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Overview

For many years, clinical psychologists have been researching the causes of emotional suffering. With the rise of positive psychology, there’s a focus on how to achieve happiness through various methods.

Happiness is not everything. In fact, by obsessing over happiness at the expense of our other emotions, we actually do ourselves a great disservice.

The good life can never be achieved without the benefits that come from emotional pain, bad feelings and the dark sides of human nature.

In this book, you’ll learn how negative emotions can lead to greater insights and leadership skills. You will also learn why an angry lawyer is better than a happy one or someone who has anxiety. Finally, the book tells us that psychopathy might be good for certain people in power positions.

Big Idea #1: Your happiness can interfere with your performance and accuracy.

Managers try to keep their employees happy by telling them that a positive attitude leads to success. However, this is not always true because people who are in a good mood may get better evaluations from customers and supervisors, but it does not mean they are actually performing well.

For example, people who are naturally happy may not be as persuasive. They focus on the big picture and don’t pay attention to details. Consequently, they’re less convincing in their arguments than those who aren’t happy but can keep track of all the facts.

Studies have shown that happy people are more gullible and less persuasive. How can you tell if someone is telling the truth? You need to look for subtle cues, like how they react when questioned about their honesty. In one study, participants watched videos of people denying that they stole something. Happy participants were able to detect frauds only 49 percent of the time; unhappy people detected 62 percent of them. Other studies showed that happy people recalled things they had not seen before as well as being more easily deceived by others than other groups of participants in experiments. So, it’s important to keep your lawyer from being too happy!

Big Idea #2: The pursuit of happiness can keep you from being happy.

Happiness is great, and it’s only natural to want more of it. The problem is that when people try too hard to be happy, they end up less happy than those who don’t focus on happiness. For example, one study divided participants into groups before listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. One group was told to raise their happiness levels while listening (in other words, increase the pleasure from listening), and the other group wasn’t given any instructions but just listened normally.

People who just listened to the music in a study were happier than those who tried to be happy and evaluate their happiness.

The study shows that happiness is fleeting. Just like a bar of soap in the tub, you can’t hold onto it for very long.

Furthermore, focusing on being happy can make you unhappy in the long run. Focusing on your own happiness is self-centered and this myopic focus distracts you from other people’s needs. This can interfere with relationships.

For example, if you want to increase your happiness and avoid negative emotions, you might avoid contact with a troubled friend. This will cause the other person to feel less connected with you. The longer this continues, the more likely it is that they’ll choose not to be around you. In fact, research indicates that people who value pursuing positive thoughts actually feel lonelier than others do.

Relationships are important in our lives. They make us happy, but paradoxically, they can also be the source of unhappiness if we don’t value happiness over relationships.