What Happens When You Meet Yourself Where You Are

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When you’re facing the stresses and hassles that life lob your way, how do you deal with them? For instance, do you zero in on troubleshooting, or are you more inclined to dodge the problem? Or maybe both (depending on the day and the matter at hand)? We all have various ways of reacting to situations that occur around us.

And we don’t just respond to what’s arising in our environment. We handle what shows up internally. In other words, we also react to what’s happening in our body (e.g., tightness in certain muscles, heart beating faster, sweating, tension loosening in parts of the body), the emotions we’re feeling (e.g., anxiety, contentment, anger, love, sadness, gratitude, fear, grief), and the thoughts we’re having (e.g., “I’m doing a bad job,” “I’m at ease,” “This person must be judging me,” “I’m doing well at this,” “I’m talented,” “I’m energized.”). We might be relatively unaware, not paying attention to what’s happening inside. We may try to evade our inner world because we think it seems too scary, painful, or pointless to turn toward it. Or we might judge our internal experience, feel ashamed by it, and mentally kick ourselves, presuming that a “normal” person wouldn’t feel or think this way. If any of these feel familiar, oh my are you in good company! Arguably, it’s far less intuitive to 1) observe our physical experiences, emotions, and thoughts, and 2) actually receive them with an attitude of acceptance (also known as equanimity).

What does equanimity (acceptance) mean? It’s not the same as being stoic, uncaring, or indifferent. It essentially means that we’re not getting in our own way. Instead, we’re letting our physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts appear without a) fighting them or trying to make them go away, or b) mentally gripping them or ruminating on them. We allow what arises in our inner world to flow in a more organic way. To put it in more concrete and adorable terms (because why wouldn’t we do that?), imagine that a scampering puppy is about to run through your living room. Instead of scolding the puppy, running away from her, or preventing her from coming in, you let her enter and allow her to head off into the next room when she chooses without trying to keep her in the living room with you. These responses (i.e., observing and acceptance) are foundational in mindfulness approaches. Now what if we were to disentangle these two elements to find out how they each impact what happens for people amid stress?

A team of researchers did precisely that in a new experiment with over 150 people who reported feeling stress. One group of individuals learned how to observe their inner experiences, another group learned how to both observe and accept their inner experiences, and a third control group that learned other techniques to manage stress. The researchers examined people’s unpleasant and pleasant inner experiences during a demanding, stressful situation created in the lab and found no distinction across the three groups in terms of their unpleasant inner experiences (which the team expected based on earlier work). However, for folks who learned both observation and acceptance, their pleasant inner experiences rose more compared to people in the other two groups.

Now you may be wondering, “What’s the point of being aware of and accepting your inner world if it doesn’t turn down the volume on what feels negative?” When people experience tension or strain, their awareness shrinks and shines a spotlight on what seems intimidating, scary, and disquieting; in other words, negativity gets more mental airtime. An ability to notice and accept all of our inner world expands our internal horizon and helps us to also be aware of what seems affirming, beneficial, or even just neutral. This study reveals that it’s possible to observe not only what feels bad amid stress, but also what feels good. This might enable people to face stress in a more adaptive, healthy way, although more work on this is needed to address that question. In the meantime, if you choose, perhaps you might invite yourself to try a mini experiment of your own and see what it's like to allow your physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts to flow in and out on their own without making yourself do anything with them. You don't have to hold onto them, analyze them, push them away, or judge them. Regardless of whether you try the experiment for one day, one hour, one minute, or 10 seconds, do what feels manageable for you. In one sense, this experiment involves less effort (I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it can take a lot of energy to battle or hang onto the workings of our inner life). On the other hand, this involves more effort because it means trying something new, unfamiliar, and probably strange. You're likely to stumble and that's okay. That's part of the human experience too.