A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

by Steven C. Hayes

Action. Requires pivoting from avoidant persistence to committed action; redirects the yearning to be competent.

The Action pivot focuses us instead on the process of competently and continuously building habits in small steps linked to the construction of larger habits of loving, caring, participating, creating, or any other chosen value.

The six pivots can be more simply summarized with this cheat sheet: See our thoughts with enough distance that we can choose what we do next, regardless of our mind’s chatter. Notice the story we’ve constructed of our selves and gain perspective about who we are. Allow ourselves to feel even when the feelings are painful or create a sense of vulnerability. Direct attention in an intentional way rather than by mere habit, noticing what is present here and now, inside us and out. Choose the qualities of being and doing that we want to evolve toward. Create habits that support these choices.

Pivots in hinges take the energy that is headed in one direction and immediately redirect it in another. When we pivot, we take the energy inside an inflexible process and channel it toward a flexible one.

pain can be a powerful ally in living.

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.

ACT research has shown that we can learn these six skills through quite simple methods and can turn them into living habits.

After six months, the ACT participants were taking far fewer opiates (as measured by their urine) compared to the group that just stayed on methadone.

The methods work because urges become less dominant; values become more important; unpleasant sensations less entangling. It becomes possible to choose what you do.

The science of psychological flexibility now spans well over a thousand studies, which have tested it in almost every area of human functioning. In clinical research this breadth is called a transdiagnostic, meaning that targeting psychological flexibility works across a wide range of traditional mental health categories (anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, and so on).

In the over 250 randomized controlled trials of ACT currently available, dozens were based on only a handful of hours dedicated to creating a new life direction.

Whether the voice is positive or negative is not as important as whether it dominates us.

What is so potentially dangerous about the power this voice can have over us is that we lose contact with the fact that we are even listening to a voice.

That was my first pivot, from my conceptualized self, as defined by the Dictator, to a perspective-taking self.

While we tend to think of our thought processes as logical, many of them are anything but. Thoughts are constantly being generated automatically and mindlessly.

Seeing your thought processes that way is the critical shift from cognitive fusion to defusion; it is shifting from looking at the world structured by thought (the “main movie” or story), to looking with a sense of dispassionate curiosity at the process of thinking itself.

If the voice was not me, and my thoughts were just thoughts, I could do anything in the presence of whatever thought presented itself.

I could even turn 180 degrees and get with anxiety. I could choose to feel it instead of fighting it or running from it.

This whole process of pivoting from one life direction to another took far less time than it just took for you to read about it.

whatever happened, I would take all of me—the “strong” parts and the scared parts—and move forward with my life

we would have to try to move beyond serious limitations in each of the psychological approaches that had come to dominate the field,

humanism, behaviorism, and the approach that was becoming dominant at the time, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

How does the voice of the Dictator Within develop in our minds? Why are our thought processes so automatic, and why are the messages of the Dictator so incessant?

Why do they continue to hold such power over us even after we’ve told ourselves rationally they’re not good for us? Why isn’t the effort to think them away through the rational sorts of argumentation that traditional CBT instructs more powerful?

answering these questions would require a better understanding of human language and cognition.

Here is what the world should expect from an intervention approach in psychology and psychiatry: it should contain a broadly useful set of strategies for producing important life changes that work, and we should know why they do.

In psychology these explanations also have to tell us how to make specific changes in the way we’re approaching life so that we will reach our goals (we will call those change processes).

Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.

empathy, authenticity, and a sense of self.

The core of the behaviorists’ work was in showing how behaviors would become more or less likely to occur based on the consequences that followed them.

The relationships between setting, actions, and outcomes are what behaviorists call contingencies.

pair relaxation with gradual exposure to frightening events,

systematic desensitization,

Aka exposure therapy

First Wave of the behavioral and cognitive therapies. Principles developed through work with nonhuman animals were tested systematically with human clients, and a number of powerful methods of behavior modification were created that to this day are on the lists of evidence-based procedures.

when they referred to “behavior” they meant all human actions, including thinking and feeling.

Behavior therapy was not even a decade old when Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, and others led the way in developing CBT.

The central focus of this Second Wave of behaviorism was to correct the failure to account for the role our thoughts play in governing our behavior.

The core of the theory was that maladaptive thoughts lead to maladaptive emotions, which in turn drive abnormal behavior.

The basic method was to get patients to consider their thoughts and emotions rationally, examine the evidence for and against them, and then deliberately adopt a view that was consistent with evidence about the situation and thus was relatively accurate.

What CBT added to behavior therapy was helpful in leading people to see how thoughts can dominate our behavior.

sometimes the cognitive change that CBT argued was critical actually came after changes in mood or behavior, not before. How we felt and what we did, it seemed, might sometimes drive maladaptive thinking rather than the other way around,

This aligns with the James Lange theory of emotion: sometimes we feel something and then we bullshit a reason as to why we are feeling libe

it was not what you knew that mattered, it was who knew you knew it.

a wealth of additional research has revealed that CBT generally does not work in the way that was originally postulated, or at least not consistently.

Very large and carefully done studies have shown that disputing and trying to change thoughts doesn’t add much to CBT outcomes.

The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel.

Dave was asking clients to experience progressively more intense internal sensations of fear without putting them in those situations.

not fear itself or its associated sensations and thoughts that cause our problems, but our relationship to these experiences that does the damage.

finding other ways to deliberately develop a new relationship with unpleasant sensations, as well as emotions and thoughts, might be the key to a better approach to intervention.

If what is important is how we relate to sensations, learning to experience them without trying to expunge them, could the same thing apply to all experiences, including thoughts and emotions?

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