Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains psychological flexibility: figure out what matters to you, notice your thoughts and feelings without acting on them automatically, then choose how to respond. You can solve the problem, accept what you can't change, or shift your emotional reaction toward it.
You. Welcome to this presentation on psychological flexibility. This is another video in the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Nuggets series. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this series, we're going to continue talking about things that you can do in order to effectively use your energy to work towards your rich and meaningful life. So what you need to do is start out by defining your rich and meaningful life. And remember, you know, going back to the video on defining your rich and meaningful life, you know, recognize what that is. And then as you go through each day, mindfully acknowledge the present. How you feel, what you need, what you want, what your urges are. Just because you have an urge does not mean you have to act on it. You may have an urge, for example, to smoke a cigarette or go get drunk. Well, that may provide you some relief, maybe in the short term, but is it going to help you work towards the things that are important in your rich and meaningful life? If not, how can you use your energy more effectively? So you acknowledge the present, acknowledge your urges, your feelings, your thoughts, wants and needs, and then you identify the most effective way to use your energy to deal with the current situation, to help you move toward your rich and meaningful life. Now, if we're talking about distress, for example, you could address it. Maybe it's something that you do have the ability to address, to make it go away, to make it better. Well, great, then do that. If you wake up one morning and your head is all stuffed up and you feel sick, you know, nobody likes feeling like that. It's not going to help you have, you know, a good mood probably. So there are things you can do to address it, to address those symptoms in order to get healthy faster so you can go back to using your energy to have a rich and meaningful life. You know, staying sick and just being angry about it is just going to drain your energy. So sometimes there are things that you can can do to address the situation, to make it possible to free up energy or to use your energy towards your goals. Sometimes it's not. Maybe you've got a co worker who is just a grumpy old Gus and nothing that you do seems to be satisfactory for them. They have to complain about everything. Well, most likely a lot of that has to do more with them than with you. So arguing with them, trying to conjole them, trying to convince them why what you are doing is just fine probably isn't going to go very far. So in the big scheme of things, if there's nothing you can do to change their mind or to address the situation, maybe it's better just to let it go. Recognize that they can have their opinion, they don't have to like you. And it's using your energy to try to get them to like you isn't helping you move towards the people, things and experiences that are important in your life. This is somebody who's really not, in the big scheme of things, important in your life. The other option you have is changing your reaction to the situation. Go back to that grumpy colleague again. Instead of being angry and frustrated at them or feeling rejected by them, you can change your reaction to the situation to one of compassion. Thinking about, oh my gosh, how awful must it be to feel angry that much of the time? You know you can't necessarily change them, but having compassion or pity on them can sometimes make it easier to to deal with what's going on. Because then you're not taking it so personally, you're recognizing that the unpleasantness resides within them. So to sum up effectively, using your energy here means defining your rich and meaningful life, which we talked about in another video. Mindfully acknowledging the present. What do you feel? What are you thinking? What are your thoughts, wants and needs, and even your urges? Just because you think them or just because you have them doesn't mean you have to act on them. Then decide, okay, given the current situation, what's the most effective way to use my energy in order to nurture the things that are important to me and let go of the things that really aren't important in my life?
