I used to get wound up over the smallest things. Having to empty the dishwasher. The dog going insane every time anyone came to the door. The dog waking me up at 3 a.m. to bark at foxes. Magazine editors asking me to adjust typos in articles even though it’s just one word and in the time it took them to email me about it they could easily have done it themselves and isn’t that what they’re being paid for anyway? You know. Things like that.
As you can imagine, none of this was serving me well. I wouldn’t react violently, or even all that unpredictably, but I did on occasion shout a lot of colorful words. Worse, I had all of this stress churning around in my guts, to the point where I couldn’t sleep. Day and night, I would ruminate on emails I wanted to send, forceful conversations I wanted to have.
Life seemed to pile up. My car broke down. Then my laptop broke. Then my phone. One day, we needed to call the plumber. It’s all the stuff of a normal life — I know that now. But just a few months ago, I felt like each new addition to the to-do list might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The answer? Finding my way back to counseling, for starters. I’ve found solace in cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation in the past, so I searched for a therapist with Eastern leanings, then commenced weekly sessions over Zoom. The new guy delivered. His most impactful guidance so far has been to direct me to the teachings of another practitioner of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn.
The 9 Attitudes of Mindfulness
Kabat-Zinn is a student of Zen Buddhism, has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT, and is the founder of the Mindfullness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts. He’s perhaps best known for writing and teaching about his nine mindfulness attitudes, which are presented as essential elements for taking a more mindful approach to life. It’s worth watching him talk through all nine, but what stuck with me was the section on acceptance.
As Kabat-Zinn describes it, “[Acceptance] is an act of recognition that things are actually the way they are.” It’s a reminder that often, despite our best intentions, diligence and forethought, there’s much in our lives we can’t control. It could be another person’s reaction, having unexpected work dumped on you or the simple fact that it’s raining outside. Sometimes things are just like that, without consideration for you.
Dr. Sarah Bishop, a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience, likens acceptance to being slapped by life and realizing we can’t be un-slapped. “Acceptance is not about ruminating our way out of the slap,” she says. “It’s about acknowledging where we actually are now, so that we can then decide what we want to do from there on.” In other words, it’s about intentionally reacting to things we aren’t happy about, without adding more negativity to the situation.
Not accepting this reality — that’s where the stress comes in. As Kabat-Zinn says, “[U]nless we accept things as they are, we will try to force things to be as they are not, and that can create an enormous amount of difficulty.”
“Often it’s not just the event itself that causes us suffering; it’s the struggle with the reality of the event,” Bishop adds. “Something happens, and then we have a second battle with it: ‘I can’t believe this has happened. This shouldn’t have happened. It’s not fair. Why me?’”
Acceptance Is Good for the Body
There’s a biological benefit to acceptance, too. Bishop says that when we’re stressed, our brains and bodies can respond as if we’re actually being threatened. This can mean more physiological agitation. And we know that stress is a killer: workplace stress alone is linked to 120,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
“Acceptance gives us an opportunity to stop feeding that cycle,” Bishop says. Put into action, this can mean pausing to take three intentional breaths, which can help disrupt our automatic thinking and afford us the space to react in a more useful way.
Take this example: my car broke down recently and I had to take it to the garage. There was no immediate solution, so I left it with them while they ran expensive tests. Previously, I would have worried about this and ruminated over it for a long time. I would have grown increasingly tense and irritable, and every decision would have been driven by some version of “Now I need to earn more money to fix the car” or “I won’t be able to do this thing I want because I can’t drive there.”
Instead, I tried to put my new attitude into practice. In place of an added layer of self-imposed stress, I reframed the situation like this: “I don’t have a car for a while, it’s getting fixed and there’s nothing I can do about that. Yes, it’s inconvenient and will cost me money, but luckily it isn’t the end of the world.”
And that was it. The car stayed in the back of my mind, but it sat still, no longer gnawing away at me. It was out of my hands until some point in the future when the garage would call me, and that was that.
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A few months in, there’s one thing I’m still bumping against: acceptance can feel like I’m letting the world walk all over me. If I go outside and it’s raining, should I just accept I’m going to get wet instead of putting up an umbrella?
Not exactly, according to Kabat-Zinn. “Acceptance is a very active process,” he says. “There’s nothing passive about it. It’s not passive resignation…. [It] doesn’t mean that we can’t work to change the world or to change circumstances.”
“Instead of asking why this and that happened to us and being frustrated, we could take everything as opportunities to learn and grow,” adds Kay Phongsan, a mindfulness coach who’s spent over a decade practicing energy arts like tai chi and qigong. Acceptance, Phongsan says, allows our mind to be at peace and free of judgment. “Only then we can be conscious and see the circumstances as they truly are and interact with it with a calm, rational and centered mind for the best possible outcome.”
I think that this is key. Acceptance for me is being able to deal with a situation without letting emotions cloud my mind. Of course, it’s a work in progress and always will be — even when my problems are relatively minor. I still get annoyed. I still stress myself out. But I’m working on seeing things another way. Another of Kabat-Zinn’s nine attitudes is “non-striving” — unshackling ourselves from this idea that we must always be working towards another state of being. In my case, I’m always striving to be free from stress. But that isn’t realistic, so I need to accept I will be stressed, and try to deal with it rationally.
It Sounds Woo-Woo. It Actually Works.
Sometimes, it helps to focus on the positives. I try to focus on the fact that I have a nice life, full of nice people and things, and that in the grand scheme of existence, it’s actually a privilege to be stressed out. If work is annoying, it’s a reminder that I get to do this for a living. If my car is broken, it’s a reminder that, wow, I can drive, I own a car and I live somewhere with great public transportation which I can use in the meantime. It sounds cheesy, sure, but have you ever tried it in earnest?
“If we don’t accept, we can dwell in denial and frustration, which are the source of stress. And when one is stressed, it’s hard to have a clear mind,” says Phongsan. “A disturbed pond will never be clear, only stillness would allow the mud to settle — and the water will return to its natural state of being clear again.”
I recognize that a middle-class white guy talking about Eastern philosophies is cliche, but this mindset has helped me tremendously. If you’re interested in protecting your own peace of mind, and inviting a bit more acceptance into your own life, Phongsan recommends that, like me, when you’re faced with an obstacle that normally sends you spiraling, you start by taking a breath and slowing down.
“Slowing down life, the mind will naturally slow down too,” he says. This gives us perspective, the first step of acceptance. “When the mind is less active, we will start to see life as it is. We will start to accept life as it is and the flow will emerge from the clarity of the mind.”
At the time of writing, my car has been in the garage for 10 weeks. That’s not a typo. I was worried that I’d taken acceptance too far, that by leaving the mechanics to it, I hadn’t properly stuck up for myself — and in the process let them take the piss. I began to ruminate, running through an annoyed phone conversation in my mind. I was slipping back into old patterns, letting my brain work itself up again. I could feel my heart rate climbing, my brain spinning.
I didn’t call the garage that day. Instead, I accepted I was annoyed with them, and called them the following morning. By doing so I was able to have a calm and rational conversation in which I could convey my frustrations without feeling overwhelmed, or raising my voice — a big thing for me. It worked. The head mechanic told me the car would need a final bit of work, but as they’d had the car so long, this additional work was on them, and I’d have the car back this week. It was the best outcome I could have hoped for, and instead of being stressed about having to wait a few more days, I was happy.
“Acceptance absolutely doesn’t mean passivity, resignation or allowing people to walk all over us. In fact, I think acceptance can be what gives us the space to act,” Bishop reminds me. “Sometimes accepting reality is actually the most active thing we can do; it stops us wasting energy fighting something that has already happened, and frees that energy up for moving forward.”
In a word full of real problems, none of us needs to expend energy fighting ourselves.
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