Acceptance is being with emotions without trying to control or alter their quality, duration, or intensity.

Acceptance can help with regulating negative emotions and improving emotional coping.

When observing the mind, we recognize it as something we have, not something we are.

From an observing perspective, we can begin to meet our minds with warmth and compassion.

One of the biggest lessons on human flourishing comes from a formula for suffering: suffering = pain x resistance.

To witness this calculus in action, consider a recent moment of discontent that resulted from an undesirable event. Upon careful investigation, we’d likely realize that much of our psychological suffering was due to the deluge of gloomy thoughts, feelings, and judgments we unleashed upon ourselves in reaction to the event. It’s as if our fading fortunes weren’t bad enough, we had to punish ourselves further with shame and self-criticism.

Pain is inevitable in a human life. But the considerable say we have in the second variable of the formula—resistance—gives us a pathway for altering the outcome.

One antidote to resistance is acceptance: simply being with the difficult emotion without attempting to control or alter its quality, duration, or intensity. It’s a counterintuitive response to pain.

Yet acceptance-based interventions, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), have shown promise in alleviating human suffering, with research demonstrating reductions in stress, pain, anxiety, depression, and other psychopathological symptoms. Acceptance has also been found to be effective as a standalone strategy, helping with regulating negative emotions and improving emotional coping.

Clinical psychologist Robyn Walser has been working with acceptance-based therapies for over 30 years. One of her biggest insights is that we are far more than our minds, more than the sum of our past experiences. This recognition—seeing that we are not the difficult thoughts and emotions, but their container or “context”—is, according to Walser, the beginning of freedom.

Here’s Dr. Walser, in her own words, on the mechanisms and benefits of acceptance.

Your Thoughts and Emotions Aren't Your Enemy

Humans are socially trained to dislike certain emotions. We’re the only species that sort emotions into negative and positive. If my dog gets scared by something, she hides under the bed. But after a while, she moves on with her day.

When humans have difficult experiences, they start evaluating them: I don’t like that. I shouldn’t feel this way. We establish a verbal relationship with our experience that says that certain thoughts and feelings shouldn’t exist.

Now we have two problems: the feeling itself (which isn’t a problem in the first place, because it’s a natural response) and then our battle with it.

What we’re working on is letting go of the battle with our emotional experience that comes from this verbal relationship with ourselves, and allowing natural human experiences to flow.

Acceptance is Not Resignation

In ACT, another word for acceptance is willingness: a willingness to experience. A fast heart rate, a sinking sensation—I’m going to let that be there and let it flow, but as an active choice. I am not resigning.

Nor am I toughing it out by accepting bad behaviors or terrible situations that require problem-solving. It’s an acceptance of internal experiences—what’s going on inside the skin, not outside.

Become an Observer of Your Mind

In ACT, you don’t have to like or dislike your mind; you just need to recognize it as something you have, not something you are.

We know the world through our minds, but also through our experiences. As we acquire language, we largely lose contact with experiential knowledge and start living in our minds. The goal is to shift to an observational relationship with the mind, where we can begin observing our thinking flow.

We don’t have to like, fix, change, feel a certain way. We’re just holding the experience. It’s compassion in its rawest sense, because we are being with the emotion. Once we’ve established that observing perspective, we can begin to meet our minds with warmth and compassion.

Psychological Mechanisms of Acceptance

When we suppress our experiences, we typically end up at one of two extremes: hyper control, where we shut things down; or reactivity, with big, I-can’t-stand-this responses to our emotions. Openness and acceptance moves us out of both.

It’s not that we’re “regulating” the emotion—we are allowing the original emotion to be as it is. And suppression doesn’t even work well. When we push an emotion down, it tends to rebound.

Also, you can’t selectively shut down pain—when we close off, we close off to everything. So you lose the battle with your emotion, and you also lose contact with joy.

Defuse Rumination with Curious Watching

Mindfulness is about observing the mind and creating distance from it. ACT calls this defusion—the process of noticing thoughts as the ongoing flow of thinking, rather than getting caught up in them, so they have less control over our behavior.

Take a cup: There’s the object, and there’s the word we have for it. It’s two things, and we’ve learned the second one. The word doesn’t exist in the cup. Thoughts work the same way. Although you experience them and they feel real, they are learned. They don’t define you.

With a little more distance, you can watch a worry thought with curiosity. Minds are problem-solvers. The trouble is that we’ve made emotions into problems to be solved. They are not. There are something to be experienced.

The more we try to stop the mind from worrying, the more it worries. Instead of fighting it, we take an observational watching of the worrying. My mind is really trying to solve something right now. I’m just going to watch.

Know Your Biggest Tools: Presence and Values

First, get present. Slow down and show up to what’s currently happening. Allow whatever’s there to be there. Connect to the moment through the five senses: what you hear, see, smell, taste, touch.

Then, orient towards what matters to you. Instead of trying to get rid of something that is internal, chose the next action that lines up with your values. What do you want to create as you walk through life?

Values are not conditional. I’m not going to be loving only if somebody else is. I can be loving in any moment. We’ll all run into barriers, but we can return to our values again and again.

You are a whole and lovable being, as you are. From that place, hold your experience, and move through life in ways that are meaningful. Create something that, when you look back, you’ll know that you did what mattered to you. So many people stand against themselves and their experience. Let’s stand with you, instead.

Many thanks to Robyn Walser for her time and insights. Dr. Walser is a clinical psychologist with expertise in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). She is the director of Trauma and Life Consultation and Psychology Services and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Deliberate Practice to Develop and Enhance Skills in ACT (2026).

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