Psychological flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing situations, thoughts and feelings, and to persist with behaviours that align with your values. It means being able to fully experience the present moment and make choices based on what the situation calls for and what really matters to you. When you have psychological flexibility, you’re able to change or continue with a behaviour as needed, rather than being stuck in rigid patterns.
Psychological inflexibility, on the other hand, can lead to struggles with controlling thoughts and emotions or relating to people and situations in a rigid manner. It also includes experiential avoidance, where a person tries to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. This avoidance can limit your behaviour and make it difficult to deal with situations flexibly.
Here’s how you can cultivate greater psychological flexibility:
- Acceptance: This involves opening up to your experiences, including thoughts, emotions and sensations, without needing to change them. It’s about being willing to have these experiences as they are, without struggle or avoidance. It is not the same as passively giving in, but rather creating space for thoughts and feelings without letting them dictate your behaviour. It includes a non-evaluative posture towards your inner world.
- Defusion: This involves creating distance from your thoughts, seeing them as just thoughts, not facts. It’s about reducing the power of thoughts over your behavior. Techniques include recognizing thoughts as mental events rather than truths, or noticing thoughts as they arise without getting swept away by them.
- Present Moment Awareness: This means being fully engaged in the here and now, rather than getting lost in thoughts about the past or future. It involves engaging your senses and noticing your internal experiences. This allows you to respond to what’s happening right now, rather than being stuck in your head.
- Self-as-Context: This involves recognizing that you are more than your thoughts and feelings, which may come and go. It is about developing a transcendent sense of self that is separate from your thoughts and emotions. It also means seeing your history as a part of who you are in the present moment.
- Values: Identifying and clarifying your values is essential to making choices that align with what is most important to you. Values are the qualities of being and living that are deeply important to you. It is about connecting with what matters to you, rather than being caught up in the demands of your mind.
- Committed Action: This involves taking steps that are consistent with your values, even when it is difficult or when you have uncomfortable feelings. It’s about building patterns of behavior that move you towards your goals.
- Mindfulness: Practising mindfulness can help you observe your experiences non-judgmentally, and with compassion. You can use it as an antidote to the power of language and evaluation. It involves paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations without trying to change them. Mindfulness helps you to notice the process of thinking, feeling, and remembering. It can be enhanced by practices that improve attention, which in turn promote self-awareness.
- Experiential Exercises: Engage in practices designed to help you make contact with difficult thoughts, feelings and sensations, and to embrace reality as it is. This might include practicing acceptance of anxiety, and doing activities which you have avoided because of anxiety.
- Self-Compassion: Treating yourself with kindness and understanding, rather than self-criticism. Self-compassion involves empathy with your own feelings. It is an attitude of warmth and care towards yourself, especially when things are difficult, and involves recognizing that suffering is a part of the human experience.
- Recognizing Inflexibility: Noticing when you are becoming rigid in your responses to situations can be the first step in improving flexibility. Becoming aware of your own thought patterns, and behaviours, and identifying what isn’t working can give you the opportunity to try something new.
- Flexibility in Action: Deliberately choosing to do something different from your usual response to a situation can break rigid behaviour patterns, and create new possibilities. This might include moving towards something you are avoiding rather than continuing to avoid it.
Summary
Psychological flexibility is about being open to your experiences, acting in accordance with your values, and adapting to situations as they arise. By focusing on acceptance, defusion, presence, self-as-context, values, and committed action, you can develop your ability to respond to life with greater flexibility and resilience, and live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.