"What we resist, persists" - Carl Jung

Have you tried numerous ways to manage your anxiety?

Anxiety can have an overwhelming impact on our daily lives. It can cause us to feel a nervous and on edge, ultimately leading us to struggling with even the simplest of tasks.

While it may be hard to believe, one of the most effective ways to help manage anxiety is through learning to accept it. This approach is based on the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on learning to accept difficult thoughts and emotions without trying to fight or control them.

In this blog post, we'll explore acceptance, what it is, and how it can help with anxiety and worry. We'll also provide some experiential exercises to help demonstrate these concepts.

What is Acceptance?

Acceptance is the opposite of resistance. Acceptance is about acknowledging how we feel and think without attempting to control or eliminate it. While acceptance is often associated with a sense of resignation or defeat, it’s quite the opposite. It's an active choice to acknowledge that things are the way they are and make decisions based on that understanding. It is a choice to accept our feelings and still live a rich, full and meaningful life.

For those dealing with anxiety and worry, acceptance involves recognising that difficult thoughts and emotions are a natural part of the human experience, and that attempting to control or suppress them is futile.

Sometimes, the word 'acceptance' can be a barrier in itself. Listed below are some other ways that we might describe the same concept:

Making space for

Being willing

Allowing

Expanding around

According to Russ Harris (ACT Made Simple; 2009), a leading expert on ACT, acceptance is about embracing difficult thoughts and feelings rather than trying to fight or control them.

It can be useful to have the image of quicksand in mind. What happens when you struggle? Things only get worse. It is the same with anxiety... can you drop your struggle with anxiety?

How Does Acceptance Help with Anxiety?

Anxiety is a normal human emotion. It is not inherently bad. Actually, it is a fundamental survival response. We are only here today because our ancestors were able to stay safe thanks to this response.

All humans get to experience anxiety. So, when we try to resist it, it only gets amplified. When we resist our emotions we teach ourselves that they are a threat. We then become more intolerant of anxiety and get stuck in a vicious cycle of trying to avoid or get rid of it.

Acceptance is an important component of ACT and can help those struggling with anxiety and worry in several ways. By accepting anxiety, we can diminish the extra distress that we are attaching to the experience. Moreover, this acceptance helps us focus on changing the things we can control, so that we can pursue and prioritise the important aspects of our lives.

We can't control our anxiety, but we can control how we respond to it. Responding with acceptance instead of resistance can change our lives for the better. But don't just rely on my words...

You are invited to try it

What does your experience tell you? When you resist emotions, how do you feel? When you make room for your emotions, how do you feel?

When we resist emotions they tend to get amplified or manifest in other ways. Although it might be difficult in the short term, allowing our emotions to be there helps us to process them. They are less likely to get amplified.

Imagine trying to hold a beach ball under the water.

It's really tough, right?

It is also difficult to appreciate anything else that might be going on because it takes a lot of attention and energy. We can't enjoy the sun, swimming or talking with friends. Eventually, it just pops back up in our face anyway.

This is what it is like when we try to resist our anxiety.

It takes a lot of attention and energy and it is harder to appreciate the world around us. And it never really goes away anyway. Yet, when we let the beach ball float about it doesn't take up all our effort and attention, we can appreciate life around us and although it might float close to us, it's not popping back up in our face. This is the same with anxiety, when we allow it to be there we can engage with our lives and it is less likely to bother us as much.

How to start practicing acceptance

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a powerful way to deal with challenging thoughts and emotions.

Below are three ways you can start practicing acceptance:

1. Name Your Emotions

One of the easiest ways to start practicing acceptance is by learning to identify and name your emotions. When we name our emotions, we create more clarity around what we are feeling and can more easily accept those emotions. For example, if we feel anxious, we can name it as "anxiety," which leads to a greater understanding and acceptance of the emotion. Try to also name the bodily sensations such as 'I am noticing my heart racing...'

This practice will help you develop a greater sense of awareness and acceptance of your emotions.

2. Cactus exercise

Imagine you have a feather and a cactus. Even though the cactus is prickly, unpleasant and uncomfortable, you can still hold it gently. If you struggle with the cactus then it's painful, so the best way to hold it is gently.

In the same way, you can learn to hold your thoughts, feelings and sensations gently. This is what we call willingness, being willing to let the cactus be there, without struggle.

Just like you can hold the cactus gently, even through it's prickly and uncomfortable, you can learn how to hold onto your thoughts, feelings and sensations gently.

See if you can soften up around your anxiety. See if you can hold it with willingness, gentleness and kindness.

3. Expansion

This is an exercise in loosening up around emotions rather than tightening up around them.

Troubleshooting Acceptance

Acceptance can be a tough concept to get our heads around. We are usually taught the opposite - that we shouldn't show emotion, emotions are weak and 'don't cry'. You know the sort of thing...

It makes sense as to why we would try and avoid painful experiences, but unfortunately this doesn't get us anywhere when we apply this to our internal world (thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, urges).

The main obstacles people find when trying to practice acceptance are:

1. Psuedo acceptance: This is acceptance in the service of getting rid of feelings. If you practice acceptance with the intention of getting rid of anxiety, this is not acceptance. We must be willing to have our emotions exactly as they are.

2. Lack of validation: This is when we don't acknowledge and validate our own feelings. We have to validate our own feelings rather than beating ourselves up for having them.

3. Remoteness from values: We don’t want to accept pain for the sake of it, only in the service of values. So ask yourself 'what is important to you?' 'Is it worth making room for my feelings?'.

4. Strong payoffs for avoidance: People in high experiential avoidance get strong payoffs for any behaviour that relieves pain. No matter how short lived the relief is. Basically this means that the relief of avoiding something is a driving factor for more avoidance. Go back to your values and point 3.

5. Fusion with thoughts such as 'I hate this'. Of course, fusion with thoughts like this will get in the way of us accepting our feelings.

6. Overwhelming feelings: when we have avoided our feelings for a long time or experienced trauma our feelings can feel like they are too much. We can approach our feelings in a gradual way.

If you are struggling with any of the above then a therapist specialising in ACT will be able to help, you can apply here.

How is acceptance helpful

The aim of acceptance is to not let our behaviour be directed by our difficult emotions. We want our behaviour to be guided by our values rather than by our anxiety. When we accept our emotions and make room for them it gives us more space to choose how we want to life our life. Rather than being pushed about by our feelings.

What would your life be like if you weren't held back by difficult emotions?

Conclusion

Acceptance is an ongoing process. We don't just accept anxiety once and move on. We have to continually embody openness towards our difficult thoughts and feelings. We can use small moments throughout the day to notice what is showing up for us and allowing it to be there.

Learning to accept anxiety and other emotions is a powerful tool for managing these difficult emotions, as well as increasing psychological flexibility and encouraging mindfulness. With acceptance, we can learn to live in the present moment, without our anxiety pulling us off track.

If you are curious about how ACT might work for your anxiety then email me at info@grovemind.com

References

Harris, R. (2019). ACT made simple: an easy-to-read primer on acceptance and commitment therapy (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.