How to Cultivate Spacious Thinking |
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Rigid thinking can interfere with well-being and choicefulness.
Spaciously expanding our thinking helps us to consider multiple beliefs at once.
Holding multiple perspectives at once can also help us navigate interpersonal conflict.
By Lizabeth Roemer, Ph.D., and Josh Bartok, M.S.
We recently wrote about how cultivating more spacious awareness can enhance well-being. When stress and threat constrict our attention, they also naturally constrict our thinking. We can easily develop habits of rigid thinking that focus on threat, our own flaws, or the flaws of others. And we can cling to these thoughts with certainty, as though that certainty might somehow make us safer. However, these rigid thoughts can interfere with our ability to take actions that are consistent with what matters to us, and can inhibit our ability to flexibly and creatively respond to roadblocks.
To counter these effects, we can instead intentionally cultivate spacious thinking. Rather than believing or endorsing the critical, restrictive thoughts that arise, we can remember that there are often many truths, and that multiple things can be true at once, even if they are in seeming conflict with each other. As well, we can remind ourselves that our thoughts aren’t themselves truths, no matter how true they may feel—they’re just mental arisings. This practice of decentering from our thoughts is a key element of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Often, the technique of challenging the validity of thoughts and developing more “accurate”........