Why Flexibility is Essential
Eight years ago I was in really good shape. I lived in the mountains, across the street from a ski area. In the winter, I skied nearly every day. Some days, because there was night skiing, I would ski for ten hours. In the summer, I went hiking or mountain biking nearly every day. Sometimes, I would climb a mountain during the daylight hours, and then go backpacking in the evening, arriving at some alpine lake long after dark, sleep for a few hours, and then wake up to climb more mountains the next day. In the winter, I heated my home with a wood stove, so I spent my spare time in the summers chopping firewood. For work, I was a waiter and a bartender, so I was always on the move. During that phase of my life, I easily averaged four hours of exercise per day. I was fit. Or so I thought…
My left hip kept getting tighter and tighter. It started popping with every step. This turned out to be my IT band – the big tendon that runs along the outside of your leg, connecting your hip to your knee. It had become shortened and was now rubbing raw at the top because it was snapping over my hip bone with each step. I ignored this as long as I could, but eventually, the pain was so great that I could barely walk. Unable to work or play on my feet, I went to physical therapy and was promptly told I needed to stretch my hip.
Now, there are three categories of physical fitness: strength, endurance, and flexibility. Many people cultivate only the first two and ignore the third, which often leads to injury. My hip trouble is a prime example of this. I was inflexible, and no amount of strength or endurance could save me from the consequences of never properly stretching. To be truly fit, you need to cultivate all three forms of fitness.
Cognitive Fitness Requires Cognitive Flexibility
The world of mental fitness can be broken down into the same three categories: strength, endurance, and flexibility. As with our bodies, many of us develop intelligence and willpower – strength – along with the ability to work long hours – endurance – but neglect to develop flexibility with our minds. And lacking mental flexibility will just as surely lead to injury as lacking physical flexibility – it’s just that the injuries here are psychological: anger problems, depression, anxiety, meltdowns, emotional crises.
At the same time as I was lacking in hip flexibility, I was also lacking in mental flexibility, and the consequences of this were rapidly approaching, though I didn’t know it at the time. Instead of taking my hip trouble as a sign that I needed to slow down athletically and find a different line of work, I powered through another ski season and continued working on my feet. My hip was getting close to being 100% again when, seemingly out of nowhere, I got two stress fractures in my left foot. This would prove to be an injury from which I would never fully recover.
I had neglected to create a backup plan for work, and the only way I knew how to make a living was by working in restaurants, which was no longer an option. My main sources of fun – mountain sports – were also off-limits. Unable to work, hike, or ski, I spiraled into a deep depression. I was also a marijuana addict, and even though this behavior wasn’t serving me, I rigidly refused to give it up. I needed to change my lifestyle, my career, and significant parts of my identity, but I suffered for a long time because I didn’t have the psychological flexibility to make those changes.
Getting Your Brain in Shape
Previously in this blog, I’ve talked about developing mental strength:
- How meditation develops the mental muscle you use to focus your attention.
- How obstacles, annoyances, and other problems are good opportunities for mental training because struggle makes you stronger.
- How your ability to handle discomfort can be deliberately trained.
And I’ve also talked about developing mental endurance:
- How, after a long day of work, you can reinforce your growing identity as a hard worker by pride journaling.
- How giving yourself permission to rest replenishes your energy reserves.
- How taking care of your brain health fundamentals – sleep, exercise, and nutrition – increases your willpower
So it’s high time I talked about developing the critical skill of mental flexibility.
How to Cultivate Cognitive Flexibility
Mental flexibility is valuable in every professional field because all lines of work involve solving a variety of problems in an ever-changing environment. And training yourself to do that can be as simple as solving a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of situations. The deliberate training, however, doesn’t need to have anything to do with your work. It could range from solving math problems to building websites, from writing stories to figuring out puzzling rock-climbing routes. My favorite form of brain training, however, is playing games.
Games and Puzzles
Both because I love them and because they cultivate psychological flexibility, I play a wide variety of tabletop games. I play complicated strategy games in which you must compete over limited resources, plan ahead, predict what your opponents will do, and adjust your strategy as the game progresses. I play creative social games where you interpret weird art (Dixit
) or invent products and make sales pitches (Snake Oil
). I play word games, dexterity games, card games, and cooperative games. Some involve buying and selling, betting or bidding. Some games are all about territory control. Some games are just for laughs. Each game’s unique challenges offer their own bit of brain training, but, taken together, the sheer variety cultivates a deep level of mental flexibility.
One game that seems deliberately designed to cultivate your mental flexibility is Connections, a daily puzzle from the New York Times. You’re given 16 words that you must sort into four categories. The challenge is that the words have many things they could mean or ways they could be used. A category might have to do with the meaning of the word, how it’s used in a common phrase, how it’s spelled, how it sounds, or something else entirely. Your first idea about each word is rarely correct, so to solve the puzzle, you have to be flexible.
And the skills you learn playing games can be applied much more widely. Josh Waitzkin is perhaps the best example of this. A chess prodigy, world-champion martial artist, and author of The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
, Waitzkin is a paragon of psychological flexibility. He’s taken the core principles of learning and playing chess and applied them to mastering Brazilian jiu-jitsu, tai chi push hands, and most recently, paddle surfing. He has this to say about the value of interdisciplinary knowledge:
“Lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it to another, is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate.”1
Learning Widely
Waitzkin’s advice is related to another practice I use to develop mental flexibility: relentless learning. This means that almost every day I take time to learn a few new things from a variety of domains. These include domains with practical applications for my work – like psychology – but also include domains that are seemingly irrelevant to the work I do – like microbiology. (By the way, if you haven’t seen Journey to the Microcosmos yet, go check it out. It’s amazing.) The ideas I learn from the “irrelevant” sometimes have useful parallels or surprising applications to my daily life or my work. And, at the very least, they teach me to see the world through a variety of lenses.
Changing Perspectives
On a related note, being mentally flexible can mean being willing to look at a problem from different perspectives. Here, for example, is the view of Mt. Thomson from the west:
Impossible, right? Well, at least impossible to climb for mere mortals like myself, untrained as I am in traditional, multi-pitch rock climbing. But here’s Mt. Thomson from the south:
From this perspective, the climb seems more reasonable. … Well, at least it seems less unreasonable. And this is true of nearly all “impossible” problems: From a different point of view, they become manageable challenges.
Mental flexibility can also be the willingness to consider ideas from other perspectives – you know, those perspectives you disagree with. If you’re certain about some idea in the realm of philosophy, religion, or politics, there’s a good chance you’re being mentally rigid. And if you’re anything like me, when you see an article that espouses a belief contrary to your own, you feel a strong aversion to reading that article. One practice I use to cultivate mental flexibility is using that resistance as a signal that I should, in fact, read the article.
Other People
In a similar vein, psychological flexibility helps you have better relationships.2 Your friends, family, and coworkers will not always do or say what you expect them to. And the way you respond to them should not be fixed and rigid. You need the ability to adapt dynamically to the people in your life because they’re dynamic people. Social challenges are a way to practice this skill.
Mental flexibility can also be the willingness to use ideas from people whom we don’t particularly like. Tony Robbins comes to mind for me. I don’t like his presentation style, I think he’s overly optimistic about our ability to make radical changes instantly, and I didn’t like his reaction to the #metoo movement. But if you read one of his books or watch some of his stuff, and you’re open-minded enough to consider what he says (without blindly believing all of it), you can cherry-pick some profoundly good ideas.
Cognitive Flexibility for Life
Psychological flexibility is also essential for behavioral change. Let’s take exercise as our example. Many people want to exercise more – or at least know it would be good for them – but struggle to do it. (This is the most common thing I work on with coaching clients.) One thing that frequently prevents people from exercising more is a set of rigid beliefs about what kinds of exercise they can do, where and when they can do it, and what amount of exercise counts as a “good” workout. When some people imagine exercising, they can only think of running, as though that were the only type of exercise available. Other people think the only place they can exercise is at the gym, first thing in the morning, forgetting that you can work out anywhere, anytime, using just your body. And most treacherously, many people believe that short workouts are pointless – that only 30 or 40 or 60 minutes of exercise is worth doing. In reality, small doses of exercise are absolutely worthwhile. I’ve found that as little as five minutes is enough to boost my mood and make me feel cognitively sharper for hours. And, of course, a small amount of exercise is much better than no exercise at all. Remember, everything counts.
(See also: 1000 Little Choices, The Most Important Rule for Sticking with a Habit, and Minor Adjustments Add Up.)
I was once taught, but by whom I can’t recall, that “psychological maturity is the ability to change perspectives at will.” In other words, maturity is mental flexibility. It’s certainly a critical component of executive function, and it’s essential for handling problems well. Resilience experts Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte reported that, according to psychological research, “the most resilient people are those who have cognitive flexibility and can identify all the significant causes of the adversities they face without being trapped in any specific explanatory style.”3 In other words, when something bad happens, psychological flexibility helps you recover because it prevents you from rigidly seeing the problem from just one perspective.
Lastly, a big part of improving our mental flexibility is being more aware of how we’re being rigid. Mindfulness helps here, so you can add this to the list of reasons why meditation is good for you. Becoming more aware of our inflexibility can also help us get out of what David Foster Wallace called our “default setting” – how we often operate with an unquestioned certainty that we are the center of the world. (See: This is Water.) Doing so is likely to make us better people and make us happier.
1 Ferriss, Tim. Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
2 DiDonato, Theresa E., Ph.D. “The Understudied Trait That Makes for Happier Relationships.” Psychology Today. Dec 30, 2020.
3 Reivich, Karen, and Andrew Shatte. The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles
. Harmony, 2003.