To become psychologically flexible
is more than just addressing personality.
It's actually addressing the way we really relate to ourselves.
Flexibility is the ability to adjust your thoughts, actions and feelings
to the circumstances you find yourself in.
Situations change, and so it's important to be able
to adjust and behave in the most functional way to achieve your goals.
When you're born, your brain is not finished.
Infant brains are born under construction.
They're waiting for a set of wiring instructions
from the world.
If you expose your children to a lot of varying experiences
then you're basically wiring your child's brain
to function in a flexible way
and to learn new things when necessary.
If your child's experiences are very restricted
then your child will have less flexibility to adjust their actions
to the situations that they're in.
There's a really well-known
demonstration of flexibility
called the Stroop test.
A sequence of words, such as red, green, yellow, blue
but written in different colours.
When you present people with a whole list of these
you find that it takes people longer to name the colour of the ink
when the word is written in a colour that is different to the actual word.
The idea behind that
is in order to be able to name the colour
requires people to switch between
different pieces of information in their mind.
In simple terms,
what happens is that when they scan the word colour
the automatic processes of reading the word
interfere with the person's ability to state the colour out loud.
The more difficult people find this generally
the less cognitively flexible they are.
When your brain can't predict something,
or when you have to take in new information that you didn't predict,
that's what we call learning.
So your brain can update, it can learn,
or your brain can ignore the sense data
and just go with its own prediction.
Flexibility means tailoring a response to the specific situation,
either by predicting well
or by learning when there is prediction error.
A lot of what psychological flexibility is about
is the way in which people use resources that they have available
in dealing with stress.
One of the things about psychological inflexibility
is that people are not using their resources
in a way that's helpful to them.
Quite often they're using a very narrow range of their resources
to be able to adapt.
And the idea
in psychological flexibility
is really to move people
from a state of what psychologists call languishing,
of being stuck in a less than satisfactory situation,
to move them out of that zone
into a zone of achieving more of their potential.
What stops people from changing their lives
from a state of low satisfaction to one of higher satisfaction
is quite often to do with inflexibility
in the way they approach the problem that they're facing.
So there's a really deep lesson here.
You can take more control
over your environment.
You are not just a passive recipient of whatever the world gives you.
Spending time cultivating experiences
and foraging for new information
is an investment in maintaining a flexible brain.
These are all opportunities to expose yourself to prediction error
so that your brain can solve problems more flexibly in the future.
So exposing yourself to stuff you don't know,
and maybe even ideas you don't like,
might make you feel crappy in the moment
but actually
it is a really good investment.