A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

by Steven C. Hayes

Our remarkable allegiance to verbal rules is a major contributor to psychological inflexibility. We follow them so strictly that we never deviate even when they are making our problems worse—sometimes horrifyingly worse.

being told the rule made the difference. The field came to dub this intransigence of the human mind when it’s given a rule—or has inferred a rule on its own—the insensitivity effect, referring to the resulting insensitivity to changes in the situation the rule is meant to address.

confirmation effect.

We become so enamored of the rules we tell ourselves to follow that we distort our experience to confirm that the rule is correct.

The confirmation effect not only distorts the feedback we receive, it also impedes our ability to learn in a way that is not rule based.

The second of the three Cs we’ll call the coherence effect.

Because an accurate assessment of the causes of a situation can be extremely complicated, our minds often end up boiling down our assessments to grossly simplified explanations that fit with what a rule or set of rules tells us.

Is this also heuristics?

The last of the three Cs we call the compliance effect, meaning that we follow rules to earn social approval by rule givers.

Behavioral psychologists call this kind of rule-following pliance

we are taught by our parents to follow all sorts of rules without question.

She understood that the voice of the Dictator telling her to follow all those rules was not her authentic voice; it was a voice she had imposed on herself.

One was a brief exercise in which we asked participants to notice their thoughts while not allowing them to control their actions, such as by having them think “I can’t pick up this pen” while picking it up.

behavioral activation.

the more people believed in their own mental reasons for behavior, the more depressed and anxious they were likely to be. We began to ask patients to consider that the whole idea of thoughts as reasons for behavior is flawed,

They facilitate the awareness that while thoughts have a life of their own, their impact on our behavior comes from our relationship to them, from whether we act on them, and that the choice is up to us.

life can be a rich journey, even with its sorrows. It is just that a truly joyful journey cannot happen until the “feel good” agenda set by the Dictator Within is cast aside.

we’re massively encouraged by cultural messaging to try to deny or expunge our difficult thoughts and emotions.

a cultural view that is often outright hostile to anything painful.

A more pernicious reason why accepting the need for acceptance can be hard is that our fight-or-flight instincts are so strong. They were vital to survival in response to physical threats out in the world, and they often still are.

Our symbolic abilities can make any situation a threat. In our minds.

When you evade a difficult or frightening situation, the brain activates the same areas and releases some of the same chemicals that mark the receipt of a positive reward.

That same chemical hit can come from undermining goals for yourself.

So often, when life is not going well, it’s because we are doing things that give us smaller, sooner benefits at the expense of larger, later ones.

In healthy development, our short-term gains fit with o...

the trick is to use our capacity for symbolic thought to choose the short-term behaviors that will lead to the much richer later rewards that come from persist...

avoidance of difficult thoughts and feelings is harmful to us, both psychologically and physically. Humanistic psychology had championed this notion for decades, and some other psychological traditions had embraced it too, such as rational-emotive therapy, which put forth unconditional self-acceptance as a goal.

First, we realize that our avoidance is not paying off, and more of the same will have a perfectly predictable outcome. Second, after we “give up” on avoidance, we realize that there are alternatives that are 180 degrees in the other direction, and those alternatives do pay off, short term and long term.

People made spontaneous connections with suppressed yearnings and achieved behavior change we’d never deliberately targeted in our work with them.

acceptance methods did not reduce the sensations from carbon dioxide (shortness of breath, a racing heart), or even the anxiety. What happened was that these symptoms bothered them less, and they were more willing to go through another round. Acceptance made exposure more possible and more effective.

pursue a more purposeful life:

We helped people see that the experiences they’d been avoiding and the memories of painful experiences they sought to escape were painful and scary to them because they cared—they cared about living a life enriched by love; about being a nurturing person; about pursuing interests they found intrinsically engaging and meaningful, whether or not society was impressed by them.

exposure should take place in the service of som...

To use the language of humanistic psychology, ACT should include ways to help people become self-actualized.

The first three flexibility skills provide powerful support in staying the course.

Defusion disempowers these unhelpful thoughts.

Connecting with our authentic self helps us avoid the sway of pliance and becoming preoccupied by what others think of our progr...

It also helps fend off telling ourselves appealing lies about our progress,

Acceptance allows us to stop directing our attention to unnecessary problem solving about the pain we’re feeling, instead turning our attention toward the helpful insights these feelings offer.

We focus entirely too much on the past and how it can help us in the future rather than on enjoying the experience of the moment in its own right.

the Presence pivot

helps us keep our cognitive talents focused on positive possibilities in the present moment.

We can see the pains of our past as being in the past, but we can acquire whatever wisdom we have to learn from them.

attention to the now that is flexible, fluid, and voluntary.

A vast research base shows that contemplative practice has good effects not only on our brains but on every cell in our body. Changes in brain structure and reactivity produced by meditation lead to a greater ability to experience internal sensations, less emotional reactivity, and greater attentional efficiency, among several other important cognitive processes that improved. Meditation also changes the expression of 7 to 8 percent of the genes you have, primarily through epigenetic changes that up- and down-regulate genes involved in the stress response.

RFT studies clarified that fusion and avoidance divide our attention into two streams: one that notices what is present, and one that focuses on the problem-solving agenda (“Is it working yet?”).

for ACT we used exercises that would allow people to detect how thoughts “hooked” them and yanked their focus from the present.

In addition to helping people defuse from intrusive negative thoughts, it increases pain tolerance and reduces the impact of urges.

when we look to the past, we are not really looking into the past anyway! We are reconstructing it.

help people turn toward their deepest caring.

focusing on our genuine values is helpful. It can reduce anxiety about challenging tasks, reduce physiological stress responses, buffer the impact from negative judgments of others, reduce our defensiveness, and help us be more receptive to information that may be hard to accept,