How to Increase Psychological Flexibility | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back the central topic that we explore on the podcast is how to change how to let go of old things which might include patterns behaviors or even earlier versions of ourselves that are holding us back in the here and now and how we can step into new ways of being and doing in order to do that we have to be psychologically flexible just like how physical flexibility is the amount of stretch in our muscles the ability they have to bend without breaking psychological flexibility is the same quality in our own minds becoming more flexible includes being open to change and possibility in general being able to look at a thought or emotion and appraise it in different ways get uncomfortable dealing with different kinds of situations and cultivated the ability to commit to that which we know would probably be helpful but which is often hard to do so today we're going to be talking about psychological flexibility what it means to us and how we can develop it and uh by us I mean that today I'm joined by a clinical psychologist a best-selling author and of course my dad Dr Rick Hanson so Dad how are you doing today honestly I'm really good and I know I typically say that and it's true when I say it so I because I'm just saying that I'm really good and I'm especially psyched about this topic well I'm really glad to hear that yeah and I would love to know like how you think about this there's so much in it I mean in evolution and in a person's everyday life there's a trade-off between flexibility and speed flexibility and automaticity and flexibility very much kind of implies a semi-delibate process of choice which is important but it takes time you know if you're walking down the path in the jungle and suddenly there's a sound nearby you don't want to slow down to ponder the nature of reality and do I stop do I go do I bet do I hunker down you want to jump back really fast because that's what keeps you alive so we have to balance these things and um so I think the whole notion of choice comes to mind to what extent is Choice useful um to what extent is it better to acquire habits and let them do the choosing and what are the ways in which maybe some people are too flexible about certain things and they're too wishy-washy so it's a great topic it's it's full of good mess well you've already highlighted something here that I hadn't even thought about and that isn't in my notes of prep for the episode so this is great when you're talking about the trade-off between like thinking about something quickly versus thinking about it flexibly and that was not intuitive to me before you said it but now that you've laid it out I could see how it would be a real contrast and equally another thing that was kind of surprising to me when I first started digging into this is like some of the motivations for why people are inflexible because spoiler alert I would describe myself as a reformed rigid person is maybe the way to put it uh I think that maybe you could comment on this even better than I could dad but uh I used to be pretty pretty rigid around a variety of different things when you're usually right though well you know I mean these were the claims I made at the time but I I learned how to open up about a lot of different things and and I I didn't really think about my rigidity as essentially a form of like avoidance coping that it was a defense against pain that was like not intuitive to me when I first started to dig into this material but the more that I learned about it the more that I realized how inflexibility can be a way of protecting ourselves from different kinds of uncomfortable experiences it's interesting so in our minds let's say uh you know we have various Tendencies various reactions various views and so then something happens let's suppose and maybe you're in a place you're getting your coffee I don't know if I'm pre-associating here and and you asked for a blueberry muffin and coffee black nothing added and they bring you a gingerbread latte and a chocolate chip cookie and then you have different responses to rising in your mind flexibility a lot is a kind of inner spaciousness and inner freedom in which you can choose which of those responses you want to use now some of those responses may be perfectly correct and right so it's appropriate to be inflexible in your view that water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom I'm really rigid about that is that a problem yeah I am really rigid in my commitment to your welfare Forest I'm hyper loyal you know well I'm really rigid about my loyalty to my son is that a bad thing so for me this whole topic is very much about um relationship our relationship to what appears around us and what appears as well inside our own mind and for me the healthy flexibility is having a lot of autonomy and agency plugging one of your favorite themes here uh you know in relationship to what arises so that you can start being a choice about it you know there's this fantastic book where I really ought to unpack it on um called neurotic Styles classic from the age Shapiro yeah very good and one of them was about obsessive compulsive Styles and he pointed out obsessive compulsive where there's a lack of flexibility it's an issue of autonomy well that was totally my experience and I think the big cost of rigidity for me was exactly what you're describing that which was a loss of choice a loss of agency I was effectively shrinking the bars of the invisible cage that were around me and it goes right to uh Suzuki roshi in The Beginner's mind there are many possibilities but in the expert's mind there are few rigid people and I would include myself in that category are essentially acting as if we are an expert on the way that things are or should be or are supposed to be or could be or all of these things and so I was tightening the possibilities for myself I was limiting my behavior um the people I could have as friends how I might find as fulfillment what I could do with my life based on a lot of very preconceived notions about the way that I was supposed to be or the way that I was in that moment and therefore the the opportunities that were available to me um and so I was essentially giving up agency in favor of rigidity and that doesn't sound like a very good trade-off to me in the here and now I probably would have thought about it that way back then and I think that looking at the motivations for that can be really interesting yeah what I'm realizing as we speak here which is always fun deeply rewarding for me personally is basically thinking about useful unuseful skillful not skillful healthy unhealthy rigidity or skillful unskillful healthy unhealthy flexibility for the moment here I was reflecting on one of the findings around aging as people really progress toward the end of the lifespan often they'll become maybe you might say more rigid in their behavior patterns or their routines or what they will deal with which is actually adaptive as you start to lose function it becomes safer to simplify the topics in your life to simplify your activities to find routines so you don't have to keep figuring things out newly so in that sense rigidity is actually really adaptive for that aging person well I think there's a difference between Behavior Choice behavioral choices and psychological choices the capacity that we have inside of ourselves and and my mind and my heart whatever it is to change how I relate to my circumstance which is how I think about psychological flexibility people like Stephen Hayes and acceptance and commitment therapy one of the primary talk targets for it is increasing psychological flexibility and he talks about that a lot in terms of the ability to contact the present moment and be with whatever happens to be there without having to push it away or having to make it a certain kind of thing and to me that that's the kind of flexibility that I'm talking about here we could talk maybe as part of this conversation about becoming more behaviorally flexible around being comfortable in different kinds of circumstances or routines or different kinds of people I think that flows really naturally from psychological flexibility but I'm talking more about developing this internal trait that I think of as being almost a purely useful thing um I would not want to go back to being a psychologically inflexible person uh although I think that like in life broadly having the capacity to stand your ground and be firm about what you believe in or firm about how you do something can be a useful useful capability does that make sense it does and I'm being a little provocative I'm sure we both agree there's a place for certain fixities of you all right and an action that's not the problem the problem was when we become inflexible in our relationship to those things that's what you're getting at do I relate myself to um because I'm really interested in this space as you know but how do we function in the world without craving and the Heart of craving is insistence must that's problematic and one of your favorite quotes you know that space between stimulus and response is where we have flexibility so if there's no space no flexibility I think that's kind of what we're we're talking about here can you be fundamentally at agency and um how you relate to your own stream of Consciousness yeah so why do you think that I don't know maybe we can continue to use v as kind of a case study here Dad I'm happy to give me our science very rigid kid in my way yeah yeah so and you've mentioned this also uh in the past so maybe even thinking of yourself why do you think that people sometimes lean a bit too far into the psychologically rigid side of the spectrum like what are we protecting ourselves from what what psychological function is that behavior servant reflecting on this topic and this might be like I don't know two out there but I I think for a lot of uh certainly for me when I was especially when I was younger existence metaphorically feels like standing on or being on a dock of stable structure that sticks out into the river of time and for many people that Doc is stable but that river is terrifying the river of their ex their feelings all the feelings that could happen the murky depths the creepy crawlers the Sharks the monsters the acid the rivers mean of acid oh my God don't go there you know and that's kind of how it feels moment to moment with your own interior even so so there's a kind of beleaguered aspect to the rigidity that does not open to or flow with you know the forces within you and and also the forces outside you because they just seem too overwhelming and scary so you withdraw so it's like rigidity as the as the armor or the bars you know of the withdrawal and flexibility is a lot it's just expanding the range in which you're free I think of the definition of your Equanimity from gofron still as or the purpose of practice he said the purpose of practice is to expand the range of experiences in which we are free in other words being having more capacity so a lot as you know in therapy uh the therapeutic process is to shore up the dock initially to stabilize the dock like let's be more rigid at first let's stabilize you know like no we're not going to talk about those things we're no I'm not trying to get you in touch with your feelings we're going to stabilize the dock with you know whatever breathing or sometimes stabilizing your life circumstance you know you need to be with someone who's not attacking you every day sure and then from there you go out into the river right you slowly stick your toe in it you're still here you're okay it was actually kind of nice it's a warm River who knew you know and then you you know eventually get your foot in it your leg you start swimming in the river and Where the Wild Things Are you start having fun there I know so I think that's kind of maybe a way into this topic um yeah what do you think well I think that's totally true have I taken way too much acid I don't know uh well you I mean you've taken a lot more acid than I have Dad I know that I don't know based on some some previous conversations we've even had here on the podcast I know you've taken more than I have um uh for the record never done acid you know oh that's easy may or may not change in the future but I've done zero quantities of that so far and uh anyways with with this kind of stuff um I think you're totally right and I think it's a much more big picture way of talking about a a certain kind of coping avoidance coping which is where people try to push away experiences that are uncomfortable for them and it's easy for us to interpret that through a behavioral lens and I think you're opening up the lens to thinking of uh the nature of being as a kind of uncomfortable experience for many people probably myself included where I did feel like what I just think of my own nature and I'm the kind of person who appeals to Authority a good bet um you can even see it in how I do the podcast how I do the notes for the patreon how I do the research for these episodes I really want to know what the um the people that I view as like the authoritative people in a space think about these topics and I think in general to your point earlier about kinds of rigidity being really positive I think that's a good trade I think that we should want to know what the smartest people believe about a thing or what the most educated people think about a thing like why would you want to know that and also it's a form of protection right if I have an opinion and it's also the opinion that the smart person over there has wow that validates and protects my opinion that means that I can be more comfortable sharing it and therefore experience less anxiety around it and I'm the kind of person who tends to have a little bit of a leaning into anxiety and so that's a really really great protective measure for me so think about what actually happens when somebody's being rigid right like what are they doing they're controlling a situation a lot of the time they're trying to make it the way that they want it to be and this could include everything from the thoughts that pop up in a person's head to where we go for dinner right like the whole range is available and to use the simple example there if it stresses me out to eat unfamiliar food I can either accept that I'm stressed lean into some discomfort try something new broaden the range of my experiences or I can force everyone to eat only at the places that I want to eat and one of those is more flexible one of them is more rigid and that's just a simple example of how that rigidity can show up as a way to protect us from painful or unfamiliar experiences so you're talking here about rigidity as a means to a problematic end could you explain what you mean by that a little bit obsessions tend to be about views compulsions tend to be about behaviors to kind of connect it there that helps you stay on the safe doc poking out into the river of reality that my metaphor and so rigidity could be in service of a good end like you're just you just kind of had it arguing with people who think the Earth is flat but rigidity in the service of of getting on being um so armored today when you don't need to be that would be a problematic hand and you're right exactly part of what a major thread in therapy is to help people in a certain kind of way uh take their stand in certain I'll call it rigidities that are healthy and positive like you know a stand of sticking up in themselves or treating themselves like they matter and to get in effect rigid about that if you will uh and and to see things clearly like I'll have sometimes people come in and they they keep saying things like uh well that's but that's just my reality well yeah your reality is that the guy ran a red light and hit your car but that's the reality so I'm gonna I'm gonna step in here Dad because I think that I would actually frame what that person is doing in the room with you as a form of rigidity itself not as a form of excessive flexibility I think that they are originally attached to the view that that's just my reality yeah that makes sense so so what I'm talking about here with psychological flexibility is a capacity to look at things in different kinds of ways which is how it's framed as a psychological construct that's how it's framed in the literature if you never or always do something it is rigid even if you are rigidly being flexible if that makes sense so in terms of practicalities can I just say a couple things that I I don't think I've ever told you that I sort of do and have done deliberately great yeah I would love this yeah so one is uh to observe the tendency toward a physical habit and disrupted now maybe the physical habit is to like chew the callus on the edge of your fingernail which I'll do sometimes I'll bite that off and to actually disrupt that and are you okay disrupting It Or Another Part of me I have maybe at least one of the I don't know X number of genes for OCD and um the tendency to want to check things checking Behavior so I leave the house did I turn off the stove did I turn off the water and I'll allow myself to check once but I won't let myself check twice for example like I'm I'm forcing a kind of flexibility in I'm pushing against so that's the thing a second thing that I really picked up early on in the human potential days was a way of talking about certain Tendencies of the mind that are used as skillful means not as self-hatred or Loathing in which we recognize the robotic mechanical programmed nature of much of our own oh so precious you know inner world and and when you can step back from it a little bit and just kind of label it you know again you're doing it skillfully you gotta be careful with that but if you're doing a skillfully it's like oh that was robotic or or that was like um I'm just you know like machine like I'm just acting on a program that helps you get a little distance from it it helps you not take yourself so seriously you know when I first heard that framing I was startled and angry about it um but I started to realize no actually in a funny kind of way it's helpful to look at some of our reactions like that I really like those as tools and I I go immediately to a lot of the ACT stuff because that's a um that's an approach for starters that I just like and kind of landed for me and I don't know I liked Steven as a person when I talked with them and I think it's a useful approach that's helped a lot of people but also it is really built around helping people develop this particular mental strength and it was a mental strength that I think I struggled with for a long time and that's probably part of why I I have an affinity for it and so what are the key practices that are talked in acceptance that are taught in except in some commitment therapy well it's acceptance focused practices right because rigidity like I was talking about before is essentially a form of avoidance coping we're trying to push something away yeah and sure you can pull things towards you but that is also kind of has a tension associated with it and in a lot of ways the opposite of pushing something away is actually just like letting it be whatever it is yeah um as opposed to feeling like you have to pull it towards you which can also feel really destabilizing particularly for somebody who struggles with this kinds of stuff very good point just because you're accepting it does not mean you have to become it yes yes and I think that that understanding that in a real way in a practical way not just like a theoretical way was was huge for me um I used to be the kid in the class to give an example of this who would cover my ears when a different kid gave a wrong answer yeah because I I had so much reflexive like shame and oh and I felt so uncomfortable about it when somebody else was doing something that like broke my Paradigm in some kind of a way and so like I had to actually literally learn that them doing this thing wasn't about me and so I had to create the space to just like Let It Be whatever it was and accept it as a as it is and like okay this other thing is happening over there and I don't have to feel implicated by it and that was really helpful for me and then you can expand that out as an example to all other kinds of stuff yeah you started out in that example um with a you know a auto and automatically occurring reaction and then gradually with Insight you were able to tease apart the elements of that automatically recurring reaction and and find some key circuit breakers in it which is recognizing that um your own large-heartedness really is how I would look at it that was a lot of empathy you were empathically identifying with that person you know in a way that was uh very attentive to them you know your boundaries were blurry and then you learned to have a clear boundary there in a sense that you're not implicated in what they were doing and et cetera et cetera probably along the way as well that it's okay to get answers wrong yeah yeah also some just like factual learning in there that help break down some of those rigid views around you know it being important to answer the question the right way and all of that sort of stuff um and then alongside that another big one for me was slowly increasing my just general capacity for distress uh what people refer to as distress tolerance over time and that's that's a complicated thing people can really misuse the notion of distress tolerance uh just like you were saying earlier Dad how people can misuse the notion of flexibility to be like you know wacky wavy inflatable tube men blowing in the wind when that's really not what we're talking about um in much the same way distress tolerance isn't like letting somebody hit you with a hammer over and over again it's about not turning the normal events of life into hammers that are hitting you by a function of your own psychological processes and that's really what I was doing a lot I think I think I was really amplifying normal range basic difficult stuff into like catastrophic experiences and I had to really work with that over time and Underneath It All We're talking about a willingness to learn in the broadest sense to grow to heal to awaken to learn right and so then you think about growth mindset and and what you and I focus a lot on is a growth toolkit how to help yourself as you put it in the very beginning how to change for the better how to help yourself change for the better as a process of learning which sometimes includes just simply shifting your relationship to what already is without changing it at all including who you are without changing it at all sometimes okay and so headline here then around flexibility is growth mindset having an orientation toward learning valuing learning which includes things that I have a perverse pleasure in like discovering what I that I was wrong about something I actually enjoy that what do you think of that I think you're totally right and then I go to what helps us learn and it's practice over and over again practicing something right and I truly believe that you can deliberately practice being psychologically flexible one of the qualities of my rigidity that I think is true for a lot of people is that I had a ton of assumptions I had just a mountain of assumptions about myself about other people about the way my life was supposed to be about what was important out in the world and one of the ways into the language of assumptions is by talking in terms of limiting beliefs a lot of people do that uh I prefer thinking in terms of like models and scripts and things like that which I find a little bit more powerful for me personally but the idea of limiting beliefs can be useful here as well and limiting beliefs can take a lot of different forms right um if I think really strongly that being a logical cognitively oriented person is better than not being that way that's really constraining that is a kind of limiting belief that leads me down a certain sort of path and as time has gone on I've become increasingly open to other ways of viewing things and I've increasingly viewed stances like that as being themselves something that causes me to raise my eyebrows a little bit uh these days maybe I raise my eyebrows a little bit too much because I'm overcompensating who knows but uh that's really something that puts up a red flag for me and so what I had to develop is the practice of seeing my brain load an assumption into it and then deliberately taking a pause and examining the idea turning it over in my mind going huh what am I thinking right now why am I thinking that what are the assumptions that I'm making and then just go through the list am I assuming that that there's more Authority behind one of these views than another do I feel a feeling in myself that I'm trying to avoid I can ask myself the question what would it be like if things were radically different than I assume them to be what kind of possibilities would that open up for me one thing I'll just name too that's almost existential which is uh are you willing to change are you willing to become a bit of a different person are you willing to die to the old to bring in the new and I think that's a big thing for people and for me it's actually been really scary you know to tolerate becoming different but then over time you start to enjoy it you start to feel safer about letting go of old ways and growing into new ones I think you're totally right and uh I recently had a conversation with a psychologist named Benjamin Hardy who has this idea of 10x thinking and 2x thinking and the notion in that basically is the idea of qualitative change 2x thinking is doing more of what you're currently doing what doing it you know faster and harder and just more and more more whereas 10x thinking the idea of it is that it's like a paradigm shift it's a qualitative shift it's what you were talking about stepping into a new way of being and people are often very resistant to that and they often come up with a lot of reasons for why we can't be that dramatically different or why we can't release this idea that's like holding us back in this kind of way and I'm wondering uh what you think Dad like helps people open up to that well two things come to mind um and the second is a little Cosmic so I'll maybe oh shocker that's a shocker thank you you could be more on brand if you tried that you know because the to you familiar notion from Piaget Jean Piaget that we learn in two ways through assimilation and accommodation yeah and assimilation being as you know uh incorporating information into an existing structure and then accommodation is you know shifting our structure so let's say you're you're going through your life and you have the notion called horse so you see various palominos you see sprinters you see Thoroughbred and then you finally see a zebra hmm do you shift your frame to go this is different or do you just say oh that's a horse that's a striped horse yeah yeah with trippy stripes and then what happens when you see a gazelle or an antelope you know at some point you were an elephant let alone a whale you start shifting your categories and that's accommodation which is cognitively more demanding it's can be emotionally more demanding because it's whoa you're you're in the world of the new you've cast off from familiar Moorings and so learning how to enjoy accommodation is really helpful and to become more interested in the process of Shifting your frame your perspective uh your your context uh content matters but it's context that's really influential think about how we are with other people what's the frame of your relationship or who's Superior who's inferior who's dominant who's subordinate these are frames uh what are your roles what are your what are you what are your duties to each other who are you to each other that's all frame which matters usually so much more than the back and forth words and content and stuff but we tend to fix that on the content but yeah but changing the frame changes all of the content yeah apparently totally and that's accommodation frame shift the more um cosmic's really the wrong word but so we humans and other animals with the nervous system need to continually essentialize what is a completely chaotic turbulent and um boundary less emergent of reality continuously including there are on stream of Consciousness so we're literally through the function of the brain yeah yeah and and literally like single cell creatures establishing a membrane outside and inside where we have to do that and yet reality is without boundaries in in the deepest level and one of the aspects of this is the ways in which a place and place memory it's just so foundational to the ongoing sense of living and and uh the construction of our own sense of self being where are you where do you speak what's your place what's in your place is your place a good place where are the good places where are the bad places these are the first things that rats need to learn these are and the Advent of place memory involving the hippocampus right next to the olfactory bulb smelling your way through life it was just foundational yeah you know my mommy the mommy who will feed me you better know that when you're a little mammal 200 million years ago you know dodging dinosaurs in Jurassic Park Place memory so we're very drawn to establishing place and it's disorienting to not have dare I say it a kind of rigidity of yeah Place versus their place totally totally on the other hand that attachment to place and that attachment literally in the moment-to-moment constructing of your sense of EX of your experiences can become uh is the structural basis for a lot of suffering because we crave Essences We crave Things We crave places We crave things that are stable and static it's the the maintenance of stable static aspects of reality that enables us to Crave them into function but on the other hand really sets us up for a lot of suffering so finishing up here in my own personal practice I've been becoming more mindful of the generation of thickness in my mind and as the basis for attachment and the kind of goal Pursuit that has gotten me into trouble in some ways because boy I can really go after that goal uh to a fault and so it's kind of powerful to explore the necessary underlying essence of any problematic rigidity as grounded in a kind of dignifying of reality and if you can bring a certain solvent the solvent of mindfulness the solvent of vipassana really of insight into the nature of everything then Things become foamier cloudier more fluid and problematic rigidities are then really undermined from the foundations well I think that whole notion that you were exploring about the Primacy of place and how we think is really it was really cool for me and I think it's a really wonderful way of thinking about this whole question of psychological flexibility because you're right there are places that are better places than other places for us right you know the the mom that is your mom that loves you is a better mom to hang out with than somebody else's mom most of the time particularly from like an evolutionary context right where you want to be protected we want to pass on genes that pass on jeans that's like kind of why we're here from a biological level at least and then alongside that seeing the ways in which we have built fortresses inside of our mind like places that are defended they're the place where we're comfortable being and everything outside of that place is kind of the wild and spooky Wilderness well that's the rigidity that we're talking about that's a lack of psychological flexibility and it is inherently defended in that we're talking about the construction of walls right we're protecting ourselves from certain kinds of experiences and I know that for myself when uh when people would would attack those walls in different kinds of ways to extend our metaphor here I became very defensive um it was very hard for me to to drop attachment to place and it became harder the more that people attacked it you know the more that people push on the defensiveness the harder I held my own walls right you know we keep on rolling with our metaphor here um I'm sure that you've had to work with people around this in therapy uh you know I am not the first person to pop out a little rigid and a little defended when people went through a process with you around these kinds of issues with rigidity defending the sense of place they were even if that place wasn't actually very good for them long term were there things you did with them to help them drop some of the defensiveness around it and open to the possibility that other places could be good places too when you're describing a really fundamental process and um what makes it work is you all know from Elizabeth your partner is first to lay a good foundation you know just to establish a secure base if you want a place you want to create a place that feels comfortable for them with you together then people have different approaches some people um focus more cognitively and I know we're going to do an episode on cognitive bypassing and you know be exploring your cognitions about things but one thing that's helpful for people is to have them in effect put on the table how they see it because interestingly it's when it gets out on the table and the person gets a little bit of breathing room from it that they can then be flexible in relationship to it we can't be flexible with regard to things we're unconscious of ah so it has to come out and sometimes there's an initial step there that helps to to help them the clients say be comfortable with you to really put their cards on the table how they really feel about it how they really see it so you're doing an intermediate thing there to kind of now it's on the table right and um what's really helpful at first paradoxically is to join with their View because it helps them be safer about it and if you're not as threat goes up so does inflexibility right goes back to that evolutionary issue between flexibility and automaticity and sometimes automaticity is a lot safer so you want to lower the Threat Level so they can slow it down to be flexible for example so now it's on the table and you you start with what's what's true about it what's useful those are being two key questions what's true and what's useful because they're distinct of course and um then then you start moving a little bit more spaciousness like what what is also true what is also true it's not against what they think is true but what is also true and then maybe an expansion of huh how do you think other people that you you like and respect might look at this and you know these are maybe examples that I'm going over long about but different ways you can see it how it would work you start unpacking it yeah and then if what arises is is a kind of defensive resistance and you go oh I've moved too quickly here as a therapist I've gone too fast uh I I moved up to the 10 000 foot view really quickly but there that's too quick they're not ready for that so then we go back into the view and what's good about it what's true about it what's useful about it where did it come from you know but over time uh people usually if they're motivated genuinely to to get happier and to get Freer then they they come along and and there's often a relief and then something that will bubble up sometimes what happens for people is when they look at how they've seen things their face will change and it's almost as if another person is speaking through them another part and they'll it would be like a voice of clarity or wisdom in them that realizes that there's more to the story and that's such an incredible moment for someone to claim and identify with and make room for that part of themselves and that sometimes is the real shift it's not just the shift of the view but there's but uh an inclusion of other viewers that's really interesting and I think this whole notion of joining with the defense says it's sometimes called is really practically useful and it's it's cool for me as a non-clinician a non-therapist to to hear about how these techniques are applied in practice because I've received therapy I've been in the room I've been on the other side of it occasionally and and also I think there's a lot of real practical usefulness to it even outside of a therapeutic context because we can think of our own defenses right for me one of the key steps in becoming less rigid was understanding why I was rigid it was understanding the purpose the psychological function of that behavior because until I understood that the rigidity was there because the rigidity was right the explanation for its existence was that My Views were accurate the rigidity was there for good reasons and it was just that other people were dumb and wrong you know so I needed to to create really to understand that there might be a different reason that I was behaving in these kinds of ways and getting that really From the Inside Out in a in a way that was not self-punishing but was actually very self-compassionate was really key to my whole process and so that um that's a kind of joining with the defense you're understanding why you're engaging in this function you understand its purposes you kind of you see it from its perspective and you go oh you know I get it I'm kind of counter-intuitively when I was able to do that change became so much more possible you're making me think I know we're finishing up soon but you're making me think about um rigidity of motivation rigidity of aims just along with rigidity around views let's say uh I actually think for a lot of people being rigid or being attached being over invested in being over identified with certain aims and and kind of like motivated behaviors is uh is is a very important area of rigidity I mean the extremely that would be like a problematic drug addiction you know a person is just really inflexible about pursuing that particular experience or behavior more broadly maybe I'm not alone in you know late stage career looking back and really looking at the balance of where were their goals that would have served me to be more intense about pursuing or on the other hand which is mainly my reflection what are the aims were I just got too attached to the result and to driven around it you know you knew me as um as a dad who was pretty driven around accomplishing certain things and maybe at some cost you know and and lately I've been watching my mind uh just really go after uh doing things at a high level of accomplishment and that other people that I work with should also accomplish things at a high level too in certain settings and there's some virtue to that but overall I'm just watching my mind get rigid about standards or Pursuits and um you know I could tell you having gone through a fair amount of accommodation lately and shifting that you know it's summarized as observing my mind like a eager dog chasing a red ball and the dog just wants to chase the ball the dog's gonna chase the ball the goal the problematic goal and you know the takeaway lesson for me about about all that is don't chase the ball you know Rover you're not bad you like chasing balls but don't chase the ball that's for me that's me becoming more flexible about a part of myself um I think this is one of those topics that we could just keep on going with because it is so so fundamental and so foundational to so many of the other things that we talk about on the podcast but we have to kind of call it somewhere and this was really helpful for me honestly and and helping me kind of expand my notion of psychological flexibility altogether um including how I think about in my own life I think that there's there are some ways in which uh when we are a when we're when we're a rigid person for a long time and we really go through a process of being like Oh my whole goal is going to be to become more psychologically flexible in these different ways it can become possible to almost like air a little bit too far to the other side not in terms necessarily of developing this like construct of psychological flexibility but more generally in terms of starting to see things as falsely equal or uh get a little too loosey-goosey about different priority is in our life about whatever it may be so it's possible to err on either side here but I think that by and large to return to what you said at the very beginning of the conversation what we really want to do here is increase our capacity to be at choice about what we do increase our capacity for agency our ability to change our ability to look at the the sphere of life kind of outside of ourselves and see it from a lot of different angles and when we can do that we become less resistant to it we become more open to stepping in the river to use the metaphor that you lean on a couple of times during this podcast and which has been really useful for me personally so I had a great time doing this Dad thanks thank you for us I thought this was a really interesting conversation today with my dad about psychological flexibility psychological flexibility can be understood intuitively and it can also be understood as this pretty codified psychological construct where there are a lot of research papers around and that kind of stuff and the more General understanding of it is it's just like physical flexibility physical flexibility is a muscle's ability to bend without breaking and in the same way we want to be able to do that inside of our own psychology we don't want to be rigidly attached to a certain way of doing things a certain version of who we are or maybe a way that other people need to be around us in order for us to feel safe and then psychological flexibility is more of a more of a construct has really been fleshed out by approaches to therapy like acceptance and commitment therapy or act where it's conceptualized as the ability to contact the present moment except what's there and act in accordance with your long-term values and in that there's a suggestion of why people might be inflexible or why they might be rigid like I was back in the day and like I am still today every once in a while to be sure and I hadn't really thought about rigidity as a form of avoidance coping a way to avoid painful experiences until I got a little bit more familiar with the psychological literature but think about what a person is doing practically when they're being rigid about something while they're trying to control the situation they're trying to control their own thoughts and feelings the thoughts and feelings that other people are having maybe what they're doing out in the world behaviorally with a group of people they are essentially acting as a kind of EX expert they are saying that my way of doing things is the right way of doing things and we all have to do things that way and remember beginner's Mind Right In The Beginner's mind there are many possibilities in the expert's mind there are a few so the consequences of our rigidity of our lack of psychological flexibility is that we shrink the bars of our invisible cage we lessen the possibilities that might exist for ourselves and we frankly shrink the number of situations where we're going to be comfortable in life because a lot of life is about getting comfortable with the fact that things are not always going to be exactly the way that we want them to be and this got us into a conversation that ran underneath the episode which focused on what the right amount of flexibility and what the right amount of rigidity is because of course there are things that we want to be a bit rigid about we might want to be a bit rigid about our commitment to the well-being of other people but even inside of that we can be flexible in our approach we can be able to take on different ways of looking at this concept and maybe engage in some practical problem solving around different ways to approach it and Rick use this metaphor that I liked which was that we're on this kind of peer that is sticking out into the river of existence if you want to put it that way and the river is untamed and wild and rapid and so we stay narrowly on the dock but part of life is about learning how to stick our foot out into the river and get comfortable entering it and that's what psychological flexibility is all about we want to have access to all the tools there's a place for rationalizing our experiences and being kind of detached and also for feeling all of our feelings and for sucking it up and getting through the day and I mean there's a place for all of these things but it's each of them in the right amounts for us that's going to lead to a fulfilling and happy life alright so what helps us actually develop more psychological Flex ability well again rigidity is a form of avoidance coping we're pushing experiences away what's the opposite of that maybe it's pulling towards but I think that the opposite of that is actually just allowing it to be exactly as it is without acting on it that's the true opposite of that and what's a great tool for letting things be whatever they are well mindfulness practice which we talk about on the podcast all the time acceptance focused practices of various kinds are incredibly helpful for psychological flexibility because they help us take a step back from things and go I can be with this emotion I can be with this feeling I can be with this experience and it doesn't have to overwhelm me so I don't have to impose my view of what the right way for it to be is on to this experience that's out in the world another thing that allows us to be more flexible is expanding what some people will call their distress tolerance other people will call their window of presence pick whatever terminology you prefer it's all kind of fundamentally talking about the same thing which is our capacity to be in different situations and remain okay maybe they're not our preference but we're okay and then from there we can enter a place of more active engagement with the idea of psychological flexibility because I think that this is truly something that absolutely can be developed and we can practice it on a on a day-to-day basis we can get in the habit of looking at an assumption that appears in the mind because most rigidity is derived from assumptions we have a lot of shoulds about the way that things are supposed to be and then we can look at that assumption almost like it's this object that's a little bit outside of us and we can ask ourselves what are we thinking why are we thinking it what are the assumptions that we are making and hey what would it be like if things were actually radically different from the way that I assumed them to be and toward the end of the conversation Rick talked about this notion of a place a secure place and the ways in which we can operate from that secure place without being excessively attached to it and that that combination that back and forth between finding a truly secure and helpful place that allows for exploration out into the world without getting stuck in it is I think really the essence of what we were talking about the whole time I hope you enjoyed today's episode if you did please subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to it now on maybe leave a rating and a positive review if that's available a comment if you're watching on YouTube and hey you can always tell a friend about the podcast it's the best way we have to reach new people until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 10,585

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient

Id: BagsuuHAD2Y

Length: 52min 58sec (3178 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023