The Upside of Your Dark Side

Audible Best Seller of 2017
 
Inc. 11 Great Business Books 
 
New York Magazine Best Psychology Books
 
LinkedIn's 12 Books on Leadership to Read



Two mavericks in the field of positive psychology deliver a timely message

Happiness experts have long told us to tune out our negative emotions and focus instead on mindfulness, positivity, and optimism. Researchers Todd Kashdan, Ph.D., and Robert Biswas-Diener, Dr. Philos., disagree. Positive emotions alone are not enough. Anger makes us creative, selfishness makes us brave, and guilt is a powerful motivator. The real key to success lies in emotional agility. Drawing upon extensive scientific research and a wide array of real-life examples, The Upside of Your Dark Side will be embraced by business leaders, parents, and everyone else who’s ready to put their entire psychological tool kit to work.Audible Best Seller of 2017
 
Inc. 11 Great Business Books 
 
New York Magazine Best Psychology Books
 
LinkedIn's 12 Books on Leadership to Read


“At long last, here’s a book on why happiness can make us sad and mindfulness might be overrated. The Upside of Your Dark Side offers a provocative, evidence-based case for a balanced life. If you haven’t read it yet, you should feel guilty—and it turns out that will be good for you.”
—Adam Grant, author of Give and Take

“With verve, humor, solid research, and lots of examples, the authors cut through prevailing myths about happiness to show what actually creates a fulfilling, contributing life. Brave, bold, and brilliant.”
—Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Buddha's Brain

“Anger, guilt, regret, and anxiety have no place in a happy life, right? Wrong. The Upside of Your Dark Side illuminates the essential role played by negative emotions. And then goes further, revealing the benefits of personality traits we tend to downgrade such as grandiosity and selfishness. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the hidden elements of a happy, fulfilling, engaged life.”
—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

“The Upside of Your Dark Side offers one of the most important messages of recent psychological science: that you don't need to avoid discomfort or distress to have a meaningful and joyful life. The authors provide a highly refreshing alternative to the idea that one must pursue happiness at all costs. There is much to be learned from the experience of negative emotions, and from this book.”
—Kelly McGonigal, PhD, author of The Willpower Instinct

“I feel like I have five new superpowers after reading this book. It turns out that leading a good and satisfying life doesn't mean we have to try to be happy, calm or optimistic all the time. We can learn to use uncomfortable feelings like anger, anxiety, guilt, sadness or boredom to be kinder, braver, smarter, more creative and more persuasive. The dark side does indeed have an upside -- and this book teaches us how to harness it, so we can truly lead more heroic and purposeful lives.”
—Jane McGonigal, PhD, author of Reality Is Broken

“Full of scientific research yet laugh-out-loud funny, this book is a must read. The authors turn everything on its head—questioning the wisdom of positive psychology and the pursuit of happiness—all in order to help us flourish and be happy!”
—Kristin Neff, PhD, author of Self-Compassion

"My experience with hundreds of clients tells me that happiness and well-being result from facing and accepting bouts of fear, shame and self-doubt. I am so glad that Todd and Robert chose to illustrate the science behind embracing negative emotions in this engaging book. It will help you live a deep, rich and meaningful life.”
—Pamela Slim, author of Body of Work and Escape from Cubicle Nation

“Do we really need another book about happiness? Don’t we all already know those ‘10 Steps to Certain Happiness’? The answers, surprisingly, are "Yes" and "No".Yes, we need this book by Todd and Robert because No, we don’t know it all about happiness. It turns out there’s a hugely under-utilized tool to increase your capacity for happiness. The very Dark from which we run away is often the path to the Light. If you’ve ever wondered how you can use what’s Difficult to get closer to what’s Good, this just might be the book for you.”
—Michael Bungay Stanier, Senior Partner, Box of Crayons and author of Do More Great WorkTodd B. Kashdan, PhD, is a twin, has twin seven-year-old daughters, and has plans to rapidly populate the world with great conversationalists in Fairfax, Virginia.

The son of prominent positive psychologist Ed Diener, Robert Biswas-Diener, Dr. Philos., lives in Portland, Oregon.INTRODUCTION

THE PROMISE OF WHOLENESS

PERHAPS THE MOST difficult test commonly used for recruiting elite special forces soldiers has nothing to do with marksmanship or proficiency in hand-to-hand combat. It’s a simple jog down a remote road. Young men are instructed to don full gear and report to the starting point early in the morning, often sleep deprived and hungry. What makes this particular run unusually challenging is that none of the candidates are told the length of the course. Is it three hundred yards? Three miles? Thirty miles?

The stakes are high as the recruits begin their jog into the unknown. Some sprint forward in hopes of being first if the run is short. Others pace themselves, carefully conserving energy in the thought that the run could turn out to be a marathon. Some keep to themselves, trusting in their resolve and determination. Others jog together as a group, shouting words of encouragement. Running with sixty-pound packs is tiring, but the physical exertion is less demanding than the mental strain. The pressure of not knowing the distance to the finish line pushes many to the breaking point.

Ambiguous tasks are a good place to observe how personality traits bubble to the surface. Although few of us are elite soldiers, we’ve all experienced the kind of psychological distress these trainees encounter on their training run: managing unclear expectations, struggling with self-motivation, and balancing the use of social support with private reflection. These issues are endemic not only to the workplace, but also to relationships, health, and every aspect of life in which we seek to thrive and succeed. Not surprisingly, the leading predictor of success in elite military training programs is the same quality that distinguishes those best equipped to resolve marital conflict, to achieve favorable deal terms in business negotiations, and to bestow the gifts of good parenting on their children: the ability to tolerate psychological discomfort.

This is what psychologists refer to as distress tolerance, a quality found in people who can handle the emotional equivalent of camping (no shampoo, flush toilets, or walls to keep out creepy crawlers), who don’t shy away from anger, guilt, or boredom just because they feel bad. Instead, they withstand the discomfort of those feelings and—when appropriate—even draw from this darker palette of emotions. You might be asking, why would I want to do that? Pain hurts. I’d rather be happy. If this question occurs to you, we’re nodding our heads in full agreement. We want you to be happy too. Distress tolerance is important not just because it makes you a better camper or soldier, but also because it allows you to become stronger, wiser, mentally agile, and, most important, happier in a more resilient, and therefore durable, way. After more than a decade of working with patients, clients, students, small companies, and organizations as large as the military and the Fortune 100, we, the authors, are putting forward a new way to pursue what is desirable in life; it’s not happiness, exactly, although it does have the side effect of making us happier. We call this state wholeness.

Beyond Happiness, Becoming Whole

There will always be experts—especially in psychology—who argue that one particular way of being (happy, hardy, optimistic) is a cure-all. In this book, we take a different approach. Instead of suggesting that one state is best, we suggest that they all are. We believe—and new research supports—the idea that every emotion is useful. Even the ones we think of as negative, including the painful ones. Anger is a good example. Research shows that only rarely does anger turn into the kind of overwhelming rage that leads to violence. Instead, it tends to bubble up when you perceive an encroachment on your rights as a person. Anger stirs you to defend yourself and those you care about, and to maintain healthy boundaries. Similarly, embarrassment is sometimes an early warning sign of humiliation. More often it’s a signal that we’ve made a small mistake and that a small correction is required. Even guilt is not as awful as you might guess. It’s a signal that you’re violating your own moral code and therefore need to adjust either your actions or your code.

All psychological states have some adaptive advantage. Rather than steering you toward a single feeling state, then, we urge you to consider the usefulness of many—especially the ones we turn away from—and to develop the ability to navigate every one. For some people, seeing the bright side of life is an uphill battle; for others, feeling sad is an unusual event. We don’t suggest an extra helping of happiness or a dash of negativity; we suggest both. It is by appropriately flipping back and forth between these two states that you can achieve a balanced, stabilizing sense of wholeness. Simply put, people who are able to use the whole range of their natural psychological gifts—those folks who are comfortable with being both positive and negative, and can therefore draw from the full range of human emotions—are the healthiest and, often, the most successful.

Wholeness does not come easily, however. We get comfortable with pursuing a certain set of emotions. They make us feel good. Riding high in the moment is hard to pass up—think of a perfect kiss when your lips meld into the moistness of your partner’s, or of hearing the cheers of fellow employees when your name is announced for having won an award. Other emotions, like anger and guilt, are so painful that we avoid or suppress them. It turns out that the uncertainty, frustration, and occasional dash of guilt that stem from broken hearts, missed basketball shots at the buzzer, and botched interviews are the seeds of growth in knowledge and maturity. These often unwanted, negative experiences end up shaping some of the most memorable and inspiring experiences of our lives. By learning to embrace and use negative emotions as well as positive ones, we position ourselves for success.

Two Authors, One Quest

So who are we, the authors in whom you have chosen to invest your time and entrust your confidence? Both of us entered the field of positive psychology more than a decade ago, when this new scientific movement was just finding its legs. We were drawn to the promise of a fresh discipline with a new way of tackling old issues. In a discipline dominated by anxiety and depression research, we found the focus of positive psychology refreshing.

We’ll give you just a single example: sex. In the years since Sigmund Freud made it the main event, human sexuality has been a bit sidelined from psychology. Scientists, like many people, can be prudes. Given the amount of time we think about sex, crave sex, have sex, or, more easily, purchase 50 Shades of Gray novels, you’d think that human sexuality would be the most researched topic in history: we should know more about sex than we do about the speed of light or genetic engineering. But when we recently entered the keyword termssex and depression into the leading professional psychological database, we found just over two thousand hits for the former and two hundred thousand hits for the latter. Now that’s depressing!

The two of us went about investigating whether sex can serve as a free, fun form of therapy for anxiety. We were particularly interested in socially anxious folks who avoid making social connections for fear of rejection. In our study, we had more than a hundred participants report on hundreds of sexual episodes across a two-week period. We had people rate the degree to which they felt intimacy, experienced pleasure, and reached an orgasmic climax during sexual episodes. It turns out that people who suffer with social anxiety problems benefit from sexual contact, even as much as twenty-four hours after an anxiety attack. Sex that left people feeling intimately tied to another person lowered anxiety the following day by 10 percent. Even better, hot sex—escapades that were downright lusty—lowered anxiety by 25 percent!

We concluded that there is a place, even a curative place, for talking about positive experiences in conjunction with so-called negative experiences like anxiety and depression. But even as we tilled the fields of positive psychology, both of us were also increasingly put off by the gung-ho happiology we often witnessed. Over the past fifteen years, positive psychology has been transformed from a reminder that “positive experiences are important” to a kind of smiling fascism.

Nowhere is cultural shift toward the positive more obvious than in the world of business. It was only three decades ago that Jack Welch took the helm of GE and introduced the world to “stretch goals.” His idea was that placing people in uncomfortable and demanding positions could accelerate personal growth and, ultimately, performance. Fast-forward to the present moment, when the latest business management fad is the idea that a good mood translates to business success. The so-called happiness advantage. Some data even back this up: happy employees get better customer evaluations, are more likely to help a colleague, and make more money. There are enough data that positivity evangelists feel comfortable touting an upbeat approach as a workplace panacea. Discussed less frequently, however, are the research findings that the most satisfied people of all actually make less money and are less conscientious in their work habits.

Some companies that surfed the happiness wave to success have been wondering how to deal with legitimate discontent within the ranks. At Ruby Receptionists, for instance—a business that Fortune magazine rated the “#1 best small business place to work in America”—employees are rightly proud of their positive work culture. They are supportive of one another. Their office is fun and playful. Receptionists receive paid sabbaticals, on-site fitness classes, bonus trips to Hawaii, and a host of other upbeat perks. People can walk around 90 percent of the time with authentic smiles on their faces. But the company has wrestled with the other 10 percent. Management and employees are uncertain what to do about the gripes, frustrations, cattiness, and other negative experiences that are an inevitable part of professional life.

We began to wonder too, and in our research we became more and more interested in the intersection of positive and negative.

Drawing on the Upside of the Dark Side

In 1972, as the world’s attention turned to the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, American athlete Frank Shorter was mentally preparing for the greatest challenge of his career: appearances in both the marathon and the 10,000 meter event. It would turn out to be one of the weirder moments in Olympic history. On the morning of September 10, there were a number of reasons why Shorter had a difficult time finding that all-important inner focus. He had earlier finished a disappointing fifth place in the 10,000 meter race; his teammate, legendary runner Steve Prefontaine, petered out in the last lap of the 5,000 meter race to take fourth, failing to medal; and, of course, the games themselves were eclipsed in emotional significance by the shocking massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants.

For Shorter, the marathon must have been a roller coaster of doubt and confidence: confidence as he glanced over his shoulder to assess the size of his lead, and doubt when he finally entered the stadium for the last part of the race and inexplicably found himself in second place. Unbeknownst to him, while Shorter was running toward the stadium, a German student named Norbert Sudhaus slipped past security, jumped onto the racetrack, and impersonated an athlete running in the lead position. To further complicate matters, just before Shorter entered the stadium, the crowd had erupted in cheers for the impostor in first place, and Shorter had to redouble his efforts amid a chorus of boos as the audience realized it had been duped. Despite the many mental, emotional, and physical obstacles, Shorter ended up with the gold medal.

Frank Shorter’s unusual case is proof that in running, as in so many other aspects of life, two experiences are taking place at the same time. Although a long-distance race seems to be a physical feat, mostly a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, it is, actually, a largely mental affair. We have interviewed dozens of athletes—especially runners—and the same themes emerge. Time and again, we were told that there was “more than one race” on the track that day. Many athletes distinguish between the beginning, the middle, and the end of the race. Intense focus marks the beginning of the race, the middle is characterized by deep self-reflection, and the end is an all-out burst of primal energy. It is this last portion, in particular, that bears so directly on our thesis. This is the part of the race where athletes are most likely to use anger, self-castigation, an aggressive desire to crush the competition, and other so-called negative states to spur their own performance to new highs. If positivity and optimism account for 80 percent of success, more or less, then tapping the whole range of experience offers that remaining 20 percent edge.

We are no different from you, dear reader. We prematurely discard our painful feelings, thoughts, and urges without giving them a fair chance. Seduced by the obvious benefits of kindness, compassion, mindfulness, optimism, and positivity on our health, social relationships, and work, we often forget the value of uncomfortable states. Our minds were changed on this issue, however, when we considered results from a number of studies showing the counterintuitive truth: happiness sometimes backfires, and bad states are sometimes good.

What’s more, we are attracted to the notion of wholeness because it fits with all that we know about science and life. Wholeness has an ancient place of honor in myths across all cultures and, therefore, in the archetypal landscape of the human psyche. Wouldn’t it be great to possess full access to the endless energies of creation instead of shackling ourselves to just being positive, cheerful, kind, loving, and selfless? We’ll never free ourselves to soar in that infinite potential if we’re busy trying to avoid the darker parts of our selves, the aspects we fail to appreciate.

What we’re offering you here is an anti-happiness book that, paradoxically, opens you up to a far greater degree of joy than you could ever experience with a more direct approach. In fact, the latest studies show that there is no direct path to happiness. We are not opposed to happiness, positivity, kindness, or mindfulness. In fact, we embrace them. We also wish to ask you, the reader, one further question: are you ready for more? Will you join us in taking happiness to the next level? To go there you’ll need access to everything in the human psychological knapsack, which means unpacking and integrating previously ignored and underappreciated parts of who you are. In the pages that follow, you will learn how to become more emotionally, socially, and mentally agile. By accepting the challenge of drawing on the dark side when it’s most helpful, you bring wholeness within reach, perhaps for the first time.

CHAPTER 1

The False Nose of Happiness

IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY DENMARK, Tycho Brahe was as renowned for his flamboyant lifestyle as he was for his scientific genius. Brahe’s nose was cut off in a duel (he replaced it with a metal one), and he attended parties with his pet moose (who drank copious amounts of alcohol), but Brahe’s lasting claim to fame is his contribution to astronomy. Instead of accepting ancient philosophical or religious notions about the nature of the heavens, Brahe carefully observed and charted all the stars he could see in the night skies. His notes led to a number of astounding discoveries, including the birth and death of stars, a phenomenon that contradicted ancient notions that all things celestial were fixed. False nose and inebriated moose aside, Brahe’s work earned him a place in history as the father of modern astronomy who formed the foundation on which his assistant, Johannes Kepler, and all modern astronomers, would build their science.

Today psychology is having a “Brahe moment.” Until this point, people have been pretty good about creating intuitive approaches to improving their quality of life. You’ve probably come across some of these theories, such as the Abraham Maslow hierarchy of needs—the idea that people have to satisfy basic requirements like food and safety before they can address their need for self-esteem and fulfillment. There’s also no shortage of commonsense advice on how to become happier: be kind, count your blessings, commute less, spend more time with friends and family, be frugal, and everything in moderation. Great suggestions, but is there reason to believe that these chestnuts are either universally applicable or always true?

Fortunately, we are living in a remarkable time in psychology, thanks to the introduction of sophisticated neuroscience, advanced statistics, handheld computers that allow for better sampling of daily experiences, and other methodological and technical breakthroughs. This is our Brahe moment, when the fundamental understanding of quality of life changes. In the field of psychology in general, and on the subject of happiness specifically, these new tools have yielded two transformative findings: first, we tend to go about the business of happiness all wrong; second, we can do something to fix this.

Why the Way We’ve Been Pursuing Happiness Is Not Going to Make Us Happy

Humans have come a long way since we lived in hunter-gatherer societies. As we spend less time worrying about shelter, drought, or our next kill, it makes sense that we would turn our collective attention to the pursuit of happiness. In fact, in a study of more than ten thousand participants from forty-eight countries, psychologists Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia discovered that people from every corner of the globe rated happiness as being more important than other highly desirable personal outcomes, such as a meaningful life, becoming rich, and getting into heaven.

The rush to happiness is spurred on, at least in part, by a growing body of research suggesting that happiness doesn’t just feel good: it’s good for you. Happiness researchers have linked positive feelings to a host of benefits, ranging from higher incomes to better immune system functioning to boosts in kindness. Not only are these desirable outcomes related to happiness, but science also points to positive emotions as their cause. Some researchers, like Barbara Fredrickson from the University of North Carolina, even argue that happiness is humanity’s evolutionary birthright. It is happiness, the argument goes, that helps people to build personal and social resources that are vital to success in life and—from an evolutionary point of view—survival itself.

But one question keeps raising its not so happy head: if happiness provides an evolutionary advantage, and if we value it so highly and possess thousands of years of good advice about how to achieve it, why isn’t it more widespread? Why aren’t we talking about the current happiness epidemic instead of skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety? Emory University researcher Corey Keyes examined a diverse sample of more than three thousand adult Americans of all ages and found—alarmingly—that only 17 percent were psychologically flourishing.

The Flourishing Scale

Eight statements with which you may agree or disagree follow. Using the following 1–7 scale, please provide a response for each statement.

7—Strongly agree

6—Agree

5—Slightly agree

4—Neither agree nor disagree

3—Slightly disagree

2—Disagree

1—Strongly disagree

____ I lead a purposeful and meaningful life.

____ My social relationships are supportive and rewarding.

____ I am engaged and interested in my daily activities.

____ I actively contribute to the happiness and well-being of others.

____ I am competent and capable in the activities that are important to me.

____ I am a good person and live a good life.

____ I am optimistic about my future.

____ People respect me.

Scoring:

Add the responses, varying from 1 to 7, for all eight items. The possible range of scores is from 8 (lowest possible) to 56 (highest possible). A high score indicates a person with many psychological resources and strengths.

—

How could this possibly be the case? It turns out that, despite all the attention being paid to the topic, people are not very good at making choices that lead to happiness. We don’t mean to criticize your gym workouts, Hawaiian vacations, meditation practice, or decision to put your kids in four different after-school enrichment activities. We’re as guilty as you when it comes to missing the mark where happiness is concerned. In fact, a range of brand-new research shows that, more or less, everyone is off the mark.

Let’s begin with the research of Barbara Mellers at the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues Tim Wilson and Daniel Gilbert—author of the bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness. This trio conducted a series of studies on what can be called emotional time travel errors. Just as trained meteorologists make small mistakes that can have a big impact on forecasting the week’s weather, it turns out that people do much the same thing when predicting how an event will make them feel in the future. We overestimate, for instance, how happy we will be if our favored political candidate wins the election or our home team wins the game. We also tend to underestimate how difficult things will be, like moving to a new city.

Take, for example, the study in which Mellers and her colleagues investigated women who took a pregnancy test at Planned Parenthood. (It’s important that none of the women in this study were trying to get pregnant.) Roughly speaking, the women fell into two groups: those who dreaded having a baby and hoped for a negative result, and those who hoped the pregnancy test turned out positive. The researchers asked women to make predictions about how happy they would be if their hoped-for outcome came to pass. Women who were hoping for a negative result expected to feel a sense of elation if they ended up with an empty womb. Women who wanted to be pregnant also expected to feel joyful if they got the positive result they were hoping for.

After the test was over, the researchers found—to their surprise—neither agony nor ecstasy. In fact, they found nothing more than a tiny blip in the women’s emotional equilibrium. Women who wanted a baby were not crestfallen when told it didn’t work out; instead, they were mildly disappointed and then bounced back to their regular mood (we might expect different results if these women had been unsuccessfully trying for months or years). As for women who didn’t want a baby but ended up with an unplanned, living embryo inside them, their anticipated dread never materialized; instead, they had a softer reaction (and a small minority found an unexpected burst of pleasure). It turns out that one reason we wrongly predict what will make us happy in the future is that we overlook our capacity to tolerate, and even adapt to, discomfort. Sure, that new job—to take a different example—is intimidating the first week, but before long you’re cruising along as if you had worked there for years.

The big reason you should care about emotional time travel errors is that nearly every decision you make now is based on an assumption of how you expect to feel in the future. You purchase a dream suburban house with five bedrooms and a sprawling lawn, picturing yourself having coffee on the sweeping veranda while mentally minimizing the added thirty-minute drive to visit friends and to get to work. You give up being with your family for long stretches of time to have a better shot at that big promotion. You choose a mate, decide when (or whether) to have a baby, or select the part of the country where you’ll live, but these big decisions are often compromised by lack of insight into your emotional world. You’re not alone in this. It turns out that we all tend to exaggerate how positively we’ll feel in response to positive events and underestimate our capacity to tolerate distress. When it comes to how we’re going to feel in the future, we most often guess wrong.

Most damning of all when your pursuit of happiness is concerned is information gathered in a recent series of studies by Iris Mauss from the University of California, Berkeley. Mauss is a bit like Tycho Brahe; instead of accepting commonly held assumptions like “we can achieve happiness,” she prefers to chart the metaphorical skies to see what actually hangs in the emotional heavens. She even asks unpopular questions such as “Should people be pursuing happiness?” In one study, Mauss and her colleagues found that people who value the pursuit of happiness actually feel lonelier than other folks. Researchers manipulated the importance placed on happiness by having half the participants read a fake newspaper article extolling the many benefits of happiness. Those who read the article reported feeling lonelier than those who did not, and even produced lower rates of progesterone (a hormone that gets a boost when we feel connected to other people). It turns out that putting too much stock in happiness has health implications too!

To put it succinctly, we humans are horrible at guessing how happy we will feel in the future, and yet we base important life decisions on these flawed predictions. We purchase TVs, plan retirement, and say yes to dinner dates all because of an imperfect guess about how happy they will make us. No wonder we fare poorly in the happiness department, and business is booming for happiness authors, coaches, and consultants. The universal heavy-lifting approach to happiness—when someone follows a prescribed set of commonsense steps that are held out as helpful for everyone—doesn’t work. It’s a bit like Brahe’s false nose: a reasonably close approximation, but it won’t really help you smell any better. So what we—all of us—need with regard to happiness is a new set of strategies. We need a