How To Welcome Change

coping with stress and creating meaning in uncertain times

Today is Holi, sometimes called the Festival of Colors, a Hindu holiday celebrating love and the beginning of spring. (It’s also a full moon and lunar eclipse.) This is me celebrating Holi with local kids in Lumbini, Nepal, 2018.

Good morning, and welcome to Mindful Mondays.

Here in San Diego, the sky is full of scudding cumulus clouds, passing rain showers alternating with bright sun and gusts of wind. The weather seems to be changing every half hour. As I wrote this week’s edition, raindrops began falling on my laptop, forcing me to duck inside the coffee shop and ask a stranger if I could share his table. He was reading Rick Rubin’s new book, The Creative Act (which is still on my to-read pile) and we had a nice, brief conversation about it.

This weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about change. Today, my family is celebrating my grandfather’s 89th birthday. Less than two weeks ago, my daughter turned 18. She’ll be graduating from high school in June and starting college in the fall. We’re having lots of conversations about housing, her major, and her future career. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air.

That uncertainty can be stressful. As human beings, we’re wired for survival above all else. Throughout our evolutionary history, change has often been threatening. Any new variable—a migration of animals, an encounter with a new group of people, storm clouds on the horizon—could upset the delicate balance that kept us alive. And so we often respond to change with fear and anxiety.

But change can also be positive, bringing new opportunities, resources, and relationships.

In my experience, there are two key ingredients to thriving in the face of change: acceptance and positive reappraisal.

Acceptance is a tricky concept. As I often remind my clients, it’s not enough to accept events or circumstances. We also have to accept our feelings about them. For example, can I allow myself to feel the anxiety I have about my daughter going to college and living independently?

Feelings about change often show up as uncomfortable body sensations, which most of us don’t want to feel. But suppressing or avoiding these emotions always comes with a cost. So acceptance is not only a cognitive process, it’s actually a body-based mindfulness practice of allowing ourselves to feel what we’re feeling.

Positive reappraisal is a form of coping in which we re-evaluate stressors as potentially beneficial or valuable in some way. Importantly, it’s not about denying reality or suppressing our thoughts and feelings. It’s about taking a realistic, growth-oriented approach to making meaning from our circumstances.

For example, a concerning health diagnosis could become an opportunity to adopt healthy lifestyle changes. Losing a job can be an opportunity to take time off from work, learn new skills, or find a new job that’s a better fit for your unique strengths.

Positive reappraisal is proven to decrease stress responses at the physiological level and to result in better health outcomes across the board. It’s an important skill to develop in cultivating overall resilience in the face of stress, especially in the unpredictable times we live in.

Acceptance and positive reappraisal are both skills we can learn through mindfulness practice. Together, they make us more psychologically flexible. That flexibility allows us not only to cope with changing circumstances, but to harness the opportunities they present so we can thrive.

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Quote of the Week:

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”

“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

—Bruce Lee

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That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? What would you like to learn more about? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment, below.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Cordry, LMFT

PS: Could you use some help adapting to changing circumstances in your life and making the most of them? 1:1 coaching can help. Just reply to this email with “change” and we can set up a call to see if working together is a good fit.

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