Hi friend,
I normally take several years to research and experiment with a therapeutic before sharing about it in public, but I’m going to make an exception for this one, for two good reasons:
ACT describes processes I’m already familiar with through mindfulness practice.
I’m just too excited about ACT 😅
Introduction
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced as the word ‘act’), is a mindfulness-based behavioral therapy created in the 1980s by Steven C. Hayes, PhD, one of the most cited psychologists in the world, and further developed by his colleagues, students, and clients.
“Acceptance” here is mindful acceptance of the comfortable and uncomfortable aspects of our present experience, and “Commitment” is commitment to act in accord with our values.
In the words of ACT experts:
The goal is to open up yourself to the vitality of the moment, and to move more effectively toward what you value.
— Steven C. Hayes (Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life)
The name “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” reflects a key message: accept what is out of your personal control, and commit to action that improves your life.
— Dr. Russ Harris (ACT Made Simple)
ACT teaches us to come in contact with our full experience — even the things that can be painful or scary or uncomfortable. It teaches us how to understand our patterns and […] see if they’re really working […] in the long term, and if they aren’t, […] to break these patterns and tak[e] steps in a direction that’s more meaningful […] — in the direction of our values.
— Dr. Jessica Borushok (The ACT Therapist on YT)
These ideas of Acceptance and Commitment may seem simplistic, but in the forty years since its inception, the ACT community has developed modern, innovative, and evidence-based tools that have proven effective,
for a wide range of traditional mental health categories such as depression, stress, psychosis, OCD, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and SUD,
to deal more effectively with pain and illness,
to learn and work more efficiently, and,
to improve one’s quality of life.
Steven C. Hayes explains:
The beautiful thing about ACT is that ACT can be used in the therapeutic context, but we can work ACT out on our own too.
When practiced with an accompanying therapist, ACT stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and when practiced on one’s own, for Acceptance and Commitment Training.
Another exciting feature of ACT is that it’s a trans-diagnostic, Process-Based Therapy. ACT co-founder Kirk Strosahl remarks,
Diagnosis is a distraction, not a direction.
(Amen to that.)
And in an interview, Steven C. Hayes explains,
We never did drink the Kool-Aid that was offered from the DSM-III onward. […] Our approach — instead of the DSM medicalization of human suffering — is to try to dig into the processes that narrow human lives or expand them, and to learn how to measure them so that we can begin to train people to use them to evolve forward.
ACT researchers identified six processes which are responsible for most of our suffering and happiness — four of which involve our ability to maintain an open, Accepting awareness of our present experience, and the remaining two involve our ability to identify our values and Commit to act on them to build a vibrant, meaningful life. In this article, you will learn about these processes and their corresponding skills.
ACT is based on a philosophy called Functional Contextualism which basically says, “If it works (Functional) in a given context (Contextualism), then go ahead and do it.” The ACT community tells its therapists, “Your mission is to help yourself and your clients develop Acceptance of your feelings and thoughts and Commit to move towards your values. Here are the best tools we’re aware of that can help you do so, but if you have other tools that can get the job done better for you in your particular situation, please feel free to use them. You can even create your own tools if you want. And pssst, don’t forget to share your experiences with us — we want to learn from you too.”
Functional Contextualism empowers people and puts the focus where it should be, namely, therapeutic efficacy.
ACT thus bears the two hallmarks of a great therapeutic model:
Precision — it points out the parameters that influence most of our suffering and happiness.
Adaptability — it gives the individual the possibility to tweak these parameters in a way that is most relevant and effective for them, at a particular time, and under their particular circumstances.
What a freaking welcome break breath of fresh air from the top-down, protocol-driven, and frankly dehumanizing “care” that pervades today’s medical culture.
Dear reader, if you still can’t tell how much I vibe with the ACT philosophy, the following quote from Steven C. Hayes and Gijs Jansen should seal the deal:
As therapists, we try to empower ¹ people and provide them with the tools ² to create meaningful lives ³.
¹ Empowerment. ² Holism. ³ Positivity.
😎 Mental Health Revolution, baby 😆 let’s goooooo!!!
Accepting the Present Moment
Steven C. Hayes explains, in his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life,
A large part of our approach has to do with mindfulness.
As a mindfulness geek, I was delighted to learn how ACT breaks down mindfulness and found the ACT model to be precise, practical, and powerful — a wonderful contribution to mindfulness-based psychotherapists, secular mindfulness practitioners, and spiritual communities.
Please remember that the following four skills,
shine light on each other — learning about one skill will inform your practice of the other skills, and,
support each other — practicing one skill correctly will make the other skills more easily accessible.
In other words, they are four facets of an effective mindfulness practice.
1. Contact with the Present Moment
Life is only available here and now, and one important way to support our mental health is to develop our ability to bring our wandering attention back to our present experience.
Contacting the present moment helps us to,
better appreciate our conditions of happiness,
reconcile with our pain, and,
act more wisely.
When we are truly there, aware and awake, life becomes more real. Since life is a flow, the secret is to connect with the present moment with the mental lightness and openness that allow us to stay in that flow and notice how everything is changing. (Please try this now, it is really helpful.)
Although Steven C. Hayes learned formal meditation techniques in his youth and still practices and teaches mindfulness of breathing, he is not an apostle of formal meditation practice, and he does not profess any religious allegiance. He and other ACT researchers have focused more on the processes that underlie healthy awareness, and the creative ways in which we can all cultivate these skills.
As I like to say (in my profound wisdom), “I don’t care where it comes from. If it works, it works.” And yeah. It works 😅
2. Acceptance
The following is not an official ACT formula, but I trust you will find it relevant and useful:
Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains,
Too often, people try to control their depression, control their anxiety,… and the harder they try to control it, the more out of control it seems.
This perfectly describes the psychosis I experienced as a teenager. I had bad thoughts. So I tried to fight those bad thoughts. And the more I did, the more horrible the thoughts got, and the more miserable I became. I was using an instinctual, but completely wrong approach to get myself out of, as the ACT community poetically puts it, my “psychological quicksand”.
ACT cofounder Kirk Strosahl remarks,
Almost every mental disorder known to man, as well as every addiction, is strongly linked to emotional avoidance as a trait.
Emotional avoidance is the persistent unwillingness to experience unpleasant feelings and thoughts even as the emotional cost of avoidance becomes higher than the emotional cost of acceptance and engagement. And we are all emotionally avoidant to some degree. Lemme unpack this.
First, and very important — no one is asking you to tolerate your pain for no reason. If you’re stuck in an abusive relationship, please, find a way to get out of it. If you have an illness that requires you to change your diet, by all means, change your diet. If you just stepped on a lego, then, definitely, say “ouch” and put the damn legos back in their damn box so that none of these little bastards can creep up on you.
But what about those times when you have a painful feeling that you can’t do much about?
What avoidance strategies have you been using? Think: distractions and substances, and also: psychological resistance and escaping into your thoughts.
And how well have these avoidance strategies worked for you? Have they left you emotionally paralyzed or numb? Have they prevented you from living the rich, meaningful, purposeful and vibrant life that you want to and deserve to live?
Like the rest of us, you may be under the impression that your personal emotional avoidance strategies “should” work. But that is not the question. The question is, do they actually work?
Even after practicing mindfulness for the past fifteen years as my full-time “job” (lol), as I reflect on the above two questions for myself, I notice something deep in my psyche that begins to move — a softening of my heart, an opening of my world, an expansion of my possibilities.
How is it for you?
Acceptance is not some clever way to “embrace our pain away” — as the following, carefully selected and surprisingly pedagogical GIFs shall demonstrate.
Not acceptance:
Acceptance:
Acceptance is not complicated, but in practice it is difficult, because it has nothing to do with the dissecting, analyzing, and strategizing that our mind is all about. Our mind, like an “overly helpful friend” (to use Russ Harris’ expression), clumsily tries to reappropriate our practice of mindful acceptance, imagining that it must be part of some new, sophisticated plan to get rid of our pain. But it’s not. True acceptance has no agenda. It is not afraid of pain. And it does not obsess over it either.
To accept is to let go of the struggle with pain. It is to wake up to the fact that,
no, annihilating our anxiety is not a lofty mission that is worth getting all anxious about,
no, we don’t need to get angry at ourselves for being upset,
no, becoming depressed when ruminating on how sad we are is not helping, and,
no, brooding over how we think too much is not the path to peace of mind.
Wrestling with our pain day in day out in the hope that it will go away is counterproductive — we only end up with a mind tied into a pretzel.
So let us untie our pretzel.
Or put it in our mouth. And chew it. And swallow it ☺️
Acceptance minimizes our mental resistance to pain, and therefore minimizes our suffering. Acceptance helps us develop compassion, in the etymological sense of the word, because it allows us to be with (‘com’) pain (‘passion’). Acceptance allows us to fully hear the messages of our emotions, develop our emotional intelligence, reconnect with our humanity, and bring vitality back into our life.
Acceptance expands our awareness and makes room for both sides of our present experience — the pleasant and the unpleasant, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the desired and the undesired, the part of us we’re proud of and the part of us we’re ashamed of — because, better than feeling good, is being whole.
3. Cognitive Defusion
Another brilliant concept in ACT is the idea of “cognitive fusion” vs “cognitive defusion”. When our attention is fused with our feelings or thoughts, we,
become captivated by their content,
dwell on them, drown in them, are trapped in, jerked around, and consumed by them,
are compelled to like or dislike them, give in or resist their impulses, agree or disagree with them, and,
lose touch with the present moment.
As you read this article, how much of your attention is absorbed by the feelings, mental images and thoughts that it evokes?
And what aspects of the present moment are you missing out on?
You’re welcome.
The little bit of cognitive defusion you (hopefully) just experienced is a step toward healthy attention. When defused we,
see feelings and thoughts for what they are, i.e., feelings and thoughts,
do not dwell on or drown in them, are disentangled, detached, and distanced from them,
are not compelled to make dual choices about them, and,
stay open to the fullness of our present experience.
Cognitive fusion is looking from feelings and thoughts while cognitive defusion is looking at feelings and thoughts. When cognitively defused, feelings and thoughts are still there, but our experience of them is very different. As I explain in my article on mindfulness of emotions, it is like if you were drowning in the middle of a river. You push yourself back to the surface and swim to the shore. Sitting on the shore, you look at the river. The river is still there, but your experience of it is now very different. When cognitively defused, your feelings and thoughts are still there, but you are now safe, observing feelings and thoughts flow naturally.
Here is something that ACT therapists sometimes invite new clients to do to illustrate cognitive defusion. Put your hands over your face. Notice how,
they are all dark — you can’t see them for what they are,
you can’t see your environment, and,
you can’t function as well.
Now, extend your hands in front of you. Notice how,
you can see them for what they are,
you are in touch with your environment, and,
you can function in the world.
Similarly, when cognitively defused:
you can see feelings and thoughts for what they are,
you are in touch with your environment, and, because feelings and thoughts lose some of their “hooking” power (the ability to jerk you around and dictate your behavior),
you can function more like the person you want to be.
ACT offers many techniques to help us cognitively defuse. The simplest of these, and probably my favorite, is to preface our feelings and thoughts with “I’m noticing […]”, “Here is […]”, or, “I’m having the thought that […]”. For example, when feeling nervous, we can simply produce a calm new thought: “I’m noticing nervousness.” When feeling an urge to smoke, “Here is an urge to smoke.” When having a judgmental thought about our weight, “I’m having the thought that I am fat.”
This is about becoming aware of, stepping back, and defusing from our thought — not disputing its content, as one may be tempted to believe. In a dramatic display of this misunderstanding, one of Russ Harris’ clients exclaimed, “But it’s true!! I am fat!!” before pulling up his shirt and slapping his belly. And sure enough, he was. But when looking at a thought, the ACT therapist is never interested in knowing,
Is this thought true?
Instead, he or she wants to know,
In the past, has this type of thought helped you be more like the type of person you want to be?
Now, would it be more supportive of your wellbeing to experience this thought with your attention fused to it or defused from it? and,
If you allowed this thought to drive your behavior, would it lead you away from or towards the value-based life that you want to live? (We will explore the topic of values later in this article.)
In short, we are interested in how a thought Functions to serve or disserve people, in the particular Context in which it arises. (Yep, that’s Functional Contextualism — bravo, you remembered 🤗)
ACT also proposes a variety of visualization practices to help us defuse from our thoughts. One that I like asks us to picture our thoughts as leaves floating down a stream. But if that sounds too Zenish to you, what about imagining your thoughts written on big signs, in a parade, in Rio de Janeiro? Or, if you’re in a nerdy mood, visualizing them as your computer’s screen saver? You want to visualize your mental discourse in a way that shows its conceptualized and changing nature and creates a buffer of awareness between you and the mental discourse.
Another way to teach yourself to see thoughts as thoughts is to disobey them on purpose — when it’s safe and fun for you to do so. For instance, if when walking out of your house in the morning your mind says, “Put your hat on right or you’ll look silly!”, then go silly-style for the day. Explore what it’s like to politely disobey your Dictator Within. You’re developing behavioral flexibility, a fundamental capacity to living the more purposeful life you want to live. (And, who knows, maybe one day you’ll be hailed as a groundbreaking fashion trendsetter!)
Another exercise to cultivate cognitive defusion is to mentally affirm the impossibility of what you are doing. For example, drink a glass of water while producing the thought, “I can’t drink water”. The goal here is to see your thoughts as thoughts — they are not the gospel truth that they appear to be, and you don’t have to take them so seriously. Realizing this is key to living more mentally free and value-driven.
ACT offers a bunch of other cognitive defusion techniques, such as saying the thought in a funny voice, spelling the word backwards, or repeating the word out loud extremely fast for thirty seconds in order to drain all emotional load out of it.
With all of these cognitive defusion techniques, please remember that,
The idea is never to ridicule or trivialize your thoughts, but simply to step back and see them for what they are, namely, words inside our head — not always true, not permanent, and not the all-powerful dictators they pretend to be.
Even if these practices seem odd to you, they are evidence-based and, I believe, worth giving a serious try. As I like to say, “If it’s silly but it works… then it ain’t silly.”
4. Self as Observer
The fourth and final aspect of healthy awareness involves defusing from our conceptualized self and experiencing our self more as the observer. Here is a table I made (not an official ACT table) to help you make the difference between the two:
Right now, can you get in touch with your Observing Self?
If not, you may like to tune into the present moment, open up your mind, step back, and try again.
According to Russ Harris,
The Observing Self is a safe place inside you from which you can safely observe what’s happening in the mind or body, without being hurt.
This mindfulness skill invites you to buy less into the story you tell yourself about who you are, and to experience yourself more as spacious awareness. Like many of the things you learned in your life, such as swimming or riding a bike, experiencing yourself as spacious awareness may seem scary at first, but with proper guidance, a little bit of faith, and a few trials and errors, you will begin to enjoy it, and before you know it, you will want to do it more and more, because being space is really fun and enjoyable. (That’s why some people go on meditation retreats for vacations — to take a break from their conceptualized self and enjoy more inner freedom.)
But if this feels too frightening, please feel free to skip this skill — you’ll still benefit greatly from the other skills.
Here are two methods that Steven C. Hayes proposes to help us experience ourselves more as the observer:
- Defusion with self story -
You already learned about defusion: when having a thought about who you are, you can preface the thought with “I’m noticing the thought that I’m [like this]”. Or, “I’m noticing the story that I tell myself about [this aspect of my life]”. Please remember that your aim here is never to prove or disprove the content of your thoughts, but simply to reclaim your mental spaciousness.
- Noticing content, noticing container -
I love this exercise:
Settle your attention on one object — this could be an external object but also your body, a feeling, or a thought.
Give rise to the thought, “I am aware of [object].” Pause.
Give rise to the thought, “I am not [object].” Pause.
Give rise to the thought, “I contain awareness of [object].” Pause and see if you experience yourself more as the observer (see table above). If so, sink into spacious awareness, as you would sink into a warm bath, and enjoy.
The goal is to know ourselves more as awareness and less as its contents. Just as, using ACT analogies, the ocean is not the waves, the sky is not clouds, and the chessboard is not the pieces, our observing self,
embraces everything,
allows everything to come and stay and go naturally, and,
is not what it observes.
We don’t have to let our self story define and confine us. We can step back, and be the observer.
This concludes our section on Acceptance in ACT.
In summary, mindfulness invites us to (1) contact the present moment, with (2) acceptance and (3) defusion, (4) without identifying with the contents of our cognition. Doing so, even imperfectly, helps us act a bit more like the person we want to be, and go a bit more in the direction we want to go.
Committing to Valued Behavior
In a way, for all of us, life is a struggle between short-term pleasures and long-term happiness, losing ourselves in momentary distractions and maintaining our valued direction.
After reviewing the research on Authentic Happiness, Martin E. P. Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, concludes,
It is not just positive feelings we want, we want to be entitled to our positive feelings. Yet we have invented myriad shortcuts to feeling good; drugs, chocolate, loveless sex, shopping, masturbation, and television are all examples. [...] Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting, until we die. The positive feeling that arise from the exercise of strengths and virtues, rather than from the shortcuts, is authentic.
The word that Greek philosophers used to talk about this positive feeling is “eudaemonia”. Steven C. Hayes asserts,
Define [happiness] as eudaemonia. Define it as a value-based, life of integrity and fidelity to yourself and what you most deeply want to stand for.
Yes, life is difficult — we are all bombarded with temptations and distractions, we all hold limiting beliefs, and we all mess up at times. And, at the same time, there are simple practices that can help us better align our behavior with our values and fill our life with a more authentic form of happiness.
Your mission, if you accept it, is to learn two Commitment skills — identifying your values, and acting on them.
5. Values Identification
In his book ACT Made Simple, Russ Harris explains,
Values are what you want your life to be about, deep in your heart. What you want to stand for. What you want to do with your time on this planet. What ultimately matters to you in the big picture. What you would like to be remembered for by the people you love.
The following exercises can help you uncover the beautiful values that sit inside your heart.
- The Magic Wand -
This is one of my favorite ACT exercises. It goes like this:
Imagine that someone waved a magic wand over you, and all of your uncomfortable feelings and thoughts disappeared — no more pain, no more addiction, no more psychological limitations. What would you do? How would you treat yourself and others differently? What project or activity would you start?
For example, someone may say,
“If I was not addicted to alcohol, I would behave more kindly to my spouse”, or,
“If I was not so insecure, I would start a charity”, or,
“If I did not feel so much stress, I would listen to my children more empathetically.”
Contemplating this simple Magic Wand question, we can,
reconnect with the space inside us that is not defined by our emotions,
reclaim our capacity to act differently,
identify our values, and,
gain inspiration to pursue them.
Simple. Practical. Freaking brilliant 🪄
- Our Two Life Coaches -
This is not an official ACT expression (I literally just made it up 😅), but I think you will like it. We have two coaches ready to help us zoom out and gain perspective on our life’s trajectory:
our inner child, and,
our dying self.
In the past fifteen years, I have consulted with my two life coaches almost daily and found their presence and advice invaluable.
I take a moment to tune in and connect with the child I used to be, with all of his innocence and imagination. I allow childhood feelings and memories to flow, especially those that have to do with sensitivity and being of service. I usually remember lying on my bed one night when I was eight years old and thinking, “There are so many people in the world who suffer right now. Their lives are unbearable, and they are not as strong as I am. Please give me all of their pain! I can handle it!!”
🥺 This is the kind of angel I need to light my way, and I’m grateful to have my inner child on my team.
I recently asked my inner child, “Are you happy to be working with me on this Mental Health Revolution?” He replied, “Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” 😆 and we celebrated together.
You have your own meaningful childhood stories and aspirations. Please, reconnect with the child you once were. Contact this sacred spark inside your soul. This openness, vitality, and creativity. This wellspring of innocence and big beautiful dreams. This diamond heart in a dewdrop sitting on top of a blade of grass as the sun rises on the world. This… okay, okay, I stop here — you know the place I’m talking about 😉
You do. You really do!
To get support from my second life coach, I visualize myself lying on my deathbed, reviewing my life, and ask myself, “What do I want to see?”
As I do this, petty concerns and fears fall away and what remains is the essential — my values, what matters, what I want most. For me, that is,
To get enlightened.
To contribute to a revolution in mental healthcare.
To create the best hommos in history.
I trust I can achieve the first two, with enough time and dedication.
Our inner child and dying self can help us make more meaningful use of our time on Earth.
- The Valued Living Questionnaire -
If you’re into questionnaires (I’m not 😆), this one is for you.
The Valued Living Questionnaire asks you to rate how much you value ten areas of life on a scale of 1 to 10.
From there you can do two things:
To quickly identify which areas need the most work, go through the same list, but this time rate how well you were able to embody each value in the past week, on a scale of 1 to 10. Then, substract each [embodiment] rating from your [valued area] rating, and voila! The greater the difference, the more your value wants your attention.
To dig deeper into your values, write about them — especially your most important ones. Why do you care about this value? In the past, how did you violate this value, and what has it cost you? How did you manifest this value, and how did it benefit you? Who do you think best exemplifies this value, and how do they inspire you?
Please remember that your values are between you and yourself — as you think about them, they must feel right to you and fill your soul with vitality and inspiration. You have your innate goodness, and you want to flourish from the inside out.
When you’re clearer about what matters, you’re ready for action 💪
6. Committed Action
Russ Harris has good news for us,
Clients and therapists often get the idea that you have to be totally unhooked — 100 percent defused — in order to do towards moves. Not so! Even a little bit of unhooking is enough to help you get moving.
— (ACT Made Simple)
In other words,
a little bit of present moment awareness,
a little bit of defusion from our feelings and thoughts, and,
a little bit of clarity about our values,
can already help us pivot towards a more valued-based behavior.
We don’t need perfect peace of mind to act more like the person we want to be. As the ACT metaphors go, our difficult feelings and thoughts can,
come along in our bag-pack as we walk towards the life we want to have, and,
sit on our bus as we drive it towards our valued direction.
We can, as one ACT practitioner beautifully puts it, “hug ourselves and go”.
- SMART Goals -
Goal setting is an important art to master. Too often, we set goals that are too abstract or too high, and we set ourselves up for frustration. SMART is an acronym that helps us formulate goals the right way. There are slightly different variations that people give to this acronym. Steven C. Hayes gives Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-focused, and Timebound. I give Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timebound. They’re pretty much the same (even though, fake humility aside, I prefer mine 😁) so pick your favorite and memorize it.
Now let’s play a game. You’re going to guess which of these goals are SMART and which are not:
I’m going to eat healthy.
Every morning for breakfast, I’ll have a cup of green tea and a big bowl of oatmeal with cacao, fruits, berries, and a dash of cinnamon — and nothing else.
Everyone should love me all the time.
I will hold the door for people, look at them and smile when I say hello. I will meditate for ten minutes every morning to cultivate more inner space and empathy for myself and others.
I will finally get rid of my crippling social anxiety.
I will set a mindfulness bell on my phone to sound every hour and remind me to pause, breathe mindfully, and be more awake in the present moment. I will try to feel my anxiety with an open and accepting heart, preface my anxious thoughts with “I’m having the thought that ...”, and experience myself less as a story and more as spacious awareness. Every day this week, I’ll call a family member or friend on the phone. Next week, I’ll do my own shopping. And in two weeks, I’ll
be the life of the partygo to a social gathering and try to talk to someone.
I will be the best ACT practitioner in the universe. Ever. Ever.
I will finish reading this amazing article written by a very humble person. Then, I’ll order Steven C. Haye’s book A Liberated Mind. And over the next two months, I’ll take a few minutes every day to practice some ACT exercises and see which ones work best for me.
Solutions at the back of this pack of cereals. Wait. This is not a pack of cereals. Never mind.
You get the idea: to set yourself for success, you want to set goals that are Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timebound.
- The 7 Rs to Sustaining Behavior -
I found these in Russ Harris’ wonderful book The Happiness Trap: Strop Struggling, Start Living. I already knew about the content of each point, but I appreciate how tight and elegant this particular packaging is, so here we go with the seven things that can help us maintain our valued behavior:
Restructuring the environment — restructure your living environment to make it harder for you to fall back on old, unbeneficial habit, and easier to practice your new, value-based behavior.
Routines — integrate the behavior into your daily routine so that it becomes second nature.
Relationships — do the valued-based behavior with someone, and/or find an accountability buddy to check in with regularly.
Reminders — set reminders to do what you want to do, on your phone, written somewhere, as a visual cue in your environment, or simply by gently reminding yourself mentally.
Records — keep track what you do, what works and what doesn’t, in a written journal or on a checklist.
Rewards — reward yourself for your valued behavior with encouraging self-talk, celebrating your progress with a loved one, or a more material (but still wholesome 😆) reward.
Reflecting — reflect on how your behavior is impacting your life, either mentally, through journaling, or discussion with someone.
ACT’s Direction
This is not an official ACT term, just my humble repackaging of the six ACT processes / skills you just learned about. Again, the first four skills are about Acceptance, and the last two Commitment. I simply present them as a Direction (because that makes more sense to me), editing the wording of the processes / skills, and adding photos (of my beautiful twin sister) based on the work of Steven C. Hayes.
You can download a high-resolution version of this infographic here. Please feel free to save it, share it on social media, or print it. It captures everything ACT is about.
The six skills on the right together make up what is called Psychological Flexibilty. According to Steven C. Hayes, in his book A Liberated Mind: The Essential Guide to ACT,
In over one thousand studies, we've found that these skills help determine why some people thrive after life challenges and some don't, or why some people experience many positive emotions (joy, gratitude, compassion, curiosity) and others very few. They predict who is going to develop a mental health problem such as anxiety, depression, trauma, or substance abuse, and how severe or long-lasting the problem will be. These skills predict who will be effective at work, who will have healthy relationships, who will succeed in dieting or exercise, who will rise to the challenges of physical disease, how people will do in athletic competition, and how they will perform in many other areas of human endeavor.
This is truly remarkable, and one of the reasons why I adopted the ACT model into my life.
ACT and the DWEP
If you took the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program with me, you may wonder where ACT fits in it. Here we go:
Like me, you can incorporate all of the useful ACT concepts and tools for Acceptance into your Sitting Meditation and Mindfulness practices. Anything that can help you be more awake in the present moment, open and accepting, defused from thoughts and feelings, and experience yourself as a spacious observer, will be of wonderful support to your Sitting Meditation and Mindfulness practices, so please make the best use of it.
If you remember, in our first DWEP Meeting, you were asked to reflect on, write down, and share your Meaningful Motivators for taking care of yourself. During the course, you learned about the Three Ways to Nourish Motivation (contemplate the harm of not doing, contemplate the benefits of doing, and enjoy the process), and how to set SMART Goals. You ticked your DWEP Sheet every night, and checked in once a week with a DWEP Buddy. You learned how to connect more deeply and meaningfully with yourself and others, and how to improve your environment to better support your wellness habits. And in our last DWEP Meeting, you reflected on your ikigai. In other words, you identified your Values, set SMART Goals, and implemented all of the 7 Rs to Sustaining Behavior. This is Commitment work, and if you find more effective tips and tricks from the ACT community to help you clarify your values and move towards them, please don’t hesitate to incorporate them into your DWEP practice. (And let me know what worked for you, so I can improve the DWEP.)
Conclusion
Here is a little poem I wrote to help you remember the six ACT skills:
In a workshop for therapists, Steven C. Hayes explains,
We’re not here to fix our clients. We’re here to liberate our clients and then let their lives unfold from there.
The therapeutic promise of ACT — to live a freer and fuller life — is not an empty promise. The ACT community brings the tools to fulfill it, the science to back it up, and a compassionate approach to the human experience.
I thank the geniuses who developed ACT, and the wonderful therapists who offer it in their practices.
🙏💛
Thank you for being part of my life’s mission.
Everything I offer to this Mental Health Revolution is free and will remain free. I write all the articles, and only use AI to help me with the spelling, grammar, and word use. I welcome your concrete and specific suggestions for improvement.
The Nazi formula is, “You are all being threatened by [ABC] and if you refuse [XYZ] you are irresponsible and expose everyone else to danger.” Please recognize this message when you see it.
Take care of yourself. You deserve to be healthy, happy, and free — regardless of what parts of your subconscious may say. Taking care of yourself is a wise investment — when you feel better, you show up better and everyone benefits. There are simple, natural, and science-based practices that can make a real, positive difference in your mental health. There are ways to implement these practices that increase your chances of success. And you can learn about all of these.
1️⃣ The #1 thing you can learn from me is the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program (DWEP). Print a DWEP Sheet and get started.
2️⃣ The #2 thing you can learn from me is Central Story Training (CST).
"Since life is a flow, the secret is to connect with the present moment with the mental lightness and openness that allow us to stay in that flow and notice how everything is changing."
Thank you for this practical and wise teaching on how to direct our attention to the flow of the present moment.