When you’re feeling down, chances are the thoughts of being happy are the farthest thing from your mind. Perhaps you’ve had a frustrating experience with an online form, beginning with your internet going down to the website itself having technical difficulties. You’re ready to throw something at the computer as you feel the rage building up inside you. Why, oh why, you wonder, can’t you just let it go and keep your emotions in check?
Yet, at other times, you’ve felt the exact opposite set of emotions as joy floods your brain when a friend sends you a text full of happy emoticons, raving over the great time the two of you had together the night before. The world indeed seems like a happy place.
Although the “ups” are great in and of themselves, might be healthier for you to be able to keep an even keel? When you get upset, wouldn’t life be calmer if you could stoically face the problem instead of “losing it” completely?
The Possible Benefits of Psychological Flexibility according to Dartmouth College’s Robert Klein and colleagues (2023), prior research does suggest that emotionally intense reactions to life’s experiences may be a sign of psychopathology. However, countering that notion are “theoretical perspectives suggesting that healthy emotional systems should produce robust emotional reactions to normatively pleasant or unpleasant stimuli”. These reactions, the authors go on to note, could help individuals cope more adaptively with those stimuli, the good and the bad.
Adaptively responding to highs and lows in life is part of a general quality the Dartmouth authors refer to as “psychological flexibility.” Not only are the psychologically flexible better able to steer around emotional twists and turns in life, but they are also better able to cope more generally with situations that require shifting mindsets when problems require new solutions. Even more importantly, psychologically flexible people can “experience reality as it is”.
There is one provision for the potential benefits of psychological flexibility, and that relates to the duration of an emotional reaction. If you continue to dwell, at some moderate level of annoyance, on that frustrating online encounter, the potential benefits of your anger could dwindle away. Intense but brief reactions, Klein et al. argue, they represent an ideal way to engage your coping mechanisms.
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