Can’t Stomach What’s Happening in the World? Try This

Many people today find it virtually impossible to accept the current political and economic state of the world—whether it’s the increasing economic disparities between haves and have nots (in 2018, the top 0.1 percent earned 196 times per year what the bottom 90 percent earned), our worsening global environment, our plummeting civility accompanying our new screen-fixated habits or our growing political polarization.

Lessons From Half a Decade Ago

To learn how to cope with what’s happening today, let’s turn the clock back half a decade to the moment in which our first global pandemic in almost a century was beginning, and consider how we coped with it.

During the peak of the pandemic, married parents under lockdown who were able to accept the uncertainty of the situation experienced less psychological distress. Further, a meta-analysis of 121 studies of over 11,000 healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic found that those who were able to manage unprecedented uncertainty, grow from the experience, and preserve their long-term well-being and capacity to care with compassion were characterized by one surprising ability.

What might that ability be? They were able to accept the discomfort of their daily reality with psychological flexibility and reflection. In other words, they knew how to practice acceptance.

Which Wall? What Writing?

People unable to accept their current situation tend to practice “experiential avoidance,” an internal coping mechanism associated with psychological inflexibility. Individuals who are psychologically flexible, on the other hand, are first able to accept what is happening around them and then adapt. A study of over 500 people in the UK during the COVID pandemic found that such individuals experience enhanced well-being and less depression, anxiety, and, again, psychological distress.

The greatest prison you will ever enter resides within your own mind. When you accept exactly where you are in your life, even under the worst of circumstances, you arrive at the precise moment in which you access the power to move your life toward something better.

Once you truly accept your current reality in life, you access the power of self-directed change. “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance,” shares the actor Michael J. Fox, who has spent over three decades living with Parkinson’s disease, “and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”

Acceptance Is Not Optional

When you accept that where you are is not where you wish to be but is where you currently are, and that any desired change must—absolutely, unequivocally must—begin from there, you regain your sense of power in your life. In other words, acceptance is ground zero, your starting point for every relationship you will ever develop and everything you will ever accomplish in your life.

The next step—actively taking action to address whatever you have found difficulty in accepting—is also critical for your long-term mental health.

“Easy for you to say, oh optimistic author,” you might be thinking. “I just can’t stomach watching these politicians and oligarchs destroying what we’ve built over so many years.”

I hear you. Yet while your feelings of disappointment, frustration, and disillusionment are difficult to live with, live with them you must, at least right in this moment.

Reclaim Your Power

Once you accept and make your peace with these feelings, you gain the vital power you need to work toward change. Renewing your source of well-being within when so much of what you value is crumbling without is an unprecedented challenge to which each of us must rise.

Move toward acceptance in your life. Once you feel an inner peace evoked by being more accepting of yourself and others, then—and only then—you will be able to think with depth about how you will create change in your life and in this world we all share together.