained reason, I felt angry. I acknowledged that the emotions I felt were valid, but not logical. Thus, I did not act on them. I felt I wanted to make a point, reject the reward, and demure from accepting the accolades. I resisted those urges. But at the dance time, I’m private, I explored those emotions and discussed them with a close, trusted friend. The feelings were soon satisfied and passed. It may have been my subconscious mind sabotaging my success or it may have been something else.
The point is that I didn’t ignore or burry the emotions and I didn’t give into them. I used my intelligence to guide my actions and reflected on what I felt until it normally subsided. I have it time to run its course, but I did not spend any more time in the negative emotion than I absolutely needed to.