THE UPSIDE OF YOUR DARKSIDE: Why Being Your Whole Self- Not Just Your "Good" Self- Drives Success and Fulfillment
MIND MAP BOOK HIGHLIGHT
By Andrea Seydel | Live Life Happy | (link)
Mind Map Free - Free Mind Mapping Software | MindMeister (link)
Introduction
Todd Kashdan, Ph. D and Robert Biswas-Diener, offer a BOLD stance Saying the modern quest for happiness through mindfulness, positivity, and optimism is FLAWED.
Positive emotions can take us far, but it turns out that we need the emotions that make us uncomfortable. ALL EMOTIONS IMPORTANT!! For example Anger can make us creative. Selfishness can make us brave. And Guild is a highly effective motivator.
The KEY lies in emotional, social and mental AGILITY-the ability to access our full range of emotions and behaviours- NOT JUST THE GOOD ONES- In order to respond more effectively to situations. ARE YOU READY TO MOVE FROM FALSE HAPPINESS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR POTENTIAL WITH THIS REALITY CHECK?
OVERVIEW
The authors challenge that accumulating feeling that feel good right now and avoiding emotions that feel unpleasant right now... is not the best strategy for living well. They called this- False Happiness. OFFERS THE PROMISE OF WHOLENESS: Great skills in negotiating ALL that life serves up. Emotional Agility from the bright side or the dark side. It is about becoming comfortable with experiencing mixed emotions (both happy and sad) about work, relationships, and any situation you enter. Science shows it is important to develop the capacity to experience both positive and negative emotions about our lives in order to gain well-being.
NOT ABOUT AVOIDING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS, BUT TO TAKE THE NEGATIVE OUT OF THEM.
COMFORT CLASS
The popular view of discomfort is internal, unpleasant, and often unmanageable. We as population have a widespread uneasiness with discomfort. Comfort is embedded in our culture. CULTURAL!!
Avoiding uncomfortable yet USEFUL STATES keeps us from reaching our full potential. We have a comfort addiction in modern society. Access to all kinds of comfort nowadays, we start to view discomfort as toxic, unmanageable, and intolerable.
Science has shown that there is benefit in emotional discomfort, the positive consequences of difficult cognitive states. We need to get better able to tolerate unpleasant emotions instead of avoiding or suppressing feeling. With an ADDICITION TO COMFORT we develop a Positivity BIAS.
WHAT EMOTIONS FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE TO YOU? WHAT EMOTION DO YOU NOTICE YOU AVOID?
WHAT IS SO GOOD ABOUT FEELING BAD?
Emotional expressions exist for reasons! Emotional expressions are important ways in which we communicate with others. THREE TYPICAL DREADED EMOTIONS: ANGER, GULIT & SHAME, ANXIETY.
Avoiding negative states, can make us miss out on valuable information like: Fear in a situation where physical harm is possible. Feel the thrust of anger when you need to stick up for your children. Feel Frustration when you make inadequate progression on your goals. Regret telling some one something bad.
These emotions signal that something isn't going right and needs your attention. These emotions give us courage, regulate our behaviour, keep us alert to our surroundings, and recharge our energy.
ACTION TIP: Abandon the notion of labelling emotions as exclusively positive or negative and instead, target what is healthy or unhealthy in a situation. Remember Guilt is not shame, anger is not rage, and anxiety is not panic. BUT RATHER beneficial information that focuses attention, thinking and behaviour towards effective outcomes.
BONUS TIP: Become Defensively Pessimistic: Rather than holding a perpetually sunny outlook and avoiding negative thoughts and feelings, defensive pessimist all themselves to imagine how they will feel if things turn out badly. By imagining worst-case scenarios, defensive pessimist transform their anxiety into action, implementing plans that can mitigate disaster. DEVELOP A GROWTH MINDSET around threat or challenge.
In positive psychology we talk about the RESILIENCE FACTOR and flexible, accurate thinking strategies, catch thinking traps, reframe mindset, explanatory style. This book encourages us to use these resiliency skills to work through emotions.
WHEN HAVE UNCOMFORTABLE FEELINGS PROTECTED YOU?
HOW POSITIVE EMOTIONS CAN BE A DOWNFALL
What can I do to be happier? There is a clear universal assumption that happiness is desirable. A FEVER FOR HAPPINESS! Happiness is a feeling, whether you call it joy, enthusiasm, or contentment. A happy person is someone who lives through frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions.
RESEARCH FINDINGS: 1. Happiness can interfere with long term success. Happy people are less persuasive, too trusting, lazy thinkers, 2. The pursuit of happiness sometime backfires. Anticipation is too great. Over valuing happiness leads to unhappiness. 3. Sometimes people want to feel bad. Certain situations call for feelings and behaviours that deviate from happiness. 4. And someone else's happiness can impair your performance. Happiness leads to big picture thinking, and unhappiness leads to detailed oriented thinking.
ACTION TIP: View happy thoughts and feelings as a thermostat telling you how things are going. Get out of your head and into your life to be happy. Avoid trying desperately to seek the positive and avoid the negative. Claim the benefits of unhappy states by tolerating, appreciating and finding them.
MINDFULLNESS OBSESSION: Harness Autopilot- to save mental resources. Act on impulse- to avoid mental depletion Sleep on it then make an intuitive decision, Mindlessness can be beneficial- better decisions. We are naturally predisposed to mindlessness.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SITUATION WHERE POSITIVE EMOTIONS BECAME A DOWN FALL? Pushy co-worker gets a raise, you don't?
SUMMARY
This book took us on a tour, based from science, to show why our culture's approach to perusal happen requires radical revision and how we need to go about it.
MAIN POINTS: 1. Comfort addiction results in lower immunity to negative experiences. 2. Negative emotions are an under appreciated resource. 3. The pursuit of happiness can weaken you. 4. Mindlessness can be beneficial.
This book taught us that It's time to shift from the obsession with happiness to adopting a broader definition of success. CHALLENGE YOUR POSITIVITY BIAS!! We tend to inflate the goodness of everything. Use defensive pessimism to challenge positivity bias. EMBRACE YOUR DARK SIDE.
For a full book highlight and worksheet go to: andreaseydel.com
For Book Link: https://amzn.to/2UKYgMi
For Podcast : https://apple.co/2LItU8b