Bad Hair Days: An Anxiety Acceptance Metaphor

If you’ve ever felt stuck trying to push away unwanted anxious feelings or uncomfortable worry thoughts, you probably know just how difficult it is to actually make that happen. Still, the alternative option of “accepting them” sounds just as hard. You’re not alone. Many of the clients I’ve worked are unsure of what to make of that idea when it comes up in our work together. So, before we explore whether accepting thoughts might actually help, we first need to understand what it means, and what it entails. Below, I’ll try to shed some light on this with a simple metaphor (who doesn’t like a good metaphor, right?).

Bad Hair Days: A Metaphor

Imagine your anxious feelings and your worry thoughts to be like the hairs on your head. Maybe some hairs are sticking up at a weird angle, or a few wayward strands have fallen across your forehead in a way that feels slightly off. For most people, this might be a tiny thing. They might absentmindedly push their hair back into place with their fingers while going about their day.

Now imagine you had absolutely no tolerance for even one hair being slightly out of place. This would mean that the moment you noticed any defiant strand, you would focus all your attention on fussing with your hair. You wouldn’t accept anything other than perfect, and when you noticed something other than that, you’d immediately stop what you were doing to make things right.

Imagine walking to work and noticing some hairs out of place tickling your forehead. Frustrated, you would stop to pat and smooth your hair out, oftentimes with your comb, which followed you everywhere. Of course, you’d be late to work pretty often because every fifteen steps or so you’d have to stop and find the nearest reflective surface to investigate your coif. You’d spend much of your commute either thinking about your hair or actively engaged in rearranging it to make sure that nothing was out of place. You’d notice that when you weren’t tending to your hair, you’d be tending to the thoughts about your hair. You’d often think about your constant hair struggles and wonder about the various strategies you might try to help you tame the wild beast on your head.

During work, you'd excuse yourself from meetings quite often and run to the bathroom to take care of business (remember, we’re still talking about hair). You'd be in there making sure your hair was looking just right, as anything less would be a problem for you. Rather than work stuff, your work travel bag would only include a small towel along with some shampoo and hair products. You would need it for those really bad hair days when you decided to dunk your head in the bathroom sink and start your hair routine from scratch.

During beautiful summer afternoons, you’d make your friend dine indoors when meeting for lunch, as the breeze would be your sworn enemy. You’d also avoid leisurely walks, bicycle rides, and any situation that might cause your hair to not look its very best. In fact, you’d often choose to stay home to ensure that your hair could be tamed and controlled, rather than risk having to deal with this time-consuming, energy-draining problem that followed your everywhere.

Can you picture living like this?

Stepping Back: What This Means for Anxiety

You might complain that these stray hairs are ruining your life and that, if only your hairs could rest in the right place, life would be so much easier. You'd even say to your therapist that, “These damn out-of-place hairs are destroying my life!”

But would that be entirely accurate?

Is it really the stray hairs that are causing all your woes, or would it be your refusal to tolerate less than perfect—even one hair being slightly out of place?

Imagine now what would happen if you were willing to walk around with the occasional strands sticking up or maybe even falling across your forehead. Imagine if sometimes you could tolerate a bad hair day (gasp). Just imagine what your relationship with suffering might be if you were willing to adjust your zero-tolerance rule by being willing to accept your hair woes. You wouldn’t love it, but through your willingness to have this problem be, you’d see that you had much more time and energy to do, well, basically anything other than worry about your hair.

When we identify our uncomfortable thoughts or feelings and decide that we simply cannot have them, we then work hard to push them away. Knowing from our previous experiences that getting rid of them is usually not possible, we find ourselves in a time-draining, energy-sucking fight that can make what we’re going through much worse than it has to be.

Once we become willing to accept these unwanted aspects of ourselves, we can find that our relationship with suffering can change.

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

— Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life