The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment

A great book on why we should embrace darker emotions like anger and anxiety instead of suppressing

In The Upside of Your Dark Side, Dr. Kashdan and Dr. Biswas-Deiner—both accomplished researchers in the field of positive psychology—show how and why being happy is far less important than being whole. This isn’t to say that being happy or the research on happiness is unimportant, or that your “dark side” is the key to success. In the introduction the authors are clear that, “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.” Positivity is important, but darker emotions like anger, narcissism, and psychopathy (in moderation!) are important contributors to a whole and meaningful life. That last claim may sound a bit far fetched, especially to American readers, so Kashdan and Biswas-Deiner marshal a mountain of evidence to show why evolution didn’t provide us with a dark side by mistake. In the five main chapters of the book, the authors show that: * our obsession with comfort makes it difficult to tolerate the inevitable hardships of life. (Ch. 2) * getting a little angry, feeling a little anxiety, and feeling a little guilt can make us better people. Anger helps us get stuff done, anxiety tells us that something is wrong and needs our attention, and guilt leads us to make amends. We should appreciate these emotions, and can use them to get things done, rather than just shutting them down. (Ch. 3) * feeling happy all of the time makes us less persuasive and less attentive to detail, and self-consciously trying to be happy can make us less happy if reality doesn’t live up to our fantasy. (Ch. 4) * despite the current cultural and scientific zeitgeist about the benefits of being mindful, many of our most powerful and accurate processing mechanisms are mindless. We often make better decisions acting impulsively than deliberately (and the authors show just how to balance impulse and deliberation). (Ch. 5) * being manipulative, narcissistic, and psychopathic (in ...