Why you should stop trying to fight the bad things in your life

Acknowledging your past mistakes will help you to act properly towards others. Photo / Getty Images

Donald Trump. Sleep deprivation. Sagging boobs. Cash flow. Climate change. Child poverty. Auckland house prices. Broken radiator. Teething.

And breathe ... I'm a complainer and this is my litany of complaints. An orange buffoon in charge of the free world, a baby who never sleeps, a housing market I'm locked out of forever.

But it's okay. These days I can observe these thoughts and feelings without judgement and accept them. Radically.

It's an interesting concept, radical acceptance. Based in the Buddhist tradition (life is suffering, fighting this makes it worse); fine-tuned and repackaged for a Western audience by psychologists such as Marsha Linehan and Tara Brach, it's one of the central tenets of mindfulness.

The concept goes something like this: internally raging and railing against things we can't change doesn't achieve anything positive.

Our attempts to fight or flee from pain are exhausting and add layers of suffering to what is already painful. You can't go over it, you can't go under it, you can't go round it, you've got to go through it - as the kids' book says.

My own transformation from "fighter and fleer" to "radical accepter" began last year.

As a severely anxious first-time mum, fighting and fleeing weren't really options. I couldn't fight the baby, nor could I leave him, so I panicked, spending my days and nights in a state of adrenal-fuelled fear.

Fortuitously, I discovered a course that helped post-partum mothers deal with the transition to motherhood. We sat around a table as radical acceptance was explained - we needed to make the decision to stop fighting reality and accept what we couldn't change.

A few weeks later I started to put the idea into practice.

I was stuck in a horrible flat in Mt Eden. Trying to find a house to rent that was big enough for my wee brood but under $1000 a week was nearly impossible. It was a grind - the endless house viewings, trying to be a new mumma in the midst of near squalor.

What made it even worse was the anger and frustration that glued themselves to the situation. The market forces, the unfairness of neo-liberal capitalism, the greed of landlords - the endless, tumbling play of thoughts and feelings and overwhelming emotions.

So sitting on my bed one day, baby asleep in the cot, I did the following meditation.
I identified the problem and voiced it.

"I hate my house and it's impossible to raise a baby here I hate that I can't find anything I can afford. I resent the people who've turned the property market into a grist for their money mill. I am angry, I am scared, I can't cope."

I allowed these thoughts to enter my mind, then noted what bodily sensations accompanied the thoughts.

I felt it in my shoulders, in my gut, and as a ring of pressure around my head. My left temple throbbed slightly, and there was a tingle in my right foot.

I became aware of the situation, accepted the painful emotions. I watched them ebb and flow and just breathed.

And it worked. Rather than drowning in a morass of unregulated emotions, I sat back and watched where my thoughts went, with curiosity and compassion. It lessened the sting and allowed me space to work out what to do from there.

Chris Irwin is a mindfulness teacher with Mindfulness Matters, a psychologist and a former Buddhist monk. This dude knows his stuff.

He says that it's in human nature to constantly wish for things to be different.

"We are always thinking that if things change, if something wasn't there, then things would be better for us," he says.

But this resistance and struggle to make things different leads to an extremely narrow view of the world. "If we have a life event that we become completely fixated on and we can't change it, we can't move on."

He says mindfulness techniques such as radical acceptance actually change the way our brain works and relieves a lot of suffering.

"Most of us react to perceived threats from the limbic system, an ancient part of the brain that is responsible for our fight or flight reactions," he says. "Once people regularly start practising radical acceptance and other mindfulness techniques, they start to use the pre-frontal cortex [of their brain]. This develops in later life and is responsible for such traits as empathy and the desire to nurture."

In short, this means our responses to situations and experiences aren't fight or flight reactions; we start acting out of compassion and empathy towards ourselves. When we stop fighting and start accepting, our thought process begins to soften.

This all sounds great but it does raise a question. If you just accept things, won't they always stay the same?

If you're in a domestic violence situation, living under a tyrannical dictator, or stricken with a terrible illness, surely acceptance of the situation is akin to just giving up?

And what's wrong with wanting things to be different?

Mindfulness researcher and clinical psychologist Cassandra Vietnam says that this is a key misconception of radical acceptance.

In her book Mindful Motherhood, she outlines how radical acceptance works.

"There is pain that is a part of being alive, and accepting that rather than resisting it is part of what [radical acceptance] is all about."

She says resistance to this pain creates "unnecessary suffering. This is the unnecessary layers of worry, rumination, struggle, and difficulty we put on top of the original problem."

She says that if your response to any experience is resistance, elevation of its importance, rumination or suppression, this causes "unnecessary suffering". The ability to accept and meet a situation as it is, head on, removes a layer of unnecessary suffering from the pain.

Acceptance is also the keystone of one of the most effective forms of psychology to appear in recent decades. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is used to treat a wide range of mental health issues; it's proved as effective as the more established cognitive behavioural therapy and is used to treat depression, anxiety and addiction.

Bruce Arroll is a psychologist and professor at University of Auckland. He's also one of the country's leading proponents of ACT.

He says that as "life has no delete button" (we can't undo things that have been done) and that fighting against this will ultimately lead to more pain.

He says that fighting what can't be changed creates anxiety and depression.

"Acceptance is important because fighting against things we can't change makes our lives smaller. Distressed people shrink from their lives."

Acceptance of pain, coupled with the commitment to leading a life according to one's values, can be a powerful tool.

He uses an anchoring exercise to help people accept their pain. "In the 'mindful anchor' you can train your mind to be constructive. Sit with feet on ground and hand on heart and think of the painful thought. Notice it. Name it. Soften around it. Let it go - step back from it. Consider what is now possible."

While much of this may sounds esoteric, hippie-ish and twee, the proof is in the results.

Acceptance may sound hard or even counter-productive, but evidence indicates that it works.

When you are next confronted with a situation that seems unbearable, lean into the pain, observe how it feels in your body, and breath. It may just lessen the sting.

Embrace the negative

A recent book by Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm, takes aim at the self-help industry and concepts such as radical acceptance.

Brinkmann's rather Goth-style philosophy encourages people to embrace the negative, dwell in the past, and stop soul-searching. He says positive thinking is meaningless drivel and the self-help industry a money-making scam.

He sees the likes of mindfulness - with its focus on the present - as wrongheaded.

"Techniques like mindfulness try to make us more 'present in the moment' and don't bother at all with the past. But if we want to live well in the moral sense, it's crucial that we know how to reflect on our own personal past," he says in The Daily Mail.

"Acknowledging your past mistakes will help you to act properly towards others.

"Dwelling on your past provides insights into the complexity of your life and how it's intertwined with the lives of others."

He recommends instead that we look at the Stoic philosophers for wisdom; to face the negative and tough it out. Read a novel, play the violin. Look outward for answers.

And ditch the introspection.