Congratulations! You’re the proud owner of your very own bus. In fact, you always have been. You’ve driven this metaphorical bus around every day of your life. How you drive your bus, and especially how you interact with your bus passengers, is key to increasing psychological well-being and managing the distress that life throws at all of us.
As humans, we often reflexively get caught up and entangled in our inner world–where our thoughts and feelings hang out. This happens especially when those internal experiences are unpleasant, unwanted, or overwhelming. Skills like Psychological Flexibility and mindfulness teach us a different way to relate with our internal worlds so that we get less caught up in them. A bus and its passengers provide a useful metaphor for thinking about psychological flexibility.
Related: (VIDEO) Explaining Psychological Flexibility: Surfing Metaphor
As bus drivers, we’re constantly navigating lots of information coming at us. Outside the bus there’s an external world full of roads, bus stops, traffic, bridges, construction, weather, and more. But inside the bus there’s a whole other internal world made up of the variety of passengers on the bus–thoughts, feelings, memories, impulses, desires, physical sensations, and more.
Don’t Want Passengers? Sorry, That’s What Buses are For
Here’s the challenging part: Driving your bus well–getting from place to place or driving in the directions we care about–is hard enough sometimes due to all that aforementioned external stuff, much of it made up of things we can’t control. But it’s also sometimes even more challenging trying to deal with all the different passengers on our bus, while we’re trying to go to those places. And we can’t stop passengers from getting on our bus, nor can we simply just kick them off when we don’t like them.
We don’t have control over what thoughts and feelings show up on our bus. Some of them we may like, some of them may be pleasant or give us useful and helpful information. Others we might not like so much; it doesn’t matter, they can all get on our bus and ride as long as they want and come and go as they please.
We Get Easily Caught Up in Thoughts & Feelings
It’s hard to navigate all this internal noise, and inevitably as humans sometimes we get caught up in or entangled with some of the passengers we wish would just leave us alone. We turn around mid-driving, and fight with them and argue with them, or try to rationalize them into submission.
Or we drive the direction they tell us to drive even when we know it’s not a helpful direction to go, in hopes that it’ll make them quiet down or leave us alone. Or worse, we stop driving all together, turn around from what mattered to us and instead try to kick those unwanted passengers off the bus.
The Paradox of Fighting With our Thoughts & Feelings
Naturally, none of that works. But the problem is beyond just that we spent energy in a draining and unwinnable battle; it’s compounded because we’re also now losing out on the benefits of driving with intention toward what matters to us.
And now we’re frustrated with ourselves as drivers because we feel like we should be able to remove certain passengers, and we’re worn down from the fight. We’re missing out on the pleasant or enjoyable passengers that were waiting further up the road, because we’ve stopped driving, or because we’ve ceded control of the bus to passengers that told us to turn a different direction and then promised when we did that they’d get off the bus and leave us alone.
(Spoiler alert: they lied.)
Let me emphatically reiterate: this is human. You’re not a horrible bus driver compared to all the other drivers out there. We all struggle in different ways and intensities with whatever unwanted passengers frequently board our buses.
How to be a Psychologically Flexible Bus Driver
So here’s how you drive a bus mindfully, being clear on the difference between you and your passengers, and interact flexibly with them while directing your attention to what matters to you, driving in the direction of your values….In short, here’s how you drive a bus with Psychological Flexibility.
First, you do want to have an awareness of your thought/feeling passengers–noticing them, seeing who’s there. You can’t pretend them out of existence or constantly ignore them, because some of them have useful input for you. And some of them you enjoy.
Second, remember that they are passengers, and not you. You aren’t your thoughts and feelings. You’re the one holding the wheel and driving the bus.
Along with that, remember that you don’t have control over who gets on your bus, and instead try to adopt a stance of willingness toward whoever decides to ride with you.
And as you’re driving, even when passengers get loud, remember to direct your focus more often than not to the road in front of you, to what’s present in the external world, and to the things that matter that you want to drive toward.
From there, maintain a flexible and expanded awareness: Periodically checking the mirror and noticing the passengers behind you, tuning into whatever helpful information some of them may provide, enjoying the presence of some, then returning your attention gently to what’s immediate, what’s there when you look out the big front window.
Lastly, from time to time check in with yourself to focus on what it is you want to be driving toward. Get clearer on the stuff that matters and is important to you. And then, drive purposefully, in committed actions and behaviors, in those directions, toward what you value.
Then repeat, over and over again. You’ll get inevitably hooked at times back into an inflexible interaction with your thoughts and feelings. That’s okay! When you catch it, congratulate yourself for doing so.
And then grab the wheel, face front, and start driving again. As you’re driving your bus toward what you value in your life, or toward bus stops (goals) based on those values, notice your passengers, allow them to be there along for the ride, even if they’re loud or threatening or annoying or distracting.
And once again, after you’ve observed the inside of your bus without judgment, and after you’ve decided if any passengers are offering useful input, then redirect your focus to the present moment of driving and where you want to go. This is Psychological Flexibility.
Notice that in this skill, what has changed isn’t the content, volume, or nature of your thoughts and feelings. What’s changed instead is the way you relate to and interact with them.
How You Can Get Help Developing Psychological Flexibility
Practicing the skills to increase psychological flexibility can be helpful to just about any human being, since our default is psychological INflexibility and being frequently entangled with our thoughts and feelings. It’s a particularly valuable skill for people who are experiencing significant distress and resulting impairment in their mental health.
We at Full Color Psychology work well with people who are overwhelmed with depression, stuck constantly in highly anxious thoughts, caught in patterns of disordered eating behaviors, or experiencing general psychological distress. We also specialize in working with the mental health impact of faith transitions and helping athletes and performers improve their performance, both issues where the skill of Psychological Flexibility is very useful.
If this is something you’d like to explore more, check out our other videos and articles about Psychological Flexibility and related topics (in the ‘Learn’ section of the site). You can also look up resources and books by Steve Hayes, Russ Harris, and other teachers of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), the basis for the ideas in this article and video. Of course, feel free as well to reach out to us with questions or to inquire about our therapy services.
Photo by Preston Zeller
