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 it 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” (p. 911). 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” (p. 911).

There is one proviso to 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, represent an ideal way to engage your coping mechanisms.

Testing Psychological Flexibility’s Advantages

Across a series of five studies, all on college undergraduates, the Dartmouth researchers tested the relationship to well-being of peak emotional reactivity to positive and negative stimuli. In three of the studies, the method to test emotional reactivity, called the Dynamic Affective Reactivity Test (DART), involved asking participants to rate their emotions in response to images designed to evoke positive and negative emotions (e.g., cute animals vs. crime scene photos). In one variant of this task, participants rated how far they would like to be from the item shown in the stimulus.

It was then possible, with responses to the emotion rating scale tasks, to relate daily variations in well-being with the range of emotions the participants reported while in the image viewing task in the lab. The findings across all studies supported the psychological flexibility theory, indicating not only that people with greater variability in emotional highs and lows were happier and more satisfied across the daily assessments but also that they seemed better able to make choices to maximize their positive emotions. This adaptive ability was tested in a variant of the experiment, asking participants which stimuli they would like to spend more time viewing. The results showed that rather than expose themselves equally to uplifting and depressing images, those with greater emotional variability could make happier choices or show what the authors called “affect rationality” (p. 920).

How to Become a Psychologically Flexible Person

Now that you may be ready to toss aside the view that emotional reactivity is a state you should avoid, the question becomes how you could enter this new world of psychological flexibility. One key suggestion the authors propose is that you do exactly the opposite of what you might suppose is needed. That is, instead of avoiding situations that could make you unhappy or fearful, you give yourself some practice in adjusting your emotions to whatever comes your way. When that computer treats you badly, the answer isn’t to avoid computers altogether but to allow the anger to wash over you and then return to the problem with a cleaner and fresher approach.

In the process, the second route to psychological flexibility can come into play. Klein and his collaborators connect their findings to the tradition in psychological intervention of mindfulness and acceptance commitment therapy. In these approaches, you don’t drive away, but notice your emotions and embrace them as part of your full human experience. In the words of the authors, their findings “highlight the important role that context-appropriate emotional reactions are likely to play in this form of behavioral governance” (p. 922).

When it comes to psychological flexibility, then, practice makes perfect. You also don’t have to stop at emotional flexibility. There are ample opportunities to gain expertise in thinking outside the box, from word fluency puzzles to creative thinking exercises. Even if you don’t like games, take advantage of any chance you can to avoid becoming fixated in one particular way of approaching a problem. So what if you’ve always scrambled your eggs by mixing them in a bowl first? Why not try scrambling them in the pan for a change?

To sum up, new ways of reacting to the world in general can help strengthen your flexibility in ways beneficial to your mental health. Life’s downs aren’t as pleasant as its ups, but by allowing yourself to feel both, you can move on to more satisfying and fulfilling experiences.