Learning to Accept Your Emotions

By Xavier Banson, BA, and Matthew Dixon, Ph.D.

Imagine you have a deadline coming up and you’ve been working for hours, but you feel like you’re getting nowhere. You’re starting to feel really anxious. At this point, you might start to judge yourself for having this emotion: “What’s wrong with me? I don’t have time to be anxious! Why can’t I just focus and be productive?”

Now you have two emotions: (1) feeling anxious about getting work done and (2) feeling frustrated that you are anxious.

When we judge ourselves and generate a second emotion that gets layered on top of the first emotion, we often feel worse and are even less likely to reach our goals.

Sound familiar? At one time or another, most of us get upset at ourselves for having a certain emotion that we don’t want to experience, whether it be anxiety, or anger, or sadness. So, you might now be wondering: “Is there anything I can do to make those secondary emotions less likely?” Thankfully, research suggests that the answer is “yes!”

Accepting Our Emotions

Many people have heard of “mindfulness.” This term has its origins in Buddhist teachings, but related concepts are found in many teachings from all over the world.

Mindfulness is often associated with doing a meditation practice, but its essence is to be more aware and accepting of our present-moment experience. Sometimes our present-moment experience includes an unpleasant emotion that we might not want to feel. Acceptance can limit judgmental thoughts and unhelpful secondary emotions.

Let us explain. Imagine that you are in a challenging situation like the scenario described above and you feel anxiety arising. Now imagine that instead of getting upset at yourself for having this emotion, you bring your awareness to the experience of the emotion in your body and, for a moment, accept that it is happening. You might say to yourself: “OK, this anxiety is not fun to experience, but I have the capacity to breathe through it and realize that it is just a passing emotion.” With this attitude of acceptance, and stepping away from the tendency to fight against the emotion, you are less likely to get stuck in a loop of judgmental thoughts that might trigger more unwanted emotions.

It might sound counterintuitive that “leaning in” to the feeling of an unpleasant emotion can be a good thing, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests it works (see the next section). Why? Probably because accepting ourselves (including our emotions) relieves pressure. We stop adding fuel to the emotional fire when we release judgmental thoughts about our emotions. And just as we want to be accepted rather than judged by other people, self-acceptance just feels more soothing than self-judgment.

When we are not stuck in a loop of judgmental thoughts, we also create more inner space to determine if there is something useful we can do to change the initial emotion if needed. For instance, when we accept our emotions, we can think more clearly about how we could turn down the volume on the initial emotion, perhaps by seeing the situation from a new perspective or asking someone for support.

The Science Behind Acceptance

Is there any scientific evidence that acceptance works? Indeed, there is! For decades, scientists have been interested in the use of mindfulness for living a healthier emotional life. There is now a mountain of evidence indicating that when people adopt a more accepting perspective, they tend to experience less emotional distress.

For instance, a meta-analysis by Hofmann et al. (2010) that summarized many individual studies found that acceptance was associated with significant decreases in anxiety and depression across many samples of participants.

Some of our own research (Dixon et al., 2020; Goldin et al., 2021) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has found that acceptance-based improvements in relieving emotional distress are associated with changes in brain activation, including an increase in activation in the frontoparietal network (a collection of brain regions associated with regulating attention), and decreased activation in the “default mode network” (a collection of brain regions involved in self-evaluative thinking).

So, in both people’s reports about their emotional experience and in their patterns of brain activity, we see evidence that acceptance has beneficial impacts on well-being.

Measuring Acceptance

When scientists try to measure how well people are bringing acceptance to their emotions, they often ask them to rate their agreement (e.g., on a 1–5 scale) with several questions like the one below.

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“I think some of my emotions are bad or inappropriate and I shouldn’t feel them.”

The good news is that mindful acceptance is not something that you are born with and either have or don’t have. It is something that can be developed with practice.

Conclusions

Mindful acceptance is about being a curious observer of our emotions and seeing them for what they are—passing mental events that don’t have to trap us in harmful patterns of self-judgment. We can move toward greater emotional well-being by being more compassionate with ourselves and slowing down to take a breath when challenging emotions arise. This can be a powerful way to limit the generation of unwanted secondary emotions that often amplify unpleasant feelings and make it difficult to see productive solutions. Mindful acceptance can relieve internal pressure and can help us see more clearly how to address challenging situations and emotions.