We can’t be happy all of the time, nor should we try. The positive psychology movement has snowballed in recent years, and may be encouraging us to pursue more shallow and ultimately less fulfilling lives. “Enough already” seems to be the message a new book, The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self- Not Just Your “Good” Self- Drives Success and Fulfillment, by Ph.D. psychologist Todd Kashdan and Dr. of Philosophy Robert Biswas-Diener. Our “negative” emotions such as sadness, anger, and anxiety allow us to be whole and often contribute to constructive end results, explain the authors.
I discovered The Upside of Your Dark Side when I attended a presentation by one of its authors, Dr. Kashdan, at the Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University, where he is a professor of psychology. During his engaging humorous speech, Dr. Kashdan articulated much of what has been irking me about the ballooning positive psychology movement. Certainly we all prefer feelings of happiness to sadness or fear, but isn’t there a higher purpose to life than feeling warm and fuzzy? What about our actions and what we ultimately contribute to society?
According to Kashdan and his co-author Robert Biswas-Diener, the “comfort addiction” began in earnest in the 1990s, during a time of relative peace and prosperity. This is also when the phrase “comfort food” came into use. “We began seeing happiness not as a desirable goal but as a moral imperative,” the authors write.
We have become so uncomfortable with being uncomfortable that we are suppressing a number of “negative” emotions that can be helpful to our well-being and goal achievement. Kashdan and Biswas-Diener give numerous examples of this in their book. Guilt signals us to re-evaluate and make repairs, anger often fuels necessary action, and anxiety alerts us to potential dangers to be prevented.
We have heard that happy people get along better with others, have better marriages and are more likely to be promoted at work. But happy people can also be gullible and be lazy thinkers. We often need to sacrifice some short-term happiness to achieve long-term goals. Sometimes hard things need to be done, and while hard things can be done with a positive mind set, there are also times when eruptions of frustration or dismay let others know when they’ve pushed us too far. Or in the greater context of society, it is often anger that fuels a much-needed revolution. Would the civil rights movement have prevailed if everyone was turning the other cheek and smelling the roses instead of doing the difficult dangerous work that was required to achieve lasting improvements to society?
Just as too much happiness can have a downside of lulling us into complacency, some dark states have a positive flip side as well. The benevolent side of narcissism is self-assuredness, and of dominance is leadership. In The Upside of Your Dark Side, the authors are quick to point out that none of this excuses us from being kind and courteous and helpful to others. It is rather an acknowledgment of our complexity as human beings and encouragement to embrace that complexity.
We need to become a little more comfortable with discomfort, allow ourselves to experience unpleasant emotions and situations in the pursuit of being more whole and aware. Because true happiness is different from comfort or pleasure. “Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing,” according to writer George A. Sheehan. In other words, it might take some unpleasantness to get there.
