Accepting Uncomfortable Emotions: Learning From Car Dashboards and Manure Jacob D. Gossner, Elizabeth B. Fauth, and Tasha Howard “Just think more positively.” “Pull yourself together.” “Get over it.” “Quit worrying.” Most of us have heard (and said) this advice many times. For agricultural producers, long hours coupled with challenging, unpredictable conditions can give rise to challenging thoughts and feelings at times. Conventional wisdom maintains that uncomfortable, distressing, or painful thoughts and feelings are “bad,” can be controlled by “thinking positively,” and are not healthy or normal. There is evidence that being optimistic, “finding the silver lining,” or seeing the benefits of hardship are beneficial for us. However, some people think this means that we should avoid the negative. The fact is that we all experience uncomfortable, distressing, and painful thoughts and feelings at times. There is no way to go through life without our minds reminding us of our mistakes, worries, or the painful gap between what we want and what we have (Hayes, 2019).
Understanding Thoughts: Getting Hooked, Avoiding, or Accepting Thoughts like, “I am a failure as a rancher,” have likely been experienced by most ranchers at some point, particularly after conflict with others, exhaustion, or repeated worry. When distressing thoughts and feelings like this come, there are three general ways we can respond. First, we can treat these thoughts as if they represent something real or factual. Believing that this thought is the actual truth is what scholars call cognitive fusion, or “getting hooked,” and people who use this technique tend to have poorer mental health and lower quality of life (Bramwell & Richardson, 2018; Faustino et al., 2021). Why? When we “get hooked” by difficult thoughts, and believe they are true, we feel even worse, and we lose the ability to engage effectively with challenging situations, such as marriage, raising a family, and making a living. Second, when we are faced with difficult thoughts, we can avoid them (psychologists call this experiential avoidance). Avoiding difficult thoughts and emotions is a way to control them, and for a short time, it can “work” (Harris, 2019). Thinking “I am a failure as a rancher” is distressing; experiential avoidance might mean “zoning out” while you binge-watch TV. Over the next few hours, you don’t have to experience that thought, which feels better. Unfortunately, avoiding our thoughts and feelings or trying to control them leads to 1