035 on mental flexibility
It’s been months since I last sat down at a computer to write, but I made a promise to myself to slowly reintroduce writing and filming into my weekend routines. Transparently, I recently made a big cross-country move and have been spending the past two months settling in. But no more excuses! I want to return to sharing some of my reflections with you. I hope you find something meaningful in today’s post on mental flexibility.
Have you ever caught yourself rigidly holding onto a rule about who you should be or how life should look? Recently, I’ve noticed a theme emerging in my sessions with clients: mental flexibility.
As a therapist, I often see people so caught up in their own rules that every choice feels weighed against a mental checklist of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts.’
Some things I often hear are:
“I should be further in my career by now.”
“I must always be strong.”
“If this relationship doesn’t look exactly like XYZ, then it’s a failure.”
At first, these rules can feel protective. They create the illusion of predictability, a framework meant to bring order to the uncertainty of life. But over time, that framework can become your own personal cage.
I think back to a client who couldn’t allow herself to rest, even when her body begged her to. For her, resting equaled weakness. Only when we began to explore mental flexibility, asking what if rest was not weakness but a form of strength, did she begin to recognize how her rigidity was suffocating her instead of keeping her safe.
Psychological research confirms what I see in these moments. Positive mental health isn’t the absence of distress. It’s not about perfect certainty about who we are or where we’re going. At its core, mental health is the ability to adapt, to shift perspective, to pivot when life doesn’t go according to plan. Flexibility is what makes resilience possible.
And yet, if flexibility is so essential, why do we resist it?
Some of the reasons are cultural. Many of us grew up equating bending with breaking. Changing your mind meant you were flaky. Letting go of a plan meant you failed. Rigidity was rewarded as strength. I think of a client who admitted she could never say she was wrong, not because she didn’t recognize it, but because her family treated changing one’s mind as weakness.
Other reasons are existential. Rigidity can feel safe, as if clinging to a single story could shield us from disappointment or loss. But rigidity doesn’t protect us. It leaves us brittle. Like a tree in a storm, the one that refuses to sway is the one most likely to snap.
And maybe that’s the quiet paradox of mental health: what protects us isn’t holding on tighter, but learning to let go.
In my sessions, I see mental flexibility surface in small but powerful ways. A client daring to try a new coping tool instead of returning to an old destructive pattern. Another admitting, perhaps for the first time, “Maybe I was wrong.” Or the moment someone realizes, mid-thought, that their rigid beliefs are what’s keeping them stuck and that there are other ways forward.
These may seem like minor shifts, but they are acts of courage. They are openings. Invitations to growth. Moments where someone says, “I thought I knew who I was, but today I am becoming someone new.”
So what does mental flexibility actually look like in everyday life?
Maybe it’s grieving the life you imagined, while staying curious about the one unfolding.
Maybe it’s choosing curiosity over defensiveness in the middle of a conflict.
Maybe it’s loosening your grip on who you thought you should be, so you can finally meet who you are.
Because flexibility isn’t about losing yourself. It’s about creating space to grow. And maybe, just maybe, it’s the quiet superpower of mental health that no one ever told us about!
