Psychological flexibility: living with difficult feelings instead of fighting them

In 1987 Daniel Wegner and colleagues asked people to talk through their thoughts for five minutes and to try not to think of a white bear. They rang a bell each time a white bear came to mind anyway, and it came often. Later, when they were allowed to think about it, they thought about the bear more than people who had never tried to suppress it.

Trying not to feel or think something rarely works for long. That idea sits at the centre of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes and colleagues. Its main goal is psychological flexibility, the ability to notice difficult thoughts and feelings, let them be there, and still do what matters to you.

Avoidance and its cost

The opposite of flexibility, in this view, is experiential avoidance, which means arranging your life around not having certain feelings. Someone avoids parties to avoid anxiety, or stays busy every evening to avoid sadness. In the short term it helps. Over time the list of things you avoid can grow, and life gets narrower.

Flexibility means that a feeling, pleasant or not, does not make the decision for you. You can feel nervous before a hard conversation and still have it.

The AAQ-II

In 2011 Frank Bond, Steven Hayes and colleagues published the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire II (AAQ-II), a seven-item measure of psychological inflexibility. Our Psychological Flexibility test uses its seven statements, for example "I'm afraid of my feelings.", "Emotions cause problems in my life." and "Worries get in the way of my success."

We changed two things. The original asks how true each statement is for you, from never true to always true. Our version uses a seven-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. In the original a higher total means more inflexibility. Because every statement describes a struggle, we score all seven in reverse, so on our test a higher score means more flexibility. Your number is therefore not directly comparable with published norms.

What the score does and does not capture

Bond and colleagues found that higher AAQ-II scores, meaning less flexibility, went together with more depression, anxiety and stress. That fits the theory, but it also raises a question. In 2014 Martin Wolgast argued that the AAQ-II items overlap so much with general distress that the scale may measure how bad you feel as much as how you relate to your feelings. Statements such as "It seems like most people are handling their lives better than I am." read close to a description of low mood.

So treat your result as a snapshot of how much your inner experiences get in your way right now. A difficult month can lower it, and it is not a fixed trait or a diagnosis.

If your score is low

A low score means you currently feel that painful feelings or memories stop you from living the way you want. If that has lasted for weeks, or comes with persistent low mood, panic or sleep problems, talk to a doctor or psychologist. ACT is one of several approaches a therapist may offer.

Some simple practices come from the same tradition. Naming a feeling ("I notice I am anxious") gives a little distance from it. Asking what you would do right now if the feeling were not in charge points you back to your values. These are habits to try, not a replacement for help when you need it.

Psychological flexibility overlaps with mindful attention, which the mindfulness test (FFMQ) measures. For other ways of handling strong feelings, read four emotion regulation strategies.