HJ: So one of the strategies that I used to deal with anxiety and my overall mental health while I was facing some of my challenges I’ve encountered during grad school is an idea called radical acceptance. It can be described as a distress tolerance skill. So its focus is on, if you’re dealing with something that’s genuinely upsetting that you can’t change, how can you move forward, acknowledging that it’s bad without letting yourself suffer more than you have to?
When my therapist told me about this, I looked it up, and I found some steps that you can go through mentally to practice this skill. And I wrote them down on sticky notes and put them up at my desk. And I found it really helpful to remind myself of this idea, go through these steps, whenever I was feeling particularly anxious or bad. And I found that it was a really important strategy for me because I felt like I was dealing with some truly upsetting circumstances. And it was important to me to have ways to cope with that that acknowledged that I was dealing with things that were hard.