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The Upside of Your Dark Side summary

Name: The Upside of Your Dark Side
Rating: 4 (248 reviews)
Author: Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener

Todd Kashdan Robert Biswas-Diener

Why Being Your Whole Self – Not Just Your “Good” Self – Drives Success and Fulfillment

4 (248 ratings)

23 mins

Brief summary

The Upside of Your Dark Side by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener challenges the idea that we should always strive to be positive. The authors argue that embracing negative emotions can lead to creativity, resilience, and personal growth.

Topics

Personality Manipulation

Table of Contents

The Upside of Your Dark Side
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Discover why it’s good to be a little bad.

For many decades, clinical psychologists have explored human weakness and the causes of emotional suffering. With the rise of positive psychology, the focus began to shift from avoiding pain to pursuing happiness through attempts at obtaining the good life.

As you’ll soon discover, happiness isn’t everything. In fact, by obsessing over happiness at the expense of our other, darker emotions, we actually do ourselves a great disservice.

Indeed, the so-called “good life” can never be achieved without the benefits that come from emotional pain, bad feelings and the dark sides of the human condition.

In these binks, you’ll learn all about how negative emotions can actually lead to greater insights, stronger leadership and a more successful life.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why you’d be much better off with an angry lawyer by your side than a happy one;
why an anxious person is more likely to notice a fire on a train; and
how a dash of psychopathy is one of a potential president’s greatest character traits.

Your happiness can interfere with your performance and accuracy.

Nowadays, management goes by the mantra that an upbeat mood translates to business success. But while mirthful and content people do get better customer and supervisor evaluations, that doesn’t objectively mean that they are performing better.

For instance, while they might be likeable, happy people are less persuasive.

If you want to persuade others, then you have to communicate your message in a detailed and concrete way. However, happy people tend to focus on the big picture at the expense of the tiny details. Consequently, their arguments are less nuanced and concrete.

Indeed, this can be seen in a number of studies on the persuasiveness of upbeat people:

In these studies, “happy” and “unhappy” people were asked to create arguments about issues ranging from the allocation of tax dollars to the existence of soul mates. In all these studies, unhappy people’s reasoning was judged as 25-percent more convincing than those of happier participants.

What’s more, happy people are more easily deceived and more likely to “recall” false facts than others.

As we’ve already seen, people tend to be less interested in details when they’re happy. But if you want to spot deceit, then you’ll have to look for very subtle cues. This became obvious in one study in which participants were asked to identify liars and honest people in a series of videotapes:

The tapes showed people denying that they had stolen something, only half of whom were telling the truth. Happy participants were able to identify the liars only 49 percent of the time, while unhappy people detected 62 percent of the frauds.

In other experiments in which people had to recall facts or words they’d been presented with before, the happiest among them were the most prone to “recall” items they hadn’t even been shown!

Clearly, happy people are both less persuasive and more gullible. So, how happy do you want your lawyer to be?

The pursuit of happiness can keep you from being happy.

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.

Anxiety enables us to react quickly in the face of danger.

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:

Anger can enhance your creativity and increase your authority.

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.

Guilt can turn us into better people. Shame, on the other hand, is not so helpful.

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.

Narcissistic traits can make you productive, creative and successful.

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!

Psychopathic traits can make you a “better” leader.

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.

We can’t be mindful about everything.

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?

Mindless processing can lead to superior performance and better decisions.

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?

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What is The Upside of Your Dark Side about?

The Upside of Your Dark Side looks into the darkest depths of the human psyche, only to discover that the painful emotions that we often wish we could just make go away – anger, anxiety, guilt – are sometimes the key to our success. Backed by many fascinating scientific studies, The Upside of Your Dark Side makes it clear that psychological health means wholeness rather than happiness.

The Upside of Your Dark Side Review

The Upside of Your Dark Side (2014) explores the benefits of our negative emotions and urges readers to embrace their full range of feelings. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It challenges the conventional belief that negative emotions are inherently bad, providing thought-provoking insights into how they can be harnessed for personal growth.
Backed by scientific research and real-life examples, the book offers a fresh perspective on self-improvement, showing that the full range of human emotions is essential for a balanced life.
By encouraging readers to embrace their dark side, the book promotes authenticity and offers a path towards greater self-acceptance and fulfillment.

Best quote from The Upside of Your Dark Side

You need an anxious person on your team.

—Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener

Who should read The Upside of Your Dark Side?

Anyone who’s fed up with the happiness-hype in popular psychology
Anyone who tries to bottle up his or her negative emotions
Anyone interested in psychology

About the Author

Professor Todd Kashdan is a widely recognized expert on anxiety, self-regulation and well-being, who has published more than 150 scholarly articles. In addition to working as a public speaker, he has also won numerous academic awards and wrote the critically acclaimed book Curious.

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is a positive psychologist who has published numerous scholarly articles and conducted research all around the world. He is currently the managing director of Positive Acorn, and his book Happiness won the PROSE Award in 2008.

Categories with The Upside of Your Dark Side

Psychology Mindfulness & Happiness Motivation & Inspiration

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