Welcome to IVF This- episode 71 - Mental Flexibility

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. I hope you’re all doing so well. 

Soring has sprung in Central TX and it’s already starting to heat up here in Austin. Today’s temps are like 97* and I’m not really emotionally ready for that kind fo temps so your coach is struggling a little bit with being irrationally angry with the hot weather. Alas, not to worry, I go through this particular mourning period every year so its pretty typical. 

It’s been a While since I offered a personal update so I wanted to let you all know that tomorrow, the day after this is recorded, I will start my leave after having our baby. We are very excited to be here, honestly, because we didn’t think we would ever get to do this again. It’s quite humbling, actually. We were sure our journey was over in 2020 when our last embryo transfer failed. 

It's interesting bc I talk about consequences a lot with my clients. And most people think of consequences as a bad thing. My husband, who’s an economist, doesn’t call them consequences he calls them trade-offs. Meaning that everything has a trade-off. 

So, I was thinking back to Late summer, early fall of 2020 and how I was pretty sure our journey was over. I was grieving this idea, this expectation for how I thought our journey would look- I think all of you can relate to that. I was devastated that it didn’t work. I was angry that we went through all that we did for a negative test- again, I think a lot of you can relate to that. 

Then I started moving more towards acceptance. I still wanted to try but hubby was not on board at that time and it was more important to me that he come to a decision on his own rather than me shoving my preferences down his throat. So, I got to work on acceptance and loving the life that I had, right now, as opposed to that fantasy life that I had kind of created in my mind. 

And I got there. It took MONTHS of concerted efforts, journaling, all the things that I talk about. And then right around that time that I had really kind of settled into this place of acceptance and didn’t feel so much of that tug of longing, my husband kind of casually said, you know, I’m kind of getting excited about the idea of having another kid. MIND YOU, this was probably about 6’ish months or more after that failed cycle. And then if you’ve followed our story then you know that we did our second full cycle on May of 2021, had a FET in July 2021 and now, we are hours away from meeting our last little one. 

My husband and I each had to grapple with tradeoffs. Which trade off were we more comfortable with? Well, that is a pretty individual experience. A tradeoff that would be acceptable to me might not be acceptable to him. 

For instance one of the biggest tradeoffs for us would be to go through the entire process again, knowing full well that we did not have great odds and weighing the huge financial risk of the whole process, vs never try again and live with the “what if’s”- this is I think is probably one of the most common tradeoffs with IVF. 

Now, Before I really got to work on acceptance, the idea of “accepting” anything less than what I decided I had always wanted, which was 3 children, seemed like I would die. That it would feel like a death that I would accept something less. And maybe you feel like that too? It might be something different for you- a different circumstance, a different number, whatever. Right, but this deeply held belief that you have, it would feel like you might die if you didn’t have that. 

And it took a lot of work for me to really, deeply, love my life even thought it was different. 

Then we decided to pursue IVF one more time. We jumped through all the hoops, paid all of the money, did all of the things. Now, on the other side, it kind of feels like anything but this would be death. 

Now, this is the interesting part, BOTH of these beliefs were and are true for me at the time I was and am thinking of them. This is what is called mental flexibility and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. 

I’ve talked before about emotional resilience. The skill you can develop through thought work of being less reactive to the world around you or your own brain. Emotional resilience helps you learn to live on a more even keel, where you still experience the full range of human life, but you don’t have such big swings and crashes and you don’t feel out of control and at the mercy of your feelings. The peaks and valleys aren’t quite as high or as low. Not that you feel muted in your experiences but it doesn’t feel as volatile. 

Most of us are too changeable in our emotions and we have to learn how to bring it all down to smaller variants, smaller swings, so that we feel more stable. 

We are not able to swing wildly in our thoughts. We are rigid and attached to what we already think and believe, and that is why mental flexibility is such an important concept. 

Mental flexibility is the capacity, the skill of training your brain to be open to new ideas, new thoughts, and new perspectives. Brains do not like to be challenged or to be wrong. When that happens, we tend to experience a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. 

So cognitive dissonance is the mental tension that is caused by the conflict between two different ideas or thoughts which contradict each other. And the way humans deal with that is by unconsciously dismissing the new conflicting idea and doubling down in their belief on the first idea. 

So this is why if you are talking to someone, they’ve done studies on this, if you don’t believe in climate change and you are shown evidence of climate change, it doesn’t change your mind. It actually makes your brain find reasons to dismiss or reject the evidence. 

It’s overhyped, scientists are biased, it’s happening but it’s not manmade, whatever the arguments are. People will actually report believing more strongly in their original belief after it’s been challenged. And this is why trying to persuade someone of a different opinion is so often frustrating and backfires. 

You may actually just prompt their brain to get more entrenched in their original belief. And if this is happening to you, it’s okay. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re stubborn, that you’re stupid, or that these other people necessarily are stubborn or stupid. It’s an unconscious process that happens because our brains don’t want to be wrong. 

Our brains have to filter and interpret so much information every day. We use a lot of shortcuts. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. We want to just know when we look at a table that it’s a table. Our brain just uses a shortcut. That’s a table. There’s four legs on it, there’s four sticking protuberances down to the floor, there’s a flat surface, it’s a table. 

Rather than every time you wake up in the morning being like, wait, what is that? What is that shape? Why is it there? What does it do? If your brain had to re-evaluate every single thing every time it thought about it, you would never be able to get out of bed. 

So, your brain just likes to have a shortcut and it doesn’t want to be wrong about that. That seems dangerous. It’s exhausting, it would be overwhelming, and what if we’re wrong about who we can trust or what food is safe or whatever else. Our brain thinks that being wrong is dangerous, that it’s exhausting, and we might die. 

So, your brain would rather be certain, even if it’s wrong, because your brain does not want to be destabilized. It doesn’t want to think, oh my god, what else might I be wrong about? Our brains experience that as a threat, as if you came out in the morning and all of a sudden, your table was walking and talking, you would be super freaked out. 

This is an unconscious process. The good news is that we can bring it into consciousness and work on changing it in the places that we want to. So we can let it continue running unconsciously for identifying objects and being able to drive without thinking very carefully about every moment. That’s why it’s easy to drive after you’ve done it for a while and it’s terrifying the first time. 

We can let our brain do this unconscious process wherever we don’t really care about changing our thoughts, but we can learn to change the process in the places that it would serve us to do so. Thought work is what can allow us to develop the skill of being mentally or emotionally comfortable without losing our shit. 

Because that’s really what’s going on. When your brain experiences cognitive dissonance, it’s uncomfortable and it thinks it’s going to die. And so instead of allowing that discomfort and being curious about it, it just doubles down on its original belief. It’s mental rigidity. It just puts its foot down, it’s like, no, this is it, I’m standing firm, I’m gripping to this, this is the only truth. 

Learning to allow the discomfort that will just come up in your brain and body when your thoughts are challenged is a skill that you can learn. That is what produces mental flexibility. Ironically, this can be a matter of life or death. Our brain thinks that mental rigidity will keep us safe, but just look at the COVID pandemic. 

People’s cognitive dissonance is preventing them from being able to change their minds to adapt to new data. So, no matter how much evidence there is that COVID is real and killing people, people who are invested in believing the opposite won’t change their minds. 

I think as a culture, we are particularly resistant to changing our minds. I do believe humans are like this in general, for all the reasons I just described. It’s evolutionary psychology. But I think in the US, we seem to almost delight in our stubbornness. We look down on expertise and critical analysis. I think we tend to value anecdotal evidence more, maybe because it feels more relatable, I’m not sure. 

I mean think about all of the people in the world that think that IVF is morally wrong. I was raised Catholic so there are VERY strong opinions about IVF within the Catholic faith. It’s not shared by everyone that identifies as Catholic but for those that do, it can be a pretty contentious issue. People will steadfastly argue that IVF is “playing God” and that is their whole-hearted belief. Now the cognitive dissonance is that that is true for them. That is not, say, my view point. My viewpoint is that IVF is a medical intervention for a disease and we do not have that type of resistance towards other medical interventions, say like a open-heart surgery or something. Now, those are two contradictory thoughts. And I can allow for that person to believe that they are right and I can still believe that I am right, and that neither of us have to change and that’s ok. 

No do I believe that I am more “right” of course! I am human. My mind, just like all of yourse likes to believe that it is certain. We want to be certain because we think we will be safe that way, but we’re not safe when we’re like that. We’re rigid. It makes us blind. Mental flexibility is the ability to contemplate new ideas and be open to changing your mind. 

There is tremendous power of imagination and intellect required to see things from multiple perspectives, to hold two competing thoughts or ideas at the same time. That’s a level of intellectual sophistication that I think we all should aspire to because it will be so useful for us in our lives. 

To look at a circumstance and see how two people can have totally different thoughts about it and neither is more objectively true than the other because they’re both true to the person who holds them. They seem true to that person. 

This skill is crucial for thought work because thought work is all about coming to believe new things that you haven’t believed before. And I think sometimes we expect this should be easy. As if we just had never heard of this other thought we could think, but that as soon as we hear it, we will totally adopt it. 

Sometimes we think a new thought and we’re just off to the races. But when we’re challenging really deeply held beliefs that we’ve had about ourselves for a long time, that’s not usually how it works. It’s not just that you never thought to believe that you can, let’s say, become a parent. 

It’s not that you had no thoughts about being a parent, and now you’ve discovered you can be one. Usually, the case is that you already subconsciously believe that it isn’t possible for you to become a parent. You see what I mean? It’s not just there was a void of thoughts about this subject and now you’ve heard a new one. 

Mental flexibility is the capacity to be introduced to a new thought or idea that challenges your existing belief structures and not immediately reject it. This doesn’t mean you have to go straight to believing the new thought 1000% because you can’t yet most of the time. That’s why mental flexibility is so important. 

Mental flexibility is the skill, the practice that helps you get through this uncomfortable period where you believe both things. Mental flexibility is what allows you to simultaneously hold two conflicting beliefs. Your old belief that you won’t be a parent and your new belief that you can be a become a parent and that the process my look differently than you had originally believed. 

You believe both of them on and off, depending on which one you’re thinking at any moment. You’re working on believing the new one more and more, but you still believe the old one. If you’re mentally rigid, then you can’t cope with this, with this dissonance, with the conflict, with the discomfort that comes up with considering what if you were wrong. 

And your brain’s total cascade of terror that that might mean you’re wrong about everything and that tables aren’t table and the whole world is collapsing. That’s what gets triggered on a primitive level sometimes when we contradict a thought, and then we feel so much resistance we just give up and we think it means something has gone wrong, we resist the old thought, and we freak out. 

The refusal to allow both to be true ironically means you usually end up defaulting to the old belief since you’re not ready for it to go away yet. But if you can allow both to exist in your mind, if you can practice mental flexibility, then you can strengthen the new belief until it becomes the only one that seems true to you anymore. 

Something rigid, if you try to change if, if you need to make it shorter or wider or if you need to bend it or if you need to reshape it, it’ll break. Apply any force to something too rigid and it’ll snap. But something flexible can be shaped and molded into something different. 

So the way you practice this is by leaning into the discomfort you feel when someone offers you a thought that contradicts your own. Whether it’s 

coaching or politics or any area of life. It’s just a thought, it can’t hurt you. Looking at it to see if it might be true to that person or true for you in some way or a thought you might want to entertain is not dangerous. 

Your brain thinks it’s a threat but it’s not. It’s just a thought. So, allow that discomfort that comes up. It may feel even physical. That’s okay. Breathe through it. Try to examine the thought honestly, as if you’ve just woken up from a coma and you didn’t know that you already disagreed with it. 

It doesn’t mean you have to end up deciding to accept and believe it and change your original thought. But the ability to see how and why this thought might be true for someone else or could be true for you is crucial. 

There’s one other thing about mental flexibility that I want to point out for you all, which is that one of the upsides of practicing this skill is that it allows you to hold competing truths in your mind about yourself, which makes it an amazing tool for practicing self-compassion and acceptance. 

I said competing truths, but really, I just mean competing thoughts. If you are willing to be mentally flexible and allow for contradiction, it means you can look at yourself and you can, rather than just see yourself as negative because you’re not perfectly positive, you can see that you’re two different things at the same time. 

You’re a mom who yells at your kids and you’re a mom who’s patient with your kids. It just depends on the moment. You’re a supportive partner and you’re a non-supportive partner sometimes. Just depends on the moment. You are somedays an incredibly productive employee and some days you are not. 

We think we have to be all one or all the other, but being a human isn’t that simple. Sometimes we think, feel, and act one way, sometimes another. We’re both, most of us, most of the time. And all of it is okay. And the irony is always that we think resisting what we don’t like about ourselves will change it. But in fact, it’s accepting and allowing that you are both that allows you to move more into alignment with the thing you want to be. 

The same is true with thoughts. Allowing that you believe both things, the new thought and the old thought is what allows you to practice without so much drama, moving into alignment with the new thought that you want to believe. Growing and evolving and becoming the person you want to be and challenging some of your most fundamental beliefs about yourself is not always going to feel good. It’s going to feel uncomfortable and destabilizing and we want to lean into that. 

You don’t get a flexible brain just by magic. You get it by practicing the skill of holding contradictory ideas or thoughts together in your mind, allowing them to both be there, allowing someone to suggest the opposite of what you think without freaking out, being open to hearing how something you immediately disagree with might be true. 

That is how you develop mental flexibility. The more willing you are to adopt a new thought, even when it contradicts your current beliefs, the more radically your life will change and the more mentally flexibility you are, the less time it ends up taking to shift those thoughts. But you have to earn that flexibility by practicing and building up the skill. 

And it’s a skill that I hope each and every one of you open up and allow yourselves to learn because it really can change your whole life. It really can change the vice grip that feelings have over you. It really can change how compassionate you are to other and, most importantly, to yourself. And that is what I want for each and every one of you. 

Ok, that is what I have for you today. Have a great week and I will talk to you soon.