Psychological Flexibility

What is psychological flexibility?

Psychological flexibility is the ability to:

• adapting to a situation, including the ones that cause us pain, and acting coherently with our values.
• be aware of the present moment and all the emotions, thoughts and sensations we experience.
• sometimes living in the future to clarify and plan goals, sometimes living in the past to lesson learned but always in a positive way without continuously returning on negative thoughts without taking action.
• balance needs and values across various life domains.

Let’s say that Paul has an important test to do in few days. He would prefer to spend time doing other things and he is starting to feeling stressed and worried because of the test. Instead continuing to think about the test in negative way, he decides to remind himself that it is ok to feel stressed. He then thinks what he has done in the past to be adequately prepared for tests and he reminds himself that passing the test is very important to him.

Then he returns to the present moment and starts to make a study plan and stick to it. He plans some free time to rest and some time to do leisure activities.

Paul is showing psychological flexibility because he is aware to the emotions he is feeling, he lived in the past and in the future in a positive way, taking action towards his goals balancing the need of pleasure time.

Why is psychological flexibility important?

Considering that:

• Researches suggest that absence of psychological flexibility is related to psychological pathology.
• If one suffers of psychological pathology is less likely to be happy.
• One of the aspects of psychological flexibility is to balance values and needs.
• It is important to find a balance between values.
• Sometimes it is not clear what it is the best way to behave to reach our goals and be happy. In these cases, being flexible is an advantage because allow us to adapt and better orienteering when facing life decisions.

Therefore it is important to learn to be psychological flexible.

How to improve psychological flexibility?

See About Mindfulness and in particular the six principles of the Acceptance and Commitment therapy.

References

• Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health. Todd B. Kashdan. 2010.
• The Happiness Trap. Russ Harris. 2020.