It Ain't Always all Wine and Roses! How Mindfulness and Acceptance Can Enhance Our Life

Did you know that true Positive thinking isn't just thinking happy thoughts?  Did you know that it is OK to say "This sucks!" when it really does?  What we're talking about in this episode is acceptance and how we can use mindful acceptance to make our lives better.  We've all heard the terms "mindfulness" and "acceptance", and sometimes we even practice them:)  In this episode, we'll explore what that really means and we'll also take a look at some scientific data that seems to suggest that they could even make us more healthy.  Join us as we explore mindful acceptance on this week's Positive Pod!

This week, we'll draw inspiration from the following article from the Journal of Psychoendocrinology:

Daubenmier, J., Hayden, D., Chang, V., & Epel, E. (2014). It’s not what you think, it’s how you relate to it: Dispositional mindfulness moderates the relationship between psychological distress and the cortisol awakening response. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 48, 11–18. https://doi-org.pallas2.tcl.sc.edu/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.05.012

Transcript

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the Positive pod. This week we're going to explore the connection between mindfulness acceptance and its connection to your overall health. So let's get started. What is mindfulness mean? I mean, people talk about mindfulness. What we're beginning to discover in the health literature is that there's a connection between obviously how we think and how we feel. Interestingly, for many years we thought that it was what you think that makes a difference. And in fact, it is. To a degree, we explored an episode, one that positive thinking or positive trait optimism, that expectation in general, that things are gonna work out well, is linked to better outcomes, both health wise and mental health wise. Well, that makes sense. As it turns out, it's as important how you think as it is, what you think. Like many of our episodes, we're gonna take a look today at some scientific literature. What we're looking at today is, ah is a study that was done by Donovan Heimer, Hayden Chang and Apple and the articles called It's Not what You Think, It's how You relate to it disposition all mindfulness moderates the relationship between psychological distress and the cortisol awakening response. Heck does all that mean while the court is awakening? Response is in response to stress our bodies will flood our tissues with court is all to prepare for danger. That court is also stress response of natural metabolic response to kind of negative conditions. Lunge with that is it sticks around and it can have some negative health outcomes for us. So we ask ourselves when we look at a study like this. All right, give me the bottom line here. And the bottom line is, the more we accept the reality of what's in front of us, and the less we ruminate about that, the better. When we have something negative that happens to us, we're presented with several choices. What we know from the literature already is, if we generally expect it to work out, well, that's better. And in fact, that's also been linked with a lowering of the court. Is all awakening response further when we can accept what's happening and not let that define us warning even better position. On the other hand, the more we've ruminate about something, the higher the stress response which is exactly what we don't want. So as we look at the results of this study, there was Are lowering effect on cortisol. Awakening Response found for acceptance. Interestingly, there was no positive effect found for describing So what you might say. Here's the payoff we could go for for long periods of time talking about all the challenges that we have. But what this data suggests is that's a little less valuable. What's more valuable? If we can accept the what is about what happens, we can then better problem solved that. What can we do about that? What jumps immediately to mind is a story of three fishermen All had to feed their family. One of the fishermen would Onley fish during the bright sunlight. He would Onley fish when the tide was high, and he found that when he tried to fishing at low tide or when he fought, tried to fish at dusk. It just wasn't comfortable for him. He didn't like it, and he didn't catch many fish, and so he was limited to fishing at high tide and embraced sunlight. Now, as a result, he caught what he called. There was another fisherman that was just the opposite would only efficient low tide and really preferred to fish at night. And when he was forced to fish during the day, he was very unhappy with the situation, and he tended to avoid doing it any corporate caught. By contrast, the third fishermen accepted the weather as it waas. If it rained, he brought a hat to keep the rain out of his eyes. If it was bright sunlight, he dressed Cooley. As a result, he could fish at any time he chose. Of the three fishermen, the third fisherman's family prospered. Of the three fishermen, the third fisherman was the happiest because he was able to accept the weather for what it waas and make an adjustment. Then he was better in a better position to do what he could for his family. And I think when we encountered difficulties, the temptation is to ruminate about it, to feel sorry for ourselves. Describe in detail what a terrible thing is happening here, and it's okay to recognize how we feel. But there's an alternative to consider. Take, for example, the person who doesn't like the color blue. He walks out the door and looks up at the sky and says, Ah, this is terrible The sky is blue and he spends the rest of the day thinking about how much he wishes the sky were a different color. Contrast that with another person who walks out the door, looks up, sees that the sky is blue, accepts that the sky is blue. He doesn't ever have to think about that again. He can think about how he'd like to spend his day. He can think about problem solving his day versus the first individual who is busy spending his mental energy decrying something that simply is. What the data suggests in this particular study is if we could accept what is. We release our body from the need to find that an emergency. We release our body from the need to find that to be a problem, and we release our body from the need to prepare for fighter flight. Once we accept what is, we have the opportunity two problems off. It offers us the opportunity to avoid the rumination that comes with spiral into anxiety and depression, and the data was very clear in this study that the folks who had higher levels of acceptance felt significantly lower, levels of anxiety showed significantly less. Rumination showed significantly less cortisol, awakening response and their bodies. As a result, we're healthier. But most importantly, perhaps their faculties were clear to be able to do what they needed to do to problem solve any given situation. So what I would ask you to think about in as you're moving forward is, to what extent are you able on a regular basis to accept what is in front of you? I think it's also important to know here that acceptance involves what we feel in addition to what is so we can talk about the sky being blue. We can talk about the weather, those air fax. When we begin to think about what we feel, that could be a different thing. So, for example, if we lose someone, there's grief involved there, they're supposed to be grief involved there. We're supposed agree. We're supposed to feel resentful about that. We're supposed to feel the sense of loss. A big part of acceptance is being able to accept that what we feel is what we feel and to give ourselves permission to do that, too, many times when we think about positive thinking, people make the mistake that well, it all just about thinking happy thoughts. Not necessarily. It's about being accepting of the thoughts that we have in any given moment. That's a critical distinction, you know, My grandmother used to say, When we lose someone really special to us, it leaves the biggest hole in our heart. I think that's really well said in lots of ways. It's supposed to be a big loss if we lose someone, and the more we cared about that person that close, we were to that person. The bigger the loss that lost the size of that losses directly commensurate with the amount of love that that person put back into our lives. And it's okay to grieve that it's okay to feel that we've been cheated. It's okay to be angry, and it's okay to be sad, and I think when we're able to give ourselves permission to feel those things, we can do a better job of moving through the grief process. That acceptance also gives us the opportunity for choice, and one of the choices we can make is to acknowledge the temporal nature of feelings. Absolutely. We're going to feel the loss of an individual in our lives for many years. But we have the choices in terms of how we interpret those feelings, and we have the choice in terms of what we, uh, how we consider those feelings. I mentioned the temporal nature of feelings, temporal meaning, time based, right. So, like the screaming man underneath the train, this too shall pass. And we have the opportunity to to recognize that at any time in the process that we're ready to recognize that. And there's no should around that there's no you should be sad for a period of time. You should be angry for a period of time. You should be in denial for a period of time, then ain't the way this works? It's individual. It's based on the relationship that you had. It's based on how you see the world is based on all those things. The acceptance that we're talking about here in this episode is accepting what ISS accepting all the factors that are giving yourself permission to feel how you feel and also giving yourself permission to at some point say yes, this sucks right now, but at some point, this too shall pass. And that's an important power that we can give ourselves with this notion of acceptance. The final aspect of acceptance I want to touch on today is the intensity of feelings and the toxic nature of should surround all that. The only way through a grief filled situation is through the grief. If you want to go to New York City, you're going over a bridge or in a tunnel. It's just the way you're going to get there. And the only way through the grief process in the only way through certain difficult situations in life is to feel your way through them. The acceptance that we're really talking about here is giving yourself permission to feel your way through that, giving yourself permission to acknowledge that feelings or temporal feelings are eventually will pass. But to fully feel them in the moment and and to recognize that that that sucks to recognize the big loss, the big hole that's in your heart, that's okay. It's okay to feel the way we're feeling, just like it's OK to recognize that the sky is blue, just like it's OK to recognize that it's raining outside, but we could probably still do some things. The sky is blue. We could probably still do some things there. There are no should. But there are opportunities to enhance our lives when we can practice that radical acceptance of the circumstances and how we're feeling. Except that as it is and then move forward with. Given that I have accepted that now what do I want to do with that? Next? It's the ultimate empowerment to build your own meaning into things. Fundamentally, I think what this study suggests is the idea that man does search for meaning. We search for meaning. We want to know why we need to make sense of things. This idea of acceptance gives us the opportunity to accept what is and puts us in a much better position to make meaning and at the end of the day makes sense of what happens in our lives. So the next time we do face a challenge in our life, we then have that choice of you know what kind of fishermen dough. I want to be here. How do I want to approach this dumb? I going to recognize that the feeling is temporary, but I got to feel it, and once I'm done feeling it, I then have some choices about how I move forward. I don't have to rail that the sky is blue. I can accept that the sky is blue and I can move forward. I don't have to rail that this happened to me. I can accept that and I can move forward because I've moved through the process. I've felt the feelings. I now have an opportunity to adjust, to change my life and live the life that I wanna live. And that, I think, is the ultimate empowerment. That is the ultimate expression of acceptance is a way to foster meaning. Thanks for joining us on today's positive pod. We look forward to seeing you next week in future episodes. In the meantime, go out and get some good into your life. Take care, everybody. But by