Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

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According to your mind, the content of your pain is the source of your suffering because the pain is bad. Thus, you can measure suffering by the amount of the (bad) pain.” (129) Ask yourself this question when you think you’ve failed: What is buying that thought in the service of? What value does it comport with? Being right? Never failing? Never being vulnerable? Is that what you want your life to be about? If not, take responsibility even for your mind chattering on about what a failure you are. Feel the pain. Learn from it. Then move on.” (162) Chronic emotional avoiders do not know what they’re feeling because not knowing is itself a powerful form of avoidance. (Damn, that’s me) levels of self: 1. Conceptualized self, 2. Self as ongoing process of self-awareness, 3. Observing self You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?”

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance

If we want to thrive, we have to account for the interests of other people and of our community. But how can we maintain a balance? Humans suffer, at least in part, because we are verbal creatures. We are often either recreating the past or living in an imagined future.The baseline condition of life is suffering. Humans are different from other animals in that we not only suffer but we suffer about our suffering. Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve” Hayes has been President of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association, of the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (now known as the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies), and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. He was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychological Society (now known as the Association for Psychological Science), which he helped form. There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning ‘by chance’ or ‘an occurrence’, which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it—especially to avoid any sense of ‘unhappiness’. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.”

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life - Google Books

I’m naturally a very cerebral person, which is partly the reason why overthinking and anxiety have been problems for me. I think too much and feel too little. I have a tendency to over intellectualize my emotions, which often means I don’t actually process them effectively. ACT/Buddhism seems to be an excellent counterbalance to my temperament. Most of us think of evolution only in terms of genetics, but that is a mistake. Culture, thought, behavior, and the expression of genes (the genes you have can be turned on or off) also evolve. In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance. We have been given the great gift of being able to adapt our thinking and behavior intentionally, and to change our circumstances deliberately, to better suit healthy, purposeful living. The six flexibility skills form such a powerful set because each allows us to meet one of the six essential criteria for evolution to occur. They provide us with the tools to intentionally evolve our lives.” The truth about mental health is that the causes of all of the mental conditions you hear about are unknown, and the idea that “hidden diseases” lurk behind human suffering is an out-and-out failure.” First of all, the language! Beginning from the first chapter where they are dealing with the reader as an awkward mental-illed person.. phrases like "We know you're suffering and thats why you're hear" .. "We are going to teach you.. bla bla bla... " a very degrading language! Throughout the chapters every now and then they have to keep telling you, "you are suffering you are suffering you are suffering"..what the hell??? ..and yeah the exercises.. let's remember all of our sufferings.. besides, implementing exercises through a book is a terrible thing!Short term positives are more reinforcing than long term negatives; this is why ineffective coping strategies persist - they offer short term relief but continue the problem over the long run (31) ACT is not about fighting your pain; it’s about developing a willingness to embrace every experience life has to offer. It’s not about resisting your emotions; it’s about feeling them completely and yet not turning your choices over to them. ACT offers you a path out of suffering by helping you choose to live your life based on what matters to you most. If you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, or problem anger, this book can help—clinical trials suggest that ACT is very effective for a whole range of psychological problems. But this is more than a self-help book for a specific complaint—it is a revolutionary approach to living a richer and more rewarding life. As much as I want to agree with the stop-thinking asceticism of cognitive behaviorism meets buddhism ("We're not saying don't feel your feelings! Feel them so deeply you don't care! Um! This makes sense to me sometimes while I'm at ACT therapy seminars!"), it just doesn't work for the more think-y among us. I like being in my mind. Being in my mind is being in my life. Finding varying ways to relate to pain -- sometimes cowering from it and sometimes snuggling up to it -- is what marks me as a human being. I find that ACT self-help book read dogmatically. And I think the mark of any bad self-help book and definitely any bad psychotherapy is a one size fits all approach -- believing so deeply as Hayes does that the tenets of this book repudiate other ways people try to help themselves. I’ve noticed in my own life that as my memory and verbal skills have increased, so has my pain/suffering.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Accept…

I love ACT, so it pains me to rate this less than 4 or 5 stars, but I would really hesitate to recommend it to any consumer with less than a master’s degree. The appendix includes a note to scientists explaining that the authors dumbed down many of the Relational Frame Theory (RFT) concepts for the sake of the general public, and they did, but still there is much in here that goes way beyond what an average self-help consumer will push through. I find the exercises and quotes useful to me as a practitioner but it’s hard for me to imagine more than a handful of the people I have ever worked with going through this book start to finish. I’m willing to be wrong about that. In any given moment the issue is the same: Will you feel what you feel when you feel it? This is a yes or no question. It can be answered in only two ways: yes or no.” (128) Hayes' work is somewhat controversial, particularly with his coined term "Relational Frame Theory" to describe stimulus equivalent research in relation to an elaborate form of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (also referred to as verbal operants).

Meditation and mindfulness train the mind to respond in different, more poised ways to stressors and stimuli We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.” Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.”

Get Out of Your Mind | Psychology Today UK Get Out of Your Mind | Psychology Today UK

Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.” The sections on mindfulness were fine, but there's much better material out there - anything by Thich Nhat Hanh would be a better choice. The same is true for the pieces touching on Buddhist philosophy - I'd recommend "Fear" by Thich Nhat Hanh instead. The past is verbally remembered and the future is verbally imagined or “languaged” with images (23) Ser consciente, pese a lo esquivo que resulta. Debemos centrar nuestra atención en el presente, el momento a momento. Yes, as is the case with most creative geniuses (i.e. the Joker), I have mental problems. This book seems way ahead of its time. It teaches you to just stop caring about stuff you can't change. Imagine that...being happy even when you're not. If you're confused now, wait until you read the book. I think I need to hire a psychologist to explain it to me.If you commit to a particular act, use mindfulness and defusion strategies when your mind starts giving you problems with pursuing that path, and move forward, accepting what your mind offers you, you will be in a better position to live a full and meaningful life with or without unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and sensations. Whenever you find yourself slipping and reverting to bad, old habits, reflect on these 3 questions.