Since the modern world encourages us to pursue happiness, the topic of positivity has never received as much attention as it does today. Books on self-care and achieving happiness have made billions of dollars in profits, and you can find quotes on this topic almost anywhere on the Internet.
Nowadays, you can hire a mentor or a life coach to help you stay positive or practice mindfulness meditation (a form of meditation that involves intense concentration on the present). Or, simply, you can use one of the many apps on your smartphone that can help you achieve happiness. Therefore, it is no surprise that the US Army started instructing its more than one million soldiers in positive psychology and that UK schools are including positivity classes in their curriculum.
It has come to the point that people's well-being is now measured through happiness, and it is safe to say that the indicator of happiness has become as important as the gross national income. However, pessimism has its own advantages too. In fact, pessimists can be excellent negotiators and witty decision-makers, and they have a lower risk of having a heart attack. In addition, Pessimists may have more stable marriages, higher incomes, and a longer life, even though they expect the opposite.
On the other hand, being positive comes with high risks. As it drains your energy and undermines your attention to detail, making you naïve and self-centered. It is well known that positivity encourages excessive drinking, overeating, and impulsive involvement in potentially abusive relationships.
In the midst of all of this, the notion that our feelings are adaptive emerges. Anger, sadness, and pessimism are not necessarily negative or unfortunate at all. As humans, we have evolved these psychological reactions to serve specific functions and help us thrive.
Let us take anger as an example, from Newton's grudges and obsessions to Beethoven's tantrums that made him break down more than once. It seems that geniuses are bound to experience intense feelings of sadness, anger, and more, even though they don't last long. Silicon Valley’s community is full of similar examples. For instance, Jeff Bezos, the founder of the Amazon website, is renowned for his irrational anger and insult-hurling behavior. However, this didn't stop him from founding a $300 billion company.
Creativity is your ability to shift your perspective
For years, the relationship between anger and creativity remained ambiguous. Right up until Matthijs Baas, the professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, looked deeper into it. Matthijs and his team provoked a group of students in a way that served this study's scientific purposes.
He asked half of the students to recall an upsetting experience and write an article about it. Matthijs reported that this made them somewhat angry, but not to the point where they totally lost their temper, while the other half expressed feelings of sadness.
Following that, the two groups of students were put against each other in a creative thinking test. They were given 16 minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible to improve education at Amsterdam University's Department of Psychology.
As Professor Baas predicted, angry students came up with more creative ideas, at least at the beginning of the test. Moreover, their concepts were original, and less than 1% of the ideas they generated were repeated. Undoubtedly, angry participants were better at unstructured innovation, and this can be illustrated by the following example:
Let’s assume that you were asked to consider the potential uses of construction blocks. The person who follows a methodological approach, i.e., the organized person, may come up with 10 uses, all of which are related to construction. They won't be able to think of building blocks as weapons, though, unless they adopt an illogical, alternate way of thinking.
The essence of creativity lies in your ability to shift your perspective. In fight-or-flight situations, illogical thinking is more capable of developing solutions that save the day.
Baas states, expounding this relationship, “Anger primes the body to sharpen its energies because it indicates that something is wrong and that you need to find a way out of the situation.” In order to understand this mechanism, we must understand what happens in the brain when we get angry. First, like all feelings, anger starts in the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped particle in the brain that is in charge of determining what poses a threat to our safety. Since it is so sensitive to dangers, it can warn us of their presence long before they actually materialize and send the alert up to the level of consciousness.
However, anger depends on the chemical signals that are provoked in the brain. When the adrenaline reaches a high level, it provokes an overwhelming feeling of anger accompanied by a physical and emotional outburst that lasts for several minutes. The rate of breathing accelerates, the heart rate increases, and the blood pressure rises significantly.
One of the most obvious and recognizable signs of anger is the reddening of the face and swelling of the temporal and frontal veins, which occur when blood rushes to the extremities.
However, despite the common belief that anger is a psychological emotion that evolved mainly to make us aggressive, this physiological response has other benefits. It boosts our motivation and makes us more willing to take potential risks. All of these physiological changes are very beneficial, no matter how much risk you take, as long as you vent your anger.
Of course, in certain situations, expressing your anger may make some people uncomfortable, but immediately after doing so, your blood pressure should return to normal. As it is known, suppressing your anger has much more dangerous consequences than venting it out.
The notion that suppressed feelings are bad for your health is old-fashioned. The Greek philosopher Aristotle is one of the main advocates of venting. He believed that tragedy plays made the spectators experience feelings of sadness, anger, and catharsis.
Moreover, in an optimal environment and by interacting with these plays, the audience gets rid of these feelings all at once. His philosophy was later adopted by the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, who modified this method of venting. Freud used a technique based on making the patients lie on the couch and express everything they felt.
In 2010, a group of scientists decided to dig deeper. They conducted a survey that included 644 people who suffer from coronary artery disease in order to determine their level of anger and the extent of their distress. The scientists followed up on these cases for a period ranging from 5 to 10 years, depending on each case.
During this study, 20% of them experienced an acute heart attack, and 9% of them died. As preliminary evidence suggested, it seemed that anger in both catharsis and suppression increased the risk of a heart attack. Nevertheless, after monitoring other factors, the researchers realized that anger itself has no effect. Yet, suppression increases the likelihood of having a heart attack by about three times, and the reason behind this is still unknown. Other studies have shown that suppressing anger can lead to chronic high blood pressure.
The benefits are not limited to health-related factors. Rather, anger can enhance your negotiation abilities. A person's perception that someone doesn't value his interests as much as he should is what suddenly makes them aggressive. Hence, means of pressure such as physical violence and the recovery of benefits in terms of loyalty, friendship, and financial benefits are used to make the other party realize his mistake.
What supports the validity of this theory is the expression of annoyance when we get angry. Studies indicate that these gestures and expressions that appear on our faces are not random at all. They occur precisely to make us appear physically stronger in the eyes of our opponent.
If you comprehend this mechanism correctly, it can help you gain others' respect and improve your position in negotiations. In fact, this is one of the traditional ways to get the best outcomes in negotiations.
Additionally, scientists ascertain that anger can enhance social and language skills, improve our memory, and make us seem more persuasive. Joseph Forgas, one of the leading researchers in the relationship between emotions and behavior for more than four decades, states, “A bad mood indicates that we are in an uncertain and difficult situation and prompts us to think in a more alert manner, paying attention to details and noticing the subtleties of things.”
Other studies conducted in similar contexts showed that feelings of frustration enhance our awareness of social cues. Interestingly, it prompts us to act in a fairer manner toward others.
Tough but fair
Although happiness is always seen as a virtue, being happy doesn't necessarily bring the benefits we imagine.
In one of the studies, the feelings of the volunteers varied between disgust, sadness, anger, happiness, and strangeness, and sometimes they had neutral feelings. Then, they got involved in the ultimatum game. It is an experiment in which the first player gets some money and is asked how he wants to share the money with others, and the latter decides whether he agrees or refuses, and in the event of rejection, neither of them gets the money.
This experiment is often used in psychology to test our sense of fairness by showing whether the other player expects to get half of the amount the first player has or whether he is content with the idea that everyone has the money for himself. Surprisingly, all of the negative emotions led to the second player rejecting the unfair division, which means that these feelings reinforce our desire for justice and to treat everyone equally.
Another experiment exposes that this state is not coincidental. For example, the dictator game has the same rules except that the second player has no say in the matter at all. Rather, he is forced to accept how the first player divides the money. This shows that happier players tend to be more selfish, while those to have more grim moods are actually less selfish.
Forgas says, "Frustrated people pay more attention to external social norms and act more fairly towards others."
Happiness in some situations carries more dangerous caveats, and it is related to the Oxytocin hormone, known as the happiness hormone. Some studies have shown that this hormone reduces our ability to identify threats. In prehistoric times, happiness made our ancestors vulnerable to predators, but today it lowers our guard against the dangers of modern life such as alcoholism, overeating, and abusive relationships.
Forgas continues, “Our brains perceive happiness as a safety indicator. After that, we stop paying attention to potential threats in our surrounding environment.” Those who are always happy may miss important signals in their immediate environment, and alternately, they excessively rely on their previous knowledge, which could affect the way they assess the situation.
In one of the studies conducted by Forgas and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Australia, a group of volunteers was gathered in a laboratory. Their moods were modified to feel happy or sad by making them watch a collection of films. Afterward, they were asked to give their take on the credibility of some recent rumors such as the notion that electric currents cause leukemia and the CIA’s assassination of President John Kennedy.
The results demonstrated that contented individuals were less skeptical and more receptive to naive believability. Subsequently, Forgas used a shooting game to examine whether having a good mood drives people to rely on stereotypes in making their decisions. As Forgas predicted, happy participants had the tendency to target the characters who wear turbans because they stereotypically associate them with terrorism.
As for optimism, it is as negative as happiness in terms of its results. Positive expectations can be completely at odds with motivation, so we need to get things done.
Gabriel Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University, says, “Positivity leads individuals to believe that they have achieved a lot, so they lay back and don’t put in the required effort to materialize positive expectations into reality."
For instance, fresh graduates who have unrealistic expectations for their future success, end up achieving fewer financial and professional goals than others. Likewise, patients who envision a rapid recovery experience a slower recovery. Oettingen proved in many of her studies that the more we imagine what we dream of, the less probability of achieving any of it.
Therefore, the notion of dreaming of something that will actually make it happen turns out to be false. In fact, excessive optimism is a problem. It will thwart smokers' attempts to give up smoking and prevent obese people from losing weight.
Defensive pessimism
The most alarming idea of Oettingen’s assertions is that the dangers of optimism can extend to affect society as a whole, not only individuals.
USA Today newspaper published a comparison, in which they tracked and monitored economic performance over a week, and then within a month. They came to the conclusion that the more optimistic the content of the newspaper, the more the economic performance declines. Then, they tracked presidential inaugural addresses in the United States and found that positive speeches were followed by significant declines in employment rates and gross domestic product.
After all these negative results, it becomes a mistake to lean towards optimism and to believe that you are less likely to make the mistakes that others make, because this will undoubtedly lead to bad results.
Instead, you must abandon the unrealistically optimistic view and see reality with an objective view. This is called "defensive pessimism," or what can be described in Murphy's Law, which is one of the inevitable laws, stating that "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
The benefit is that by anticipating the worst, you will be prepared to handle it when it actually occurs. The following example will help to demonstrate how this law operates: Say you are giving a presentation in the workplace. All you have to do, according to Murphy's Law, is think about the worst possible scenarios. For example, you may stumble while going up to the stage, forget your hard disk that contains the information you need, or have other technical problems, perhaps having to answer embarrassing questions. Of course, there is a lot to expect, depending on your level of pessimism.
Anyhow, whatever the situation you imagine, you must remember it well and try to figure out a solution to overcome it.
Psychologist July Norem from Wellesley College is an expert in pessimism. She comments on this matter: “I am a little bit clumsy, especially when I feel nervous. So, I make sure to wear low heel shoes when I am giving a lecture. I come early to the auditorium to determine the width of the stage and to make sure that there are no wires I might stumble on. I usually have a backup hard, but of course, I can do without it if I had to. Also, I send a copy of the lecture to the organizers by email, or I keep a copy with me in my memory card and bring my laptop along to play it on. Better safe than sorry.”
In conclusion
The next time someone tells you to be optimistic, defend your pessimism. Tell them that the world around us requires a logical person to worry and that those who laugh a lot, cry last. Be one of those who see the world as bleak at first until you get the results that really call you to be happy.
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