Few would argue with the statement that there are a lot of challenges in the world, particularly at this current moment. While many demands are predictable, necessitating responsibility and hard work, some catch us off guard. Our schools and jobs require us to complete assignments on a timely basis. We need to go to the grocery store to buy and prepare food. There are bills and taxes to pay and plans we need to make for our financial future. But there are also rising gas prices, global pandemics, and major incidents related to climate change.
What we need to cope effectively, and even soar, amidst all of these stressors is psychological flexibility, or our willingness and ability to be agile in the ways we think, feel, and respond to stress.
While research on psychological flexibility has been around since the 1960s, scientific investigation and clinical promotion has skyrocketed with what is called the third wave of cognitive-behavioral therapy—a move in clinical interventions that assist people in having a more mindful and accepting approach to thoughts and feelings rather than trying to challenge and change them.
Decades of research indicate that psychological flexibility plays an important role in buffering the negative effects of stress and a broad range of mental health disorders like depression and anxiety. Psychological flexibility has been shown to have beneficial effects in a number of distinct populations from health care professionals, and police officers, to children with juvenile arthritis and their parents, and trauma-exposed veterans.
When challenges happen, both large and small, most of us have predictable responses: familiar ways of seeing the world, responding to stress, and feeling. I’m a trauma psychologist, and for the past 25 years, I’ve been working with a range of survivors: combat veterans and former prisoners of war, men and women who have been sexually abused or assaulted across their lifespan, and people who had escaped from the former World Trade Center towers or were first responders on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Understandably, the people I had the pleasure of working with were hypervigilant, always scanning their environments for danger and ready to respond with clenched jaws and fists. When someone is in such a stance, it makes sense that their judgement is clouded by terror and their responses are often knee-jerk reactions. When people are in such chronic states, their attention and decision-making is greatly constricted.
What I tell the people that I work with is that these are reactions, not responses. And we work together to be more receptive to experiences and more adept at coping.
I never want anyone I work with to think that I’m telling them their thinking, feeling or acting is wrong. I tell them that I am human, just like them. And I have blind spots and implicit biases just like everyone else. I often share with my patients a quote that is attributed to the American business icon, Henry Ford: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” In other words, when we only rely on our prior knowledge and experiences, we are restricted and constrained.
Psychological flexibility is about being fluid and agile, versatile and adept. If we’re on the dance floor doing the Moonwalk, and the place gets really crowded and we don’t have space, we need to pivot ourselves to some other moves, like The Floss or Two-Step. Having a lot of potential responses in our toolbox is important, and always being open to learn and add new ones is crucial.
In moments of acute stress, I try my best to maintain a broader perspective and I encourage my patients to do the same. It’s essential that we are not wedded to one way of thinking, one style of responding, or one way of feeling.
Simon Rego, Chief Psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center and the author of The CBT Workbook for Mental Health, told me that psychological flexibility is a lot like physical flexibility. People can develop psychological flexibility by loosening “their grip on the idea that there is only one ‘right’ way to think, feel, or respond.” He added that suffering “often intensifies when we become rigid, such as when we fight our emotions or insist that life must unfold a certain way.” Fortunately, psychological flexibility can be strengthened over time through mindfulness and acceptance.
This is in line with what a small group of researchers from Switzerland found in 2017 when they examined the role of psychological flexibility and its relationship to stress and physical and mental health outcomes in a representative sample of the Swiss population. People who can flexibly respond to stress had better outcomes across the board. The researchers explained that since psychological flexibility can be taught, the world should be exposed to the techniques to promote it: being mindful and accepting all emotions as they come.
It’s important that we not minimize or deny a feeling, but rather just allow it to be. Rather than reacting in the moment, we can ride out an emotion like we are bodysurfing a wave. Other techniques of psychological flexibility include engaging in problem-solving, thinking about a greater purpose or meaning, and focusing on breath. I tell my patients to picture a pick a giant stop sign in moments of stress; that’s their reminder to just pause (not react) and rethink.
I agree. It’s hard not to grasp tightly how we think the world is or how things should be. There can be comfort in familiarity and believing we are always right.
But if we are going to survive and even thrive in these challenging times, we need to be able to shift, to acknowledge that we are all a work in progress. It is in our best interest to expand our repertoire. We can learn to navigate the world as explorers: open to adventures, seeking various perspectives, and embracing a broad range of experiences.
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