There are people who find it hard to change their minds, to shift, even when the facts change. They hold on to the same way of thinking, the same behaviours, the same rules, even when those rules make them suffer.
Our brain evolved to be able to learn, revise and adapt. It is on this capacity that we survived as a species and became more intelligent. Our survival and our development were not based on a wish always to be right, but on the ability to learn and adapt when the facts change.
Every experience and every encounter with another person has the potential to change us a little. To modify the way we see ourselves, other people and reality. Learning does not happen only when we acquire new information. It happens when we allow new information to affect our existing system of beliefs.
There is, however, a way of functioning in which this process meets an obstacle.
In psychology this difficulty is called psychological inflexibility, and it is now considered one of the most significant factors linked to psychological distress.
It is the case of a person who does not enter a conversation in order to meet something new, to arrive at a different solution or to ease a relational difficulty. On the contrary, they enter it in order to confirm what they already know.
It is the tendency to remain attached to particular thoughts, beliefs, behaviours, emotional reactions or patterns, even when these do not help and make life and mental health harder.
Mental health is not certainty but flexibility
Psychopathology used to be treated as a set of separate disorders. In recent years, however, more and more theories argue that behind many different difficulties there are common mechanisms — and one of them is reduced psychological flexibility.
Psychological flexibility is the ability to adapt when conditions change, to bear unpleasant feelings without letting them dominate our decisions, to revise our views when necessary, and to choose behaviours that serve our values rather than our fears.
Psychological inflexibility lies at the core of many forms of psychopathology. Research consistently shows that higher levels of psychological inflexibility are associated with increased levels of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms and general psychological distress. At the same time, therapeutic interventions that increase psychological flexibility are accompanied by significant improvement in mental health (Macri & Rogge, 2024).
Inflexibility is not only about thoughts
An inflexible person is not necessarily someone with strong opinions and a strong personality.
Inflexibility shows itself mainly when someone:
- finds it hard to really listen — usually listening in order to reply rather than to understand. During a conversation they may already be organising their counter-attack instead of actually taking in what they are hearing, as though they were in a debate.
- finds it hard to tolerate uncertainty. For them things are usually black and white: good or bad, right or wrong, perpetrators and victims, absolute explanations.
- experiences disagreement and difference not as other perspectives but as personal threats. “I was wrong” may be translated internally as “I failed”, “I’m not worthy”, “I’m losing control” — and so they feel an intense need always to be right.
- finds it hard to recognise different perspectives and to bear two or more different realities at once. Even when a behaviour or attitude of theirs causes problems, either for themselves or for people close to them, they repeat it even when it does not help.
- feels that change threatens them and their identity. So self-observation becomes difficult.
A flexible person can notice:
“Perhaps what I’m feeling is affecting the way I see this situation.”
The inflexible person often experiences their thoughts as objective reality.
They do not perceive that this is how they are operating; instead they think:
“That’s just how things are.”
In other words, inflexibility is less a matter of ideas and more a matter of difficulty adapting to the environment.
It is no accident that a systematic review of the literature concluded that rigidity is connected with many different mechanisms that maintain psychopathology, such as perfectionism, ruminative thinking, anxiety and chronic stress, compulsivity, relational difficulties, lower quality of life and impulsivity. It is not the processes themselves that become problematic, but the rigid way in which they are applied (Morris & Mansell, 2018).
Why is certainty so appealing?
Uncertainty is psychologically demanding; it takes a good level of awareness and emotional safety to bear not knowing and to trust the unknown.
When we do not know what is going to happen, anxiety, fear and insecurity are activated. For some people, absolute certainty works as an antidote to this distress.
So the illusion is created that if there is only one correct way to live, to think or to believe, then the world becomes safer. The deeply human need for safety and certainty in a world that is often frightening builds around itself a hard wall of certainties about life that carry the illusion of protection. The more fragile the inner sense of safety, the greater the need for external certainties can become.
Ideas are then no longer used only to understand the world. They tend to be used to protect us from the fear its complexity provokes.
The problem is that life does not work like that.
Reality is full of ambiguity, contradictions and continuous change. The more we try to confine it within absolute categories, the more we collide with it and with the people around us.
A psychologically inflexible person can become a fundamentalist in religion.
But they can become equally inflexible in politics.
In science.
In nutrition.
In raising children.
Even in psychology.
In some cases, attachment to an ideology appears to serve the need for certainty more than the search for truth, for convergence and for connection. The ideology simply becomes the vehicle.
The clearest sign of mental health
One of the most important signs of psychological maturity is not having strong beliefs. It is being able to examine them.
The flexible person is not the one without firm values, but the one who can hold their values without needing to close their ears to other realities.
One of the characteristics most often associated with mental health is the capacity to adapt flexibly to new conditions and different perspectives.
One of the most typical features of psychological rigidity is difficulty integrating new information.
A psychologically flexible person can enter a conversation with one view and leave with a modified one.
This does not mean they always change their mind. It means something inside them moves. They can bear to say:
“I might be wrong.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Perhaps I need to reconsider something I used to see differently.”
The inflexible person, by contrast, can enter a conversation and leave exactly as they came in.
Not necessarily because their arguments are strong, but because the purpose of the conversation is not the search for truth but the protection of an already existing certainty.
New evidence and different views are not really processed. They are often rejected before being examined, interpreted so as to confirm the original belief, or treated as a threat.
Psychological flexibility does not mean having no values or firm beliefs.
It means not having to be imprisoned within them.
Because maturity is not measured by how tightly we hold our certainties, but by how far we can go on developing without clinging to them in order to feel safe.
References:
Macri, J. A., & Rogge, R. D. (2024). Examining domains of psychological flexibility and inflexibility as treatment mechanisms in acceptance and commitment therapy: A comprehensive systematic and meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 110, 102432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102432
Morris, L., & Mansell, W. (2018). A systematic review of the relationship between rigidity/flexibility and transdiagnostic cognitive and behavioral processes that maintain psychopathology. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2043808718779431
