This feature was first published in January 2025 in My Mensa Weekly, our exclusive newsletter for Mensa members. Find out more about becoming a Mensa member here.
By Dr Sonja Falck
Happy New Year! It’s a neat trick, the way we give ourselves the sense of a fresh start by arranging our experience of time into cyclical periods on a calendar. Fresh starts like this fill me with optimism. But the concept of a fresh start can also carry with it pressure, the stress of demanding of ourselves that we use this new time-period well.
The tradition of making New Year’s resolutions prods you to undertake a review of some kind – of your life, your performance, your habits – with a focus on what must be improved. The best intentions of this are excellent: such a review generates a burst of motivation for creating more of what matters to you most, for the benefit of yourself and those around you. The downside is that this practice can also play to something more ominous which, as a psychotherapist, I am regularly involved in helping my clients to tone down – that is, a debilitating harsh inner critic.
At worst, high expectations of yourself lead to what I call “Despondent Superman/Superwoman Syndrome”. This is a state in which you strive so hard towards ambitions, even unrealistic ones, that you constantly feel a failure, castigating yourself for all the ways you fall short of the ideal you’re holding in your mind. It also fuels a culture of consumption, spending ever more money on an aspirational lifestyle.
A radical shift
The antidote to driving yourself to always do better, be better, is acceptance – accepting yourself the way you are. Maybe that sounds radical. In fact, “radical acceptance” is a term coined by psychologist Marsha Linehan, founder of dialectical behaviour therapy. It’s a concept rooted in Buddhist traditions. It means recognising, without judgment, the reality of limitations, flaws, disappointments and vulnerabilities rather than trying, with enormous effort, to bulldoze over them or letting their existence become a cause of intense preoccupation and suffering.
What does it feel like to consider offering yourself acceptance? I find that my clients are often suspicious of acceptance. Just like their parents and teachers were, and taught them to be. This suspicious attitude derives from the fear that if you show a person kindness and compassion they will become lazy and degenerate, or try to exploit you. Yet research shows the opposite to be true. For example, workplaces that establish a culture of acceptance and encouragement attain greater productivity and employee creativity, wellbeing and loyalty.
Research has evidenced many further ways in which acceptance is a powerful force for good. It contributes to coping with adversity more effectively and experiencing more positive emotions. It evokes stronger expressivity and brings greater contentment and life satisfaction. And if you’re happy with how you already are, you become immune to all the advertising campaigns that try to convince you of what you must buy next to look better, feel better. How very liberating to relax from all that striving, to reject all those bossy messages that urge self-improvement! How would you choose to spend your time if you were freed from all that commercially manipulated dissatisfaction?
Learn to let go
Practising acceptance does not mean liking and approving of everything you see, or giving up on wanting positive changes for yourself and the world. It means discerning what is worth working on, in accordance with your lasting internal values, rather than passing external fashions, then choosing with care where and how you can make a true impact, and letting go of the rest. Differentiating between what can be changed and what cannot.
A very good starting point for this is to recognise that whatever has happened in the past is done and gone and cannot be changed. Even if what is past was traumatic, by radically accepting that this is what has happened – the situation is what it is – you can withdraw your energy from lamenting it and instead invest your energy in moving forward well.
About Dr Sonja Falck
Mensa member Sonja Falck is a psychotherapist, researcher, lecturer and author.
Image credit: Shutterstock
