You’re stuck in traffic.
You dropped a glass on the floor and it shattered.
You hurt your back moving a piece of furniture.
It’s pouring rain and you forgot to bring a jacket.
You have to clean the bathrooms, dust, and vacuum before company comes over.
There’s a long line to check out at the grocery store, and the clerk is moving really slowly because they’re chatting with a customer. Don’t they know you’re running late?
These are just a handful of the situations in which we feel resistance. Our brains rebel against reality whenever something unpleasant happens, whenever we experience an inconvenience, whenever we’re in pain, and whenever we have to do something we’d rather not do.
Resistance Makes You Unhappy
Resistance is an automatic reaction that causes us to wish things were different than they are. And this makes us unhappy because it highlights the gap between what we want and what is. In fact, the suffering you experience from a problem is proportional to the degree to which you are resisting it. Or, more succinctly, suffering = pain X resistance.1
Being in resistance leads to frustration, anger, bitterness, and resentment.2 We feel wronged because the world has not given us what we’re entitled to or because other people have not treated us the way we deserve to be treated. When we expect things to go well, and they don’t, we suffer.
Acceptance is Better
The opposite of resistance is acceptance, and everything in life gets better when we accept reality for what it is. But acceptance doesn’t mean passively allowing bad things to happen. It’s a necessary step to take before working to make things better. In order to address the problems in your life, you have to see them for what they are, and you cannot see things clearly when you’re in resistance. You also can’t take positive action when you’re focused on all the ways you’re a victim.
Acceptance is Difficult
Because resistance is our default reaction, acceptance doesn’t come easily. If we’re not mindful, and if we don’t exercise our power to choose how we respond, we’ll automatically live in a state of resistance. So acceptance is something you have to choose, and it’s a skill you can practice.
With that in mind, here are five ways to practice acceptance.
1. Do the Thing
When there’s something we have to do that we don’t want to do, we naturally resist doing it. We drag our feet. We procrastinate. We half-ass it. These behaviors are anti-acceptance. We’d be much better off just doing the thing.
“Doing the thing” might mean doing a workout, writing an email, or cleaning up a mess your pet made. It could mean wholeheartedly participating in a work meeting or a social event that you’re less than excited about. By showing up fully for whatever it is you have to do, you’ll be actively embodying acceptance.
If the task is unpleasant, fine. Best to get it over with because part of the suffering you experience from unpleasant tasks comes from thinking about doing them. In other words, if you’re going through Hell, keep going.
Remember, resistance is a compass that points you toward the behavior you most need to do. In other words, we feel the most resistance for the most important tasks. Use it to guide you, and then actively defy it by doing the opposite of what resistance is telling you to do. Because actions speak louder than thoughts, doing the thing is the most powerful way to shift from resistance to acceptance.
However, “doing the thing” isn’t always active in a way that’s visible. It can also mean sitting patiently in traffic, tolerating the pain of an injury, or smiling at other people waiting in the grocery store checkout line. In these cases, the active part is happening internally, where your mind is practicing acceptance.
Being proactive doesn’t always mean looking busy. Sometimes, the most proactive thing you can do is to sit still and accept the situation you’re in.
2. Don’t Complain
Whatever it is you have to do, or whatever situation you have to put up with, don’t complain about it.
Complaining is the very embodiment of futile resistance; it works against the goal of acceptance. And that’s one of the main reasons why complaining makes things worse.
If you complain while you’re doing a task, your mind will attempt to justify and reinforce that complaining with negative thoughts and unpleasant feelings. But if your mind sees you doing the work and not complaining, it will conclude that the task isn’t really that bad. It will understand that you’ve accepted the task and adjust your emotions accordingly.
3. Meditate
Mindfulness meditation is a great way to deliberately cultivate the skill of acceptance. While you’re sitting in meditation, you might be physically uncomfortable, you might have unpleasant thoughts, you might have negative emotions, or you might simply be bored. By sitting with whatever arises in your mind and allowing yourself to experience it, you’re practicing acceptance.
I also recommend loving-kindness meditation, which means mentally sending well-wishes to various people. You begin with yourself, expand out to loved ones, friends, and acquaintances, eventually sending well wishes to people you don’t like. By telling yourself that you want someone you don’t like to be happy, healthy, successful, and at peace, you’re practicing accepting them.
4. Improve How You Talk About Things
Another powerful way to practice acceptance is by improving the words you choose when you talk about challenging things.
Too often, when we think about tasks, situations, or people we don’t like, we use hyperbolic language:
- “I just need them to do what I’ve asked!”
- “My back is killing me!”
- “I hate Comcast!”
- “This project is giving me a heart attack!”
This kind of extreme language conveys strong resistance to reality, and it does so in a way that’s neither accurate nor helpful.
- You don’t actually need them to do what you’ve asked; you just really want them to.
- Your back might be seriously hurt, but it’s not killing you.
- Comcast is terrible, but is it really worth the emotional cost of hating it?
- And the project might be very stressful, but it’s not actually giving you a heart attack. (To learn stress-management strategies that actually work, read this.)
We’d be better off downgrading the intensity of the language we use to speak about things we don’t like. We should try to keep things in perspective and avoid exaggerating how bad things are. Often, we need to zoom out and look at the big picture. When we do, the problems that seem enormous often turn out to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Another way we get things wrong with our words is by talking about all the things we “have” to do.
Everyone has obligations they “have” to do: getting out of bed, doing chores, going to work, etc. But it’s actually possible to see these obligatory tasks as privileges – as things we get to do.
Every morning, I get to put in my contacts, and I get to take a shower. Some days, I get to do laundry, or I get to go grocery shopping. When I think this way, I’m not wearing rose-colored glasses. Contact lenses, hot running water, washing machines, and well-stocked grocery stores are actually profound luxuries that most humans, for most of history, have not had access to.
And that brings us to the final way to practice acceptance …
5. Gratitude
The opposite of resistance is acceptance, and the opposite of complaining is gratitude.
As Ryan Holiday points out in The Daily Stoic, beyond acceptance lies gratitude. And if we can go from merely accepting reality to being thankful for it, then we will cultivate joy.3 In other words, gratitude is a stronger form of acceptance.
My go-to method for practicing gratitude is gratitude journaling. Once or twice a week, I write down a few things I’m grateful for in a little notebook. Usually, the things I write about are clearly positive things: fun experiences, pleasant interactions, good fortune. But sometimes, I express thankfulness for things that appear to be bad on the surface, but which have a surprising upside.
For example, last month my car lost traction on the freeway. It was 50 degrees and raining, but just prior to my arrival at this stretch of I-90, there had been a freak hail storm that covered the road in ice. Thankfully, my car recovered right away, and all I got was a big scare. Other vehicles had spun out and were on the shoulder, being assisted by emergency responders. Later, I wrote in my gratitude journal about how thankful I was for not crashing my car and for learning that I should 1) drive slower in the rain because you never know, and 2) buy snow tires. By acknowledging the upside of obstacles, mishaps, and problems, I practice shifting from resistance to acceptance.
In fact, it’s often the case that the biggest problems you have are really the biggest gifts because they force you to become stronger. But you have to remember that this growth doesn’t happen automatically. It only happens when you accept the difficulties in your life and choose to use them as fuel for your fire.
And this is why practicing acceptance with the small problems in life is so important – it’s training that prepares you to accept the big problems that will inevitably come your way.
1 Neff, Kristin, Ph.D. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself . William Morrow, 2011.
2 Seltzer, Leon F., Ph.D. “You Only Get More of What You Resist—Why?” Psychology Today. June 15, 2016
3 Holiday, Ryan and Stephen Hanselman. The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Portfolio, 2016.