is more than just addressing personality.

It's actually addressing the way we really relate to ourselves.

Flexibility is the ability to adjust your thoughts, actions and feelings

to the circumstances you find yourself in.

Situations change, and so it's important to be able

to adjust and behave in the most functional way to achieve your goals.

When you're born, your brain is not finished.

Infant brains are born under construction.

They're waiting for a set of wiring instructions

from the world.

If you expose your children to a lot of varying experiences

then you're basically wiring your child's brain

to function in a flexible way

and to learn new things when necessary.

If your child's experiences are very restricted

then your child will have less flexibility to adjust their actions

to the situations that they're in.

There's a really well-known

demonstration of flexibility

called the Stroop test.

A sequence of words, such as red, green, yellow, blue

but written in different colours.

When you present people with a whole list of these

you find that it takes people longer to name the colour of the ink

when the word is written in a colour that is different to the actual word.

The idea behind that

is in order to be able to name the colour

requires people to switch between

different pieces of information in their mind.

In simple terms,

what happens is that when they scan the word colour

the automatic processes of reading the word

interfere with the person's ability to state the colour out loud.

The more difficult people find this generally

the less cognitively flexible they are.

When your brain can't predict something,

or when you have to take in new information that you didn't predict,

that's what we call learning.

So your brain can update, it can learn,

or your brain can ignore the sense data

and just go with its own prediction.

Flexibility means tailoring a response to the specific situation,

either by predicting well

or by learning when there is prediction error.

A lot of what psychological flexibility is about

is the way in which people use resources that they have available

in dealing with stress.

One of the things about psychological inflexibility

is that people are not using their resources

in a way that's helpful to them.

Quite often they're using a very narrow range of their resources

to be able to adapt.

And the idea

in psychological flexibility

is really to move people

from a state of what psychologists call languishing,

of being stuck in a less than satisfactory situation,

to move them out of that zone

into a zone of achieving more of their potential.

What stops people from changing their lives

from a state of low satisfaction to one of higher satisfaction

is quite often to do with inflexibility

in the way they approach the problem that they're facing.

So there's a really deep lesson here.

You can take more control

over your environment.

You are not just a passive recipient of whatever the world gives you.

Spending time cultivating experiences

and foraging for new information

is an investment in maintaining a flexible brain.

These are all opportunities to expose yourself to prediction error

so that your brain can solve problems more flexibly in the future.

So exposing yourself to stuff you don't know,

and maybe even ideas you don't like,

might make you feel crappy in the moment

but actually

it is a really good investment.