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5 Steps to Mindful Acceptance




The word "acceptance" has been thrown around as a coping style, especially in situations one cannot control. However, what needs to be clarified is that acceptance comes in all sizes and shapes, ranging from radical acceptance to practical acceptance. This is where mindful acceptance, as propounded in the evidence-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), offers a more structured way of putting acceptance into practice. Mindful acceptance is a self-management style that helps you accept your thoughts and emotions at face value without doing one of these six things that your idle mind is programmed to do during downtime:
  • Dwelling on your thoughts or emotions
  • Analyzing or overanalyzing your thoughts and emotions
  • Judging yourself or others
  • Avoiding situations that remind you of specific thoughts and emotions
  • Suppressing your unhelpful thoughts and emotions by forcefully trying to push them out
  • Trying to get rid of negative thoughts and emotions by distraction or other indulgences
If you are engaging in one of the above six coping styles to deal with stress, you are using a “control” strategy to manage your thoughts and emotions, which inadvertently adds more meaning to the context (Harris, 2008). You then, unfortunately, try to process the new insights you have created with additional meaning by doubling down on control strategies. When control strategies are used excessively, they take away your time from pursuing other meaningful activities, such as spending time with your family, pursuing health goals, or meeting work obligations. This creates a sense of guilt, which, along with the mental and physical exhaustion created by control strategies, becomes a harbinger of depression and anxiety for some people. Mindful acceptance and letting go are helpful tools to manage unwanted, unpleasant, and painful thoughts and feelings that keep coming back despite problem-solving, changing your irrational thinking, or using one of the aforementioned control strategies. Acceptance doesn’t mean passive resignation or that you have accepted your fate. Acceptance breaks the vicious cycle of struggle and frees you to spend more time in useful and meaningful activities. It is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process. Here are the steps for mindful acceptance:

1. Correctly identify and label your thoughts and emotions: To accomplish this step, use statements such as “I am feeling …or I am having this thought…” If it helps, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths to bring awareness to your internal experiences. Popular social media posts will prompt you to memorize a long list of emotions. Keep it simple. The primary or basic emotions that are universally recognized across cultures, according to the American Psychological Association, include fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, contempt, and surprise. Some researchers also consider shame, shyness, and guilt as basic emotions.

2. Step back from your thoughts or emotions: Your mind is a great content generator and never stops telling stories that evoke certain emotions. Remember: you are not your emotion; you don’t necessarily have to act on your thoughts. Tell yourself, “I notice that I am having a thought or feeling…” or “My mind is telling me to feel…or think…Thanks, Mind.” Or, label your story, “Oh, yes, this is my old favorite, ‘I am a failure story.” The few extra words you add before your thoughts and emotions help you create distance or separation between yourself and your thoughts and emotions, which helps you not get fused with your private experiences. A caveat here is that for the "Thanks Mind" technique, the tone is playful rather than sarcastic, as the latter can foster more conflict with your thoughts. 

3. Treat your emotions and thoughts as temporary: Your mind tells you a story and makes you feel a certain way. A mindful way of experiencing thoughts and emotions as temporary is to imagine yourself on a beach, where your thoughts and emotions, like the ocean's waves, come and go. At the same time, you dig your toes into the sand and allow these internal experiences to pass. Using the analogy of ocean waves, view thoughts, emotions, images, or body sensations as discrete, short-lived events akin to individual ocean waves that arise in awareness and then recede. And when they are gone, they are gone, at least for that moment (Kabat-Zinn, 2013).

4. Let go of your emotions and thoughts: What is not in your control can be let go. How do you know what to let go? Ask yourself, “Does this help me live my life according to my core values and be the person I want to be?” You can let go of that thought or emotion if the answer is no. A helpful exercise to promote letting go is the ‘Floating Leaves on a Moving Stream’ visualization (Hayes & Smith, 2005). In this visualization, you close your eyes and imagine sitting beside a beautiful, slow-moving stream flowing downhill. Once in a while, a big leaf drops into the stream and floats away down the stream, and you are watching the leaves float by. After bringing awareness to your thought or emotion, imagine that thought or emotion is written on a leaf and let it float away. Continue this exercise for at least five minutes. Letting go can be an immensely liberating experience as it breaks the cycle of suffering due to the default control agenda your mind has been using to manage stress.

5. Work on value-based goals: Once you let go of your unhelpful thoughts and emotions, you create more space in your mind to work on meaningful goals. Create an action plan to accomplish the goals while staying true to your core values. A helpful way to realize your values and direct your next committed action is by doing this value-focused exercise (Harris, 2008). Imagine that you are eighty years old and looking back on your life. Then finish the following sentences:
  • I spent too much time worrying about…
  • I spent too little time doing things such as…
  • If I could go back in time, then what I would do differently from today onwards is…
To summarize, the essence of mindful acceptance is to change your relationship with your internal experiences without using control or "fix-it" strategies. Releasing yourself from the struggles with your thoughts and emotions lets you discover the more meaningful, value-focused aspects of your life. Again, the key to mindfulness acceptance is moment-to-moment awareness of your present experience with curiosity and openness. This practice shouldn’t be approached with an attitude of getting to someplace better, getting something, or fixing what we don’t like. 

Check out Dr. Duggal's Author Page to learn more about evidence-based self-management techniques that promote mental health and well-being.

HARPREET S. DUGGAL, MD, FAPA

REFERENCES

Harris, R. (2008). The happiness trap. Boston, MA: Trumpeter Books.

Hayes, S. C. & Smith, S. (2005). Get out of your mind & into your life. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc. 

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full catastrophe living. New York, NY: Bantam Books.













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