The Upside of Your Dark Side summary

Happiness feels so good that it’s only natural to do whatever you can to increase it. Unfortunately, the more you try to brighten your spirits, the worse your mood becomes!

Indeed, the pursuit of happiness can prevent you from feeling happy in the short term, as people who focus on achieving happiness get less joy out of the pleasurable experiences that are supposed to create happiness.

Wouldn’t it be great to rid yourself of your anxiety, once and for all? Maybe not! Without anxiety, you’d lose your love for roller coaster rides and scary movies. Apparently not all anxiety is undesirable.

In fact, anxiety is quite beneficial to us in that it helps prepare us for dangerous situations. As you’ll see, this has consequences in many areas of life:

Angry teens can come up with strikingly original (and sometimes offensive) epithets for the objects of their anger. As you’ll soon see, the source of this originality is anger itself! As a matter of fact, you can even reap benefits from someone else’s anger.

For example, another person’s anger can crank up your creativity. Specifically, receiving angry feedback increases both the quality of your ideas and their originality – that is, if you’re the kind of person who needs to feel in control of situations.

Can you describe the feeling of guilt? For most, it’s not an emotion that we enjoy exploring. And yet, it’s also an emotion that offers us all great benefits:

Guilt motivates people to repair the damage they’ve done. In a study about prison inmates, researchers found that criminals who were prone to experiencing guilt suffered more from what they had done than those who didn’t feel guilty.

What are some character traits that you consider “bad?” How about excessive admiration-seeking or a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement? To many, these traits are less than admirable, and all of them are hallmarks of a narcissistic personality.

However, these “bad” traits can also be beneficial to your success!

Popular culture portrays psychopaths as cruelty incarnate – they’re the Hannibal Lecters and Patrick Batemans, whose bloody antics haunt our dreams. In real life, however, the village psychopath is likely to be a policeman, doctor or even toy developer, with absolutely no inclination to kill, threaten or abuse.

In psychology, psychopathy is characterized by overconfidence, a lack of shame and remorse, shallow emotions, blaming others for one’s own faults and a willingness to lie or manipulate whenever it serves selfish interests.

Mindfulness seems to be today’s self-help buzzword. So many of today’s books teach us how to “live in the moment” and observe what’s happening without judgment. Moreover, research shows that practicing mindfulness improves your physical and mental health, makes life feel more meaningful and might even make your brain grow.

So why aren’t we more mindful?

So, what’s the opposite of mindfulness? That would be mindlessness, which includes everything from absentmindedness to impulsive behavior to intuition. In other words, it’s acting without preliminary consideration.

But why would anyone want to act mindlessly?