Psychological Flexibility
Posted on July 23, 2020 by Mason Miller, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.
What if you could manipulate your mind to always be in the most needed mental state? This article teaches you the skill of psychological flexibility.
If you’re going into a big job interview, wouldn’t you rather be confident and determined rather than anxious and fearful? If you need to improve on performance, wouldn’t you rather be creative and free rather than restrained and controlled? We talk about waiting until we’re ready, until everything is “just right,” meaning that we have to be in the right head space to do something to its fullest. But what if you could manipulate your head space to always be in the right mental state needed for whatever task is at hand? There is a way to do this, and it’s called psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility is the ability to control and alter your psychological state. To best understand how to accomplish this, we will reverse-engineer what an action is. An action is something you do based off an urge; an urge is a sensation inside yourself resulting from an emotion; an emotion is felt when a memory is recalled. From this process, we can see that our actions are somewhat dependent on the type of memory we recall. Psychological flexibility involves knowing what action you want to have and recalling a memory which will create it. For example, if you are fearful before going into a job interview or big athletic contest and your desired action is to be relaxed, the memory you want to recall is one that is peaceful and calm. Depending on the situation at hand, it can be very powerful and useful to recall a memory beforehand as to prime your mental state to be in one that will create the action you desire. In this way, we can alter our actions to be most effective for the task at hand so that we no longer hold ourselves back from our true potential.
