Is Radical Acceptance a cure for impulse shopping?
Guest Blog by Money Healing Club Moderator, Melissa Jensen
If you’re a millennial, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the term radical acceptance being thrown around lately. While not a new concept, it is the most recent popular therapy term to hit social media. While I love a manifestation, when I first heard that you could fix your life by just accepting bad things, I was a little skeptical. Especially as I struggled with overspending, accepting it seemed counterintuitive. If I accepted my sad financial state, wouldn’t that make things worse? 😬🤷
Radical acceptance means “practicing a conscious effort to acknowledge and honor difficult situations and emotions. Fully accepting things as they are, instead of ignoring, avoiding, or wishing the situation were different, can be a critical step in moving through a difficult experience to experiencing more meaning.” Basically when things are bad, it causes us distress, sometimes a lot of it. Radical acceptance can help regulate our emotions and put us in a place to search for solutions, rather than succumb to our feelings and feel paralyzed.
Radical acceptance is not just shrugging and saying c’est la vie. 🙅♀️ It does not mean you are giving up or approving of the situation. 🙅♀️ Rather it is the step of acceptance to allow you to do better. 💁♀️ It is a first and crucial step to making real change in our lives.
“On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.” -Tara Brach
A radical acceptance practice make look like:
💡 Identify that you are questioning or fighting reality.
You are having an emotional response to something you do not like and you are engaging in behaviors you hope will distance yourself from that reality. Tell yourself that no matter how unpleasant reality is, it is in fact your reality and you can only move forward.
😭 Let yourself experience emotions in a safe way.
By not letting yourself just feel the negative feelings, you keep them bottled up in you. When my feelings are too big for me, I turn on my favorite album (Taylor Swift’s folkore), get in the shower, and have a good cry. The music really helps me just feel my feelings, which I then naturally release into tears (I’m a big cryer). Maybe take a walk without your phone or headphones or sit alone in a quiet room. Just find a way to sit and explore your feelings without numbing forces or distractions.
🧘🏽♀️ Create a mantra.
Choose something that resonates with you and doesn’t make you feel self-conscious. “I cannot change the past.” “Fighting my negative emotions makes them worse.” “I can accept this and still be happy.” Picture what you would do if you accepted your reality.
💆♀️ Use relaxation strategies and mindfulness practices that work for you.
I know, I’m also tired of being told to journal away capitalism. But our brains aren’t made to process all the information we constantly give it, so we have to find ways to relax it. Again, it’s finding something that really works for you, and that you will actually do. Some ideas include: playing with your child or pet, gardening, art, exercise, blasting 2000’s punk music, yoga, meditation, and yes, journaling. Make finding this practice a priority for you-this is where the change happens. When you are able to sit with and release negative emotions, they stop taking over your life.
Note: there is a difference between relaxing and numbing. As much as watching tv or scrolling social media can make us feel like our brains are turned off, they won’t make us feel relaxed or at peace afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, I love both, but they’re a band-aid, not a solution.
🎭 Fake it till you make it
Act as if you have accepted the situation, even if you’re still struggling with acceptance. Take the next step that you imagined during your mantra. Move to the future.
So what does all this have to do with spending?
For many of us, spending is emotional, a way to release anxiety or feel a dopamine hit. At the peak of my emotional spending, I bought myself brand new AirPods Max after I tested positive for Covid 😷 for the second time. I was frustrated I had caught it again 😤, scared because I already was dealing with long Covid 😰, and also just feeling really physically crummy 🤒. The Airpods gave me something to look forward to, but guess what, when they arrived I still had Covid! And had spent $500 that I didn’t have!
I made a bad situation worse because I didn’t want to deal with my fears.
A radical acceptance practice can be a way to interrupt this cycle. Here’s how it could have gone: I add a $500 pair of headphones to my cart and then pause and think, “what is driving me wanting to buy these?” I let my feelings come up — I’m angry and I’m scared — and sit with them for a moment. I accept that I feel this way and that is valid, but I also have to accept that Covid is out of my control. 😌 I let myself cry a little bit and then do a guided breathing exercise. I repeat to myself a mantra of “I cannot change this but I will be okay.” Then I look back at those Airpods. Now that I am not being driven by emotions, I can admit that I do not need and cannot afford them. I close the tab and turn on Season 3 of Schitt’s Creek (because I have Covid and there’s not much else I can do). I haven’t cured my Covid, but I have stopped myself from using spending as a crutch.
If breathing and mantras solved all my problems, I’d have no problems. Radical acceptance is the first step. By choosing to radically accept the things that are out of our control, we prevent ourselves from becoming stuck in our negative emotions so we can take the next step. While it is still a new practice for me, radical acceptance has helped me move from a place of anxiety and panic to a place where I’m able to confront a situation head on. And that is very real progress.
