David W. Zierk, PsyD

Flexibility involves considering different things while playing around with their connections and choosing wisely.

Flexibility is the extent to which you are willing and able to "bend" to respond to challenges, adjust to new information, and consider alternative solutions. In relationships, a healthy and flexible mindset is adaptive, which allows you to adapt to the demands of your relationship while still holding room for your preferences and needs. An adaptive mindset seeks to account for your needs but can evolve, consider new information, and be responsive to the situation. Sounds impressive, right?

When you’re flexible, the odds improve that you find satisfaction as you veer away from the rabbit holes of negativity and endless frustration. Instead of doing what you always do, flexibility looks for options. If you think of life as a target-rich endeavor, mental flexibility allows you to choose, from among many, the best target for you. Once selected, your confidence soars that you’re heading in the right direction.

The upside of psychological flexibility includes reducing stress, lowering anxiety, and containing depression. How does this happen? Having options prevents a lousy habit from repeating itself, which distances from a mindset saturated in doubt or, much worse, futility. Flexibility deepens resiliency. Moving in the “feels right” direction makes it easier to stay the course until you strike your bullseye.

Inflexibility

When you're not flexible, your mind moves to the edges and becomes rigid or permissive. These two mindsets are extreme ways of handling situations.

A rigid mind is exact, definite, and unchanging. It is single-minded. The mind that needs more flexibility is unyielding or resistant. In this state of mind, you struggle to shift from your thoughts to consider additional information or perspectives. Your experience has taught you what to expect from relationship situations, and your mind stubbornly predicts and interprets current events from this perspective. This limits your ability to adapt and respond to your relationship because your mind is only willing to consider a range of possibilities it has experienced. So, your mindset creates a situation where the past must repeat itself because you cannot tolerate feeling anything different.

Being rigid reflects an underactive mind. The motionless mindset sees itself as secure, guarded, and impregnable. The negativity of this mindset conveys the message that "my way is the only way. Your way doesn't count, and you don't matter." Due to a lack of energy orientation toward relationships, this mindset prefers solitary activities that do not require much work. You get less pleasure from relationships compared to what you observe in others. You may be indifferent to positive or negative feedback from others, who may see you as less expressive or engaged.

The rigid or resistant mind believes with conviction that it is always right and never wrong. The problem with this type of extreme thinking is that it is correct now and again, even if only by chance.

By contrast, a permissive mind is yielding, tolerant, allowing, and susceptible. Resolutely doubtful, it has no sense of its own. Swamped with too many choices, the permissive mind vacillates between not knowing and never knowing.

An overly flexible mindset is permissive or impressionable. Here, you do not hold sufficiently to your needs and attitudes, allowing another to sway you even to the extent that you forego your worldview. This can lead to self-doubt, the inability to stand up for your viewpoints or needs, and a lack of "focus" to understand your perspective. Your past has taught you that holding onto your perspective can lead to disapproval or rejection.

An overly active mindset comes in two styles. First, the reactive mind is unsettled, lacking stability, insecure, and highly changeable. It may be volatile or intense. This mindset fears abandonment, often connecting to longstanding feelings of inadequacy or inferiority. The second style, the idealizing mindset, frequently sees the world through rose-tinted glasses. While on the surface, you may seem to view the world with a positive attitude, this mindset often lacks necessary skepticism (aka naivety) and can be more easily led astray. The idealizing mindset finds comfort in the narratives provided by others, so they often do not wish to challenge this comfort by inserting their narrative into the relationship.

To protect yourself, your mind allows others to shape it. This can lead to confusion and a loss of sense of self, which limits you to a provisional identity (i.e., your sense of self is shaped by the question, “Who do you need me to be?”). Thus, you cannot be validated as your true self or be genuinely present in the relationship space.

Do you see how both mindsets are counterproductive in healthy relationships?

If there is one thing in the mental health field that separates healthy from unhealthy people, it is how a person demonstrates psychological flexibility. Having a flexible mind shapes your experience in unforeseen ways. Flexibility prevents you from being a one-trick pony or stuck in the box and doing things the way you've always done. Flexibility also increases your ability to be in contact with what is happening presently and act on long-term and mutually beneficial goals rather than short-term urges.

Learning to Flex so Things Don’t Break

A flexible mind involves three elements: 1) adjusting, 2) being creative, and 3) learning the art of anticipation.

Adjusting is responding to the unexpected rather than reacting. The proverbial square peg and round hole illustrate the point. Without making adjustments, you’re more likely to contest reality and, by conforming to your preferred point of view, spend all your time and energy squaring the round hole. The adage of getting it right rather than being right is helpful in this context.

Creativity involves the practice of developing unique options for unsolvable problems. The opposite of creativity is being mindless. When put this way, it makes the idea of having new ideas quite attractive. You can pull out a blank canvas to facilitate your creative nature when you are stuck and unsure about what to do. The active ingredient in creativity is contemplation. Since your mind can’t be in two places simultaneously, choosing to reflect and deliberate short-circuits your default tendency of thoughtless thinking.

Finally, anticipation is a special attitude of expecting the unexpected. This sets the stage for stepping into the situation rather than running from or digging in. When you take an anticipatory stance, your mind gets busy prospecting. Instead of holding fast to the status quo, the act of anticipation loosens your grip on what’s happening and shifts its focus to what’s possible.

The bottom line is a flexible mind bends during times of conflict so that things don't break down.

Remember, once your mind has made up its mind, it believes itself to be correct. So, this is where your challenge begins. Ask yourself, “Who’s in control – you or your mind?”

Press the button below to learn more about how your mind works as described in Dr. Zierk’s book, Mind Rules: Who’s in Control, You or Your Mind?