Psychological Flexibility and Why It Matters
Read time: 6 minutes
Word count: 1375
Hey friends.
Lately, I have been struggling. When I say lately I mean almost every day. I have a bad habit of spiraling. What is spiraling? For me, it’s the consumption of negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions that lead me down a rabbit hole or spiral of negative self-belief and a state of creative hopelessness.
Entering this state of creative hopelessness is too easy for me. I want to change that. I find myself unable to “get out of my head” when I am faced with a difficult situation. Instead, I am controlled by my ego and my default avoidance or shame behaviors that lead me to feel powerless, discouraged, sad, shame, or guilty about my experience or the thoughts and feelings that arise. I have difficulty allowing certain emotions to pass over me like gentle waves rather I feel everything as if it were a tsunami.
In the past few months, I have been studying ways to create psychological flexibility and encourage more waves and fewer tsunamis. Let’s dive in.
What is Psychological Flexibility and Inflexibility?
To sum it up:
Psychological Flexibility is the ability to be open, curious, and present about our experience or situation in order to navigate stressful situations.
Someone in this pattern might tend to:
Be open and curious to new ideas
Be able to clarify values, set goals and take action
Be able to handle difficult situations or experiences
Be able to find joy and peace and happiness for oneself and toward others
Psychological Inflexibility is the capacity to be rigidly focused on rules, customs, or emotional states that lead to assumptions, projection, and blame which negatively impact one’s ability to handle difficult or stressful situations.
Someone in this pattern might tend to:
Hide emotions and unwanted feelings
Avoid negative thoughts by engaging in numbing behaviors
Suppress positive emotions
Think in rigid binaries (Yes or No thinking)
Look to control thoughts, feelings, or emotions
Inflexibility as you might have guessed, leads to creative hopelessness, powerlessness, and higher rates of anxiety and depressive thoughts. Flexibility leads to greater well-being and quality of life.
How to Cultivate Psychological Flexibility in Daily Life
There are 3 keys to creating a better quality of life for yourself using psychological flexibility and enhancing your overall state and well-being.
Key 1: Be Present
When we are not grounded in the present moment our world can become rooted in chaos. If we dwell in the past we have thoughts, feelings, and emotions about what we didn’t do or how things should have been, or what we regret or wished we had done. This can lead to a ruminative response style where a person continually holds looping patterns of negative thoughts that keeps them in a state of passive rumination and displaces them from their environment. This response style can lead to avoidance behaviors and depression.
Another issue when we are focused too much on the past or future instead of the present moment involves stereotyping. Humans are hardwired to classify information based on cues and heuristics or stereotypes. We use classifications to judge values, people, companies, work, relationships, and ourselves. When a person relies too much on stereotypes to explain or justify their current state of being or identity it leads to a pattern of confirmation bias toward negative events and outcomes leading a person into a spiraled state of hopelessness.
To break free of these patterns one needs to get back in touch with the present moment. Here’s how:
Sit upright in a chair or on the floor
close your eyes or keep them open
focus on your inhale and your exhale
can you feel your belly expand and contract?
stay here, controlling your breath
if it helps, use a count (5 seconds inhale, 5-second hold, 5 seconds exhale)
stay focused on your breath for 4 minutes, can you hold your attention?
can you catch your thoughts before they happen?
Reflect: How successful were you in this practice? Did your mind immediately wander? Did your mind have resistance to doing this mindfulness practice? Why or why not?
Being present is about becoming an observer. When we let ourselves observe the mind and our thoughts, we gain a different perspective on their weight in our world. By focusing on the body and the breath we are able to see that our thoughts are merely distractions from the present moment.
Key 2: Open Up
If that practice of being present and mindful of the breath was difficult take a moment to reflect. Ask yourself:
Was I consumed by thought?
Did my attention fade quickly or was I able to hold focus?
What thoughts did my mind wander to?
Was it hard to stop my thoughts from coming?
What made the practice difficult or was it easy?
Did it help to close my eyes or keep them open?
Did my thoughts about the practice influence my ability to do the practice?
Why did I struggle to just breathe?
The key to answering these questions is to understand that it is okay to have thoughts arise. Acknowledge and accept that you might have had intrusive thoughts arise when you wanted to simply focus on your breath and body. It is okay to be thinking. However, ask yourself: “Is this thought helping me create a full and meaningful life?” or “Is this thought working to give me the life I want?”
If it is not helping, let that thought go. Are you now having thoughts about how annoying your thoughts were when you were trying to be present? Let those thoughts go too.
Our thoughts do not define us or our beliefs, they are merely patterns that we observe and change when they are no longer helping us succeed
When we fuse to our thoughts and adopt them as identities, character traits, or personalities we find ourselves saying things like:
“I am an anxious person, that’s just me”
“I am happy only when I am not alone”
“Things won’t get better for me because they never have”
Fusion to thoughts leads to inflexible thinking and difficulty adapting to situations that require us to think in different capacities about ourselves and others. When we are fused to thoughts, rules, stereotypes, or judgments about people, the world, or ourselves we lose the capacity to handle stress as we remain close-minded. In this state, we lose our sense of values, goals, and directions. Everything becomes THAT much harder to deal with.
In this stage, we must be curious about the thoughts that we hold. The key to opening up is questioning why we had that thought in the first place. Do not beat yourself up for the thought, because it is not you. Allow all thoughts to enter our mind and but be curious as to why they are coming and which ones you let go and keep.
Key 3: Do What Matters
In this last key, we take one step closer to finding clarity and taking the first actionable steps toward change.
Finding clarity about life is all about asking yourself questions. Take a moment, maybe a few, to answer the questions below:
What do you want to stand for?
What do I want more of in my life?
What do I want less of in my life?
If I decided to live my life fully, what would it look like?
What does my life look like 5 years from now if everything goes right?
What is one small step I could take in the direction I want to go?
Once you have better clarity on the values you hold ask yourself:
How can I show up every day to live in this value?
Start today.
Live boldly, live in acceptance, live in balance.
Iz
P.S. The resources I used for this post are here below.
Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health.Clinical psychology review, 30(7), 865–878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001
Harris, R. (2019). ACT made simple: An easy-to-read primer on acceptance and commitment therapy (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.
I would highly recommend checking out Russ Harris and his website. It is loaded with exercises on how to do all of the concepts covered above.