How to Stop Fighting Your Thoughts and Emotions |
Acceptance is being with emotions without trying to control or alter their quality, duration, or intensity.
Acceptance can help with regulating negative emotions and improving emotional coping.
When observing the mind, we recognize it as something we have, not something we are.
From an observing perspective, we can begin to meet our minds with warmth and compassion.
One of the biggest lessons on human flourishing comes from a formula for suffering: suffering = pain x resistance.
To witness this calculus in action, consider a recent moment of discontent that resulted from an undesirable event. Upon careful investigation, we’d likely realize that much of our psychological suffering was due to the deluge of gloomy thoughts, feelings, and judgments we unleashed upon ourselves in reaction to the event. It’s as if our fading fortunes weren’t bad enough, we had to punish ourselves further with shame and self-criticism.
Pain is inevitable in a human life. But the considerable say we have in the second variable of the formula—resistance—gives us a pathway for altering the outcome.
One antidote to resistance is acceptance: simply being with the difficult emotion without attempting to control or alter its quality, duration, or intensity. It’s a counterintuitive response to pain.
Yet acceptance-based interventions, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), have shown promise in alleviating human suffering, with research demonstrating reductions in stress, pain, anxiety, depression, and other psychopathological symptoms. Acceptance has also been found to be effective as a standalone strategy, helping with regulating negative emotions and improving emotional coping.
Clinical psychologist Robyn Walser has been working with acceptance-based therapies for over 30 years. One of her biggest insights is that we are far more than our minds, more than the sum of our past experiences. This recognition—seeing that we are not the difficult thoughts and emotions, but their container or “context”—is, according to Walser, the beginning of freedom.
Here’s Dr. Walser, in her own words, on the mechanisms and benefits of acceptance.
Your Thoughts and Emotions Aren't Your Enemy
Humans are socially trained to........