Stop trying to be calm
it's overrated anyway
Are you also trying to be calm and relaxed? How is that working for you?
I've heard about the obsession with being calm all the time: from parenting your kids to working and staying focused, to managing your anger and maintaining a healthy relationship with your partner.
We are sold aromatherapy for its calming effects, yoga for its calming benefits, and kickboxing classes to release anger and achieve calmness.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is anything wrong with being calm. Calm is a great emotion.
But guess what? So are all the other emotions 🙂
Calm is just an emotion, just like any other emotion, and we shouldn’t strive to be calm, thinking that this is the only emotion there is.
Cam isn’t the goal. Being flexible about your emotions is the goal.
And psychological flexibility means being able to act even when you are feeling other emotions.
I don’t help people become and feel calm all the time.
In ACT we do something better: we help people make room for all of their emotions and practice emotional flexibility.
So let’s go for a nice exercise to help you see what this is about:
Recall
Think of a moment when you weren’t calm but still had to act.
What emotion was there—anger, fear, hurt, something else?Engage
What made you take that action anyway, even with the emotion present?Connect
Now ask yourself: what mattered about that action?
Maybe you wanted to be a supportive parent even while angry.
Or a loving partner even while hurt.
That’s flexibility. Not waiting for calm, but acting in line with your values.
For example, this morning my daughter was being her usual 7-year-old self - moody, irritable, not wanting to get dressed for her gym class. I started to feel anger and frustration. I knew I had to be there for her, but boy oh boy, was that hard.
Then I started talking to her. Asking her questions. Showing compassion. And while I was doing this, I remembered why I did it. Because that is the relationship I want to have with her. Did I feel calm? By no means. Did I connect - yes, I did.
Mind you, this doesn’t happen every day. Sometimes it’s a screaming contest 😡But that is emotional flexibility. Doing stuff that matters even if you don’t feel perfect.
Calm is nice when it shows up. But life doesn’t wait for calm.
Try this: notice one thing your mind is shouting today, and take one small step that matters anyway.
That’s flexibility. And that’s the real goal.