A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

by Steven C. Hayes

children who have chronic pain has suggested that ACT training can help prevent pain from becoming permanently ingrained. Several world-class pain centers, such as the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (where the Nobel Prizes are given), use ACT extensively with children. That work has shown that ACT appears to reduce felt pain more noticeably with children than adults, perhaps because pain is less dug in neurobiologically and psychologically with children. New evidence suggests that the same might happen with adults if we deploy ACT at the right time in acute pain situations, before they become chronic (e.g., using ACT before back surgery).

The result was that the number of patients in the ACT group who were in diabetic control by the end of a three-month follow-up was significantly higher than the number in the education-only group.

For patients in the education group, the percentage in diabetic control actually decreased slightly, from 26 percent to 24 percent, while in the ACT-trained group, it nearly doubled, from 26 percent to 49 percent.

Training in the ACT skills has been shown to significantly improve people’s ability to cope with these myriad challenges. This is especially true for coping with the common symptoms of depression, anxiety, and fear of recurrence. A helpful description of tailoring ACT practices to the specific challenges of cancer was provided by psychologists Julie Angiola and Anne Bowen,

Gerhard and his team then conducted a trial with sixty-four patients who were divided randomly into two groups assigned to receive either TRT or ten approximately one-hour sessions of ACT training. At a six-month follow-up, 55 percent of the patients who received ACT training were significantly improved in the degree to which their tinnitus was adversely interfering with their lives, such as preventing sound sleep or causing anxiety or depression. That was nearly three times as many as the 20 percent who reported improvement after receiving TRT.

Those put through ACT training improved significantly more in a number of outcomes. They engaged in less thought suppression and had significantly lower anxiety and depression. In addition, while the patients who got CBT coped with their anxiety in ways that looked more like distraction, such as watching more TV, the ACT group took more meaningful action, such as calling their children, deciding how their possessions might be distributed when they died, making sure their will was in order, and writing letters to friends and family.

Hannah had been to his village a few weeks earlier to do an ACT/Prosocial training and as a result, when he passed away, his family knew what to do. They allowed his body to be carried away and incinerated and they lovingly sent his spirit on to the afterlife with a proper burial, praying over, washing, kissing, and then burying a banana trunk.

DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2017.05.004.