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

by Steven C. Hayes

For example, antidepressants are a ten-billion-dollar industry, even though their average impact on depression is only 20 percent better than a placebo, too small to be clinically significant (Kirsch et al. 2002).

The capacity for language puts human beings in a special position. Simply saying a word invokes the object that is named. Try it out: “Umbrella.” What did you think of when you read that word? Alright, that one’s pretty harmless. But consider what this means if the named object was fearful: anything that reminded the person of its name would evoke fear. It would be as if all the dog needs to feel fear is not an actual kick, but the thought of being kicked.

The dog knows how to avoid pain: avoid you and your foot.

A sunset can evoke a verbal history. It is “beautiful” and beautiful things are things you want to share with others. You cannot share this sunset with your dear friend, and there you are, feeling sad at the very moment you see something beautiful.

Denial and learned numbness will reduce pain, but they will soon cause far more pain than they take away.

One way to get at this core issue is to imagine how your life would be different if your pain went away. Imagine that someone has waved a magic wand over you, and your pain has vanished. Imagine that you wake up one morning and suddenly, for no reason at all, the chronic depression you’ve suffered from all these years (or the anxiety, or worry, or whatever your core struggles may be) is gone. The cloud has lifted and the pain is over. What would you do? This question isn’t a rhetorical one, we mean it literally: What would you do?

While you’ve focused more on getting rid of the pain of presence, you’ve been feeling more of the pain of absence. If that’s what’s been happening for you, it may feel as though life is closing in around you. It may feel as though you’re in some kind of trap. If you’ve been experiencing those kinds of feelings, then this book is about finding a way out. There’s an alternative to living as though you’ve been trapped.

Humans think relationally; nonhumans apparently do not. Exactly what this means will become evident in this chapter but, in broad terms, humans are able to arbitrarily relate objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings, behavioral predispositions, actions (basically anything) to other objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings (basically anything else) in virtually any possible way (e.g., same as, similar to, better than, opposite of, part of, cause of, and so on).

For example, if the baby is accidentally stuck with a diaper pin while you say “wooo,” the baby might cry whenever you mention a gub-gub or the gub-gub’s picture is seen.

If “happy” is the opposite of “sad,” then happiness can remind human beings of being sad. The two are related. This is probably part of the reason that relaxation can induce panic (Schwartz and Schwartz 1995). Dogs do not know how to do this. People do.

As a result of these symbolic temporal relations, most people tend to live more in the verbally remembered past and the verbally imagined future than in the present moment.

With comparative and evaluative relations we can compare ourselves to an ideal and find ourselves wanting, even though we are actually doing quite well.

the verbal skills that create misery are too useful and central to human functioning to ever stop operating. That means suffering is an unavoidable part of the human condition, at least until we know how to better manage the skills language itself has given us.

If you have a fear of heights, this effect may be quite familiar to you. When you look over a ledge from a great height, you almost feel a pull as if some invisible force were causing you to be unsteady precisely when you wish that would not happen. If we can generalize from the literature on suppression, this effect is probably not just in your mind: your fear activates some of the muscles that move you toward the ledge, as well as those that move you away from it. As a result, you feel unsteady.

People with panic disorder, for example, tend to think about losing their minds, losing control, humiliating themselves, or dying of a heart attack in association with the anxiety they feel. These thoughts create more anxiety partly because they relate the present to an imagined future in which there is the possibility of these dire results happening. If you have an anxiety condition, then you know that this can become a vicious circle.

Living in your mind can be likened to riding a train. A train has its own tracks and it goes where they lead. That’s fine when the tracks are going where you want to go. But if you were traveling in the direction you want to be going, you probably would never have stopped to read this book. If the life you want to live is “off the tracks,” then you have only one option: you must learn how to get off the train…at least sometimes.

When you take your thoughts literally, you are “riding the mind-train.” That is, you are responding to the thoughts your mind presents to you purely in terms of the facts they are about. Agreeing and disagreeing are both within the rules, so neither response gets you off the train. However, if you break the rules, you will find yourself off the mind-train—and isn’t this one train you’d like to get off of now and then?

Your own situation is analogous to this person’s experience. Every time you engage in a behavior specifically designed to avoid some negative personal pain, you start the same set of reactions outlined in the questions above. You are likely to feel an immediate sense of relief from not having to deal with the painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation. The sense of relief you gain reinforces your desire to use the same strategy the next time you are faced with the possibility of having to cope with your pain. Yet, each time you do this, you actually give the painful content, that is, your painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation, more power.

What predicts functioning is (a) your willingness to experience pain, and (b) your ability to act in a valued direction while experiencing it (McCracken, Vowles, and Eccleston 2004).

What is predictive is the patient’s acceptance of the condition and the willingness to take responsibility for her or his predicament

People who are more emotionally willing to experience negative emotional experiences enjoy better mental health and do better at work over time. The effect is significantly greater than the effects of job satisfaction or emotional intelligence

Why willingness? Because “living in my experience,” that is, living in the moment, seems potentially more rewarding than “living in my mind.”

When you learn how to defuse language, it becomes easier to be willing, to be present, to be conscious, and to live the life you value, even with the normal chatter going on inside your head.

Have you ever noticed that if someone thinks he is unimportant, most events in his life appear to confirm that view?

(a) the facts in our stories don’t determine the stories in which they appear, despite what our minds tell us. Many stories are possible. And (b) the facts are significant because of the stories they are part of. This means that what really can make a difference is something that might be capable of being changed. We know the facts. They will not change. But the story about the facts, and the self-conceptualization resulting from that story, are aspects of our lives we’ve been prevented from changing because of our attachment to and fusion with them. Perhaps that (our story and our attachment to it) can change.

When you let go of an attachment to your conceptualized self, you are like a child, open to whatever is possible and willing to find out what is.

Very young children sometimes have a hard time answering this question accurately because their sense of self is still developing, and they haven’t yet learned what their emotions and feelings mean. As a result, they may say they are not hungry, and then ask for food minutes later;

the whole purpose of being mindful is to learn how to defuse from your evaluations.

The power of avoided events derives more from our unwillingness to have them than from the features they have.