154 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
(like the nose- hair trimmer or the Beginners book) and lead
you to attempt to deny your emotional experience. In this
chapter, we will explain why sometimes feeling bad is neces-
sary to feeling good.
Fostering Emotional Acceptance
with Mindfulness
Learning to skillfully and successfully regulate your emo-
tions is a healthy endeavor not only because it will help you
manage your everyday experiences but also because it will
improve your overall well- being. Living a meaningful and
authentic life implies openness to and acceptance of a full
array of emotional experiences, including pleasant and
unpleasant emotions. Accepting emotions entails an unre-
stricted openness to— meaning you don’t try to control,
avoid, or change— both your emotions and the processes
that accompany them (that is, thoughts and bodily sensa-
tions). It also requires a persistent level of engagement with
your emotions, regardless of their valence, or their inherent
attractiveness or aversiveness (happiness, for example, has a
positive valence because it has an attractive quality, whereas
anger has a negative valence because it’s thought to have an
aversive quality). Indeed, research in this area supports the
notion that accepting emotions is associated with long- term
psychological health (see, for example, Plumb, Orsillo, and
Luterek 2004) and with decreased anxiety and depression
(see, for example, Tull et al. 2004; Campbell- Sills et al. 2006;
Hofmann et al. 2009). Thus, the goal of this chapter is to
encourage you to work toward accepting your emotions to
better manage your anxiety. It’s best to think of acceptance