Susan David

Susan David is a South African-born Harvard psychologist whose book Emotional Agility argues for a flexible, values-driven approach to difficult thoughts and feelings.

Susan David is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School whose work focuses on emotions, resilience, and human flourishing. Emotional Agility, published in 2016, grew from her research into how people relate to their inner lives — and from her observation that most popular self-help advice gets this badly wrong. The book argues against both emotional suppression (pushing feelings away) and emotional hijacking (being controlled by them), proposing instead a middle path in which people learn to notice their thoughts and feelings with curiosity rather than judgment, and make decisions aligned with their deeper values.

The framework has genuine psychological backing — David’s ideas draw on acceptance and commitment therapy as well as broader research on motivation and well-being — and the book is more rigorously grounded than much of the self-help genre. Her writing is accessible and often moving; she opens with her own experience of childhood grief in apartheid South Africa, which gives the abstract concepts personal weight. Some readers find the book too long for the core insight it delivers, and the later chapters on workplace applications can feel thin compared to the personal material.

Emotional Agility is most valuable for readers who have found either rigid emotional control or relentless positivity to be exhausting and unsatisfying. David’s insistence that difficult emotions contain information worth attending to — rather than problems to be solved or suppressed — is both sensible and genuinely freeing.