Westmont Magazine From Avoidance to Acceptance: Stepping Toward Wellness

 Eric Nelson, Ph.D., MAT, Clinical Psychologist and Director of Westmont Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)

More and more people in our society–including college students—report feeling anxious. Dealing with the unexpected in life can leave us confused, lost, anxious and seemingly alone. Although young adults can experience a remarkably exciting and enriching season in life, they can also face significant uncertainty, instability and transition.

Life in general can be difficult for all of us and not just young adults. As Ecclesiastes 2:23 says, “Their days of labor are filled with pain and grief; even at night their minds cannot rest.”

How we view our lives and set expectations for ourselves can unnecessarily increase our anxiety and hinder our ability to cope. Due to the fast-paced, hyperconnected, achievement-oriented context our young adults grew up in, most arrive at college with emotionally depleting and inaccurate storylines about how life works.

   “Everyone else has it all together.”

   “I must be exceptional at everything I do.”

   “I cannot fail.”

   “If I’m not happy, I’m defective; something is wrong with me.”

   “I can (must) have what I want now.”

   “I must figure out my life by graduation.”

At Westmont, we’re working to develop a coherent narrative of wellness that helps students respond effectively to the challenge and uncertainty of young adulthood to prepare them for the difficulties that can arise in nearly all stages of life.

   “No one has it all together.”

   “I can excel in my strengths and welcome and develop areas needing growth.”

   “I will fail at times.”

   "I will experience a range of emotions."

   "The best things take time (e.g., close relationships, fulfilling occupations).”

   “I will not figure out my life by graduation.”

Due to wide-ranging socio-cultural factors, college students today often find themselves ill-equipped to manage the stressors that come with college. We see three general challenges affecting young adults (and much of our society): issues related to emotional regulation, distress tolerance and limited social connectedness.

Emotional regulation. Each of us is designed to experience a range of emotion, and the experience of our varied emotions plays a critical role in navigating the complexities of life. Although none of us prefers it, we often develop the most through pain and challenge. We understandably seek positive emotions such as excitement, contentment and connection, while minimizing and avoiding negative emotions such as loss, uncertainty and discouragement. Our societal infrastructure prepares us well for this, with medication readily available to limit physical or emotional pain, same-day delivery to decrease the need to wait, and mobile apps that attempt to circumvent those inconveniently uncomfortable moments of life, such as dating apps like Tinder. Over time, our proclivity to avoid discomfort can stunt our ability to flexibly experience both positive and negative emotion. Instead of developing through our pain, we become stuck in patterns of problematic avoidance, unable to adapt and appropriately regulate emotion in responding to the varying stresses of normal life.

Distress tolerance. Difficulties in regulating emotion can lead to a decreased ability to tolerate distress or the perceived ability to withstand the challenges of life, such as conflict in a relationship, personal failure or even the management of daily stresses. We may laugh at the image of a 5-year-old screaming and forecasting imminent death prior to receiving a shot in a medical office, although many of us respond similarly to pain in our own lives. With increasing inability to tolerate distress, small stressors become much more overwhelming. For instance, a failed test should evoke discouragement and perhaps frustration, but for many it can become more foreboding, because we appraise the failed test as the predicted harbinger of a failed future. For many students, thoughts can lead to something like this: “I have let my professor and everyone down. Everything in my life has come to this, and I have failed. There is no longer hope for me.”

Social connectedness. Emotional challenges can often create the impetus to strengthen relationships with others. However, many young adults feel remarkably disconnected socially. Despite communicating through social media and text messages, they lack depth in their personal relationships. Brené Brown says, “Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued; when they can give and receive without judgement; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.” When students lack social connectedness, they find fewer opportunities to share and receive support as they face difficulties; in Brown’s words, they lack “sustenance and strength.” In their social disconnection, they falsely perceive others as being far better off than they are, which can increase distress. The flashy Instagram feed of all our friends in filtered, positive moments determines how we perceive reality. This misperception can uniquely isolate anyone feeling loss, pain and/or disconnection.

Challenges in regulating emotions, tolerating distress, and being connected socially contribute to the rise of anxiety in recent years. At Westmont, we’re working to shift the way young adults manage stress in their lives. We’ve generated a succinct narrative of wellness by focusing on the basics of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). We seek to provide our students with more than a coping strategy to give them a perspective and storyline that counterbalances the issues that contribute to anxiety. ACT emphasizes psychological flexibility, or the ability to open up to our experience while also remaining connected to our values. The framework takes into account the particular developmental stage of college students and the uncertainty and challenge they face.

Reframing our narrative through an ACT approach includes three factors:

Be present.
Open up.
Do what matters.

Be present. Before reframing a narrative, we must first become aware of the storylines that influence our response to specific events. Most of us seemingly go through life on autopilot. With our excessive busyness and overstimulation, we simply have little time to reflect. As a result, we quickly filter daily experiences through the existing narratives in our minds. For example, a socially anxious student will likely interpret an awkward social exchange as reflecting their personal social ineptitude rather than being the normal byproduct of meeting new friends—and then may respond by avoiding this person or situation in the future. Being present means noticing our reactions to events in life and being curious about how we respond. Am I really socially inept, or am I experiencing the normal part of meeting new people? In addition, being present includes connecting with the moment we’re in rather than allowing our unresolved worries and fears to constantly distract our minds. When we’re mulling over tomorrow’s problems, we miss important elements of the present experience, find less ability to focus, grow more cognitively taxed, and fail to engage as well with others.

Open up. Once we become more present, we can better attune ourselves to our emotional experiences. We then face the opportunity to either open up to the emotion or shut it out in the effort to avoid pain. Opening up to our emotion puts us in sync with the reality of our experience in the world. When we can accept and create space for pain or discomfort, we not only learn more about ourselves, but we better respond and adapt to our emotions. When we deny or avoid pain, we often become stuck in the patterns we use to avoid that pain. For example, we can experience uncertainty as a bothersome emotion. In our desire to avoid it, we tend to worry about controlling things we simply can’t control. Accepting what we can’t control increasingly frees us from life-draining behaviors such as worry, avoidance or addiction, which can hinder the things we value in life. We need not like our pain, but we can better manage it by being open to it.

Do what matters. As we become more present and open up to our emotional experience, we can better pursue those elements of our lives we truly value. For college students, anxiety can lead to the tendency to hyperfocus on nonessential issues, such as how they compare to their peers, their concern about an uncertain future, or their fear that they’re somehow missing out on something everyone else is experiencing. Young adults normally focus more on themselves as they develop and grow during this critical stage in life, asking: Who am I? Where am I going? Yet their anxiety directs their focus ever inward, and they can lose their perspective on why they enrolled in college in the first place and even forget how faith fits with their distress.

The elements of being present, opening up, and doing what matters are echoed throughout the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, and accepting hardship as a pathway to peace.

By returning to God in our pain, we can better find the peace we seek. We may open up to hardship we can’t control. We may also embrace the present moment, where we can often exert some change or simply cope with the pain we’re experiencing.

Our inability to control negative experiences can leave us feeling anxious and vulnerable. Although we can’t change everything that happens to us, ACT encourages us to do what matters to us and act in alignment with our personal values and beliefs. Focusing on our values and working toward our goals may help us discover meaning and purpose in the midst of difficulties, which can make the situation easier to bear. We can learn to acknowledge what is truly important to us, get to know ourselves better and gain a sense of purpose. We can act on long-term values rather than on unreliable short-term impulses, emotions and thoughts, which may not reflect our deeply held values and commitments.

The key elements of ACT can further the goal of generating a coherent narrative of wellness and provide a more realistic version of the storylines that most students bring to college.

I cannot fail. But I’m going to fail, and that’s OK. Failure is an important part of my development.

I’m unhappy. I’m broken. But like everyone, I’m going to experience pain and unhappiness. I can begin by opening up to my pain, learning from it, and taking small steps by acting on what I value.

This is too hard. But I can keep trying. I can’t control this, but I will manage what I can in it.

I have no hope now. But I can ask for help and support and begin to find hope for myself.

Everyone has it all together. But no one has it all together, and that is OK. We’re all works in progress.

I cannot do this. But I can keep trying and pay attention to each small success.

How do institutions and individuals begin implementing a coherent narrative based on the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy? First, we have to step back and consider what we want to achieve. We can develop directions for our efforts based on our goals, beliefs and values. We can begin to outline our narrative of wellness, taking into consideration the three basic principles above. Institutions can determine which departments take the lead, centralize the strategy, and review existing programs. Contemporary colleges offer more resources supporting students than in past decades. These programs can make a far greater impact with a shared and coherent narrative of wellness communicated from varied levels of the institution.

Then we step forward, not only developing a personal or institutional narrative of wellness, but learning it well and putting it into action. The organization begins integrating the narrative into existing programs to refocus them and planning institution-wide initiatives and campaigns, not only for students, but at all levels of the community. The socio-cultural landscape will continue to reiterate the problematic storylines in students’ lives, including every time they scroll through Instagram. However, a far-reaching, consistent, and frequently reiterated wellness narrative will better equip them to develop an adaptive framework where they can nest their own experience.

At Westmont, we’re implementing a number of initiatives as part of our narrative of wellness. We’re working with many of our incoming students this fall to train them in concepts of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and to help them identify life-draining storylines. The college has developed an Early Alert System that allows professors and student life staff to identify students who are struggling academically, socially or personally. We then reach out to these individuals to counsel and mentor them and help them succeed. We train our resident assistants (RAs) to recognize students in distress and give them tools to use in engaging those people and helping them through difficult situations.

We all experience pain in life, including our students. They deal with a variety of significant concerns, such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, relationship problems, homesickness and addictive behaviors. We seek to help them confront, live with and learn from these challenges so they grow stronger personally and emotionally and can better navigate the complexities of our time.