Openness & Acceptance - How Is It Important?

A new type of psychology called Positive Psychology is having a radical impact on people’s lives. It has offered many techniques like radical acceptance, focusing on gratitude, openness, and resonating with the positive. People are improving the quality of their lives with these techniques. Today we are going to discuss two of them – Openness and Acceptance – and what benefits do they offer.   

Openness and How it Helps

Openness to experience is used to study and measure the individual differences in personality of different people. There are certain benefits to people who have a high level of openness to experience.

1. They tend to enjoy venturing beyond their comfort zone. They are always eager to seek out new and unconventional experiences like travelling to new places, embracing different cultures and practices.

2. Higher levels of openness can lead a person to be more open to novel or unconventional ideas. This results in a higher level of creativity and a radical perspective.

3. People with low openness to experience are happier to seek refuge in their comfort zone and familiar surroundings. They are likely to pass opportunities like making a drastic career change, travelling to exotic places. They adhere to set routines and schedules and prefer the tried-and-tested familiarity of traditions.

Acceptance and How it Helps

Improving the quality of one’s life begins with acceptance. In psychology, acceptance occurs when a situation or scenario, usually negative, is acknowledged and accepted by an individual. The goal is to develop a complete acceptance of all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything without mental reservations and blockages.

1. When you practice acceptance, you have more compassion for yourself. You will start forgiving yourself for your past mistakes and stop judging yourself so harshly. That is an amazing gift in itself. Moreover, the more you accept yourself, the more you accept others.

2. Acceptance helps us to become better problem solvers. Once we acknowledge reality and face the problem for what it is, we are in a better position to consider our options and choose an appropriate action plan.

3. Acceptance supports both our physical and emotional health. This is because resistance and denial can throw our peace of mind out of place. With acceptance, we are likely to have more energy because we no longer have to exert effort trying to avoid or deny our feelings.

4. Accepting our feelings helps us to know ourselves better because running away from our feelings can result in our being estranged from ourselves and forget who we are.