A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

by Steven C. Hayes

We are paying a psychological price because what is really wrong within is treating life as a problem to be solved rather than a process to be lived.

changing our relationship to our thoughts and emotions, rather than trying to change their content, is the key to healing and realizing our true potential.

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. We cannot pick which ones pop up, but we can pick and choose which of them to focus on or to use to guide our behavior. Doing so takes skill, of course, but our ACT work has shown that this is a learnable skill.

The bottom line is this. 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.

I also saw, however, that 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, which CBT could not readily explain. It was when it came to the “why” questions that Second Wave CBT really began to falter, which most researchers in CBT nowadays concede at least to a degree.

Now, all these years later, 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.

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

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?

While this ability to conjure up a reality that is purely one of thought makes astonishing feats of problem-solving, creative imagination, and communication possible, it also means that thoughts we have that may be entirely divorced from reality can be utterly convincing to us. The symbolic reality of language is a big part of why we find the voice of the Dictator so compelling even when it is telling us to believe things and do things that our experience shows are harmful.

But it was the clinical implications that most stunned me. Trying to unravel these dense networks of relations and reconstruct them, as CBT has tried to help people do, is like trying to rearrange a vast spiderweb. It’s futile. Trying to get rid of thoughts would just add to the cognitive networks that surround them. Relating could be abstract: anything could be related to anything.

As we begin to create our story of who we are, for example, we also start to compare ourselves to others, and to social ideals of who we should be. Thus, the unfortunate side effect of the same cognitive skills that allow a sense of ourselves as conscious human beings is that we often soon become self-critical, or excessively seek to be attended to, to be important or notable based on the specialness of our self-stories. We have begun to fashion the conceptualized self, and this imagined self often takes on the illusion of being our “real” self. We begin to become the content of our stories, and the Dictator comes fully into power.

The problem is not the presence of a self-story; we all need one. But when we disappear into this ongoing storytelling—when we fuse with the story—all sorts of mental health and life satisfaction challenges follow. This is because the Dictator becomes so preoccupied with monitoring the story and defending it, assessing whether we are living up to it or others are believing it.

In one sense it was a spectacular success—our problem-solving skills are unparalleled in the natural kingdom—but it led us to view our own lives as problems to be solved. What we gained in environmental control, we paid for in lack of peace of mind.

You’ve likely experienced this. Old fears gradually fall away and you feel more confident. Then an unexpected betrayal, or criticism, or tragedy occurs, and instantly it feels like you are a scared little kid again!

Breaking the spell of our fusion with the harmful stories we tell ourselves and the voice of the Dictator frees us to begin consciously choosing to pay attention to helpful thoughts and dismiss negative ones.

One of the most harmful ways in which our minds become trapped in our thought processes is by learning, or inferring, problem-solving rules that we convince ourselves we must follow.

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

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.

What this often leads to is that we create stories about ourselves and our lives that block out the discomfort and ambiguity of the true complexity of situations.

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

In healthy development, our short-term gains fit with our long-term aims. So 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 persisting even when the short-term steps are hard.

The lesson here, of course, is that once we stop trying to scrub away the marks left on us through our life history, we receive the gift of vital learning from all of that experience.

In working on developing attentional flexibility, it’s helpful to keep in mind that the future is a matter of pure imagination, while our recollection of the past is largely distorted and wildly incomplete. What we call “memories” are constantly being reconstructed—in the present. When old friends or siblings reminisce about old times, it’s not long before they realize that their memories diverge somewhat. One person will remember details this way and another will remember them that way; trips that are separate in the memory of one will be blended together in the memory of another. Inside our own minds, we are usually convinced we are right . . . but of course that cannot be true for everyone. Someone is obviously distorting and revising history. It turns out that “someone” is all of us. It happens in part because we have an investment in the consistency of the story our memories tell. (Recall the coherence effect from Chapter Five, one of the three Cs of cognitive inflexibility.) So when we look to the past, we are not really looking into the past anyway! We are reconstructing it. We can’t entirely turn off the process of mental fabrication, but we can learn not to become immersed in it, or to buy into our fabrications. We can become more aware of our minds slipping into this mode and choose to look at our recollections of the past and conjectures about the future with a present-focused consciousness. Thoughts are only thoughts. What we do with them is up to us.

Over the next six months the high-risk workers who were getting only medical treatment as usual missed fifty-six days of work due to sick leave, or about half of their assigned workdays. Statistics tell us that about half of these workers will leave the workplace permanently, go on full-time disability, and never work again. Those randomly assigned to receive the four hours of ACT training missed on average only a half a day of work over the entire six months—a 99 percent reduction in sick leave use.

If we’re seeking to make our self-story coherent so that it conforms to social expectations, it’s time to stop investing in that goal.

On the other side of the Self pivot, your world changes. As you emerge behind your eyes, you begin to see behind the eyes of others. You notice people noticing you; you notice people noticing you noticing them. You sense a kind of awareness that binds us all together. You begin to find that you’re making more thoughtful connections with people all the time—in the grocery store, in the elevator, at work, or at home. You will notice an old woman struggling to push her shopping cart through the store, bravely facing her own physical limitations; a waiter taking care to ask a customer what he wants; a child yearning for attention from you but being too afraid to ask.

The point is not that we must strive to always be absolutely honest. That is simply not realistic. The point is to open the door to places that are hard—insecurity, inadequacy, fear of rejection, and so on—and to learn what is fearsome about them.

the “answer” the mind presents to the problem is to kill off the yearning to feel unless the feeling is good.

Your parents’ excitement at seeing you tie your shoes was probably key to your learning how; their encouragement may have kept you going to piano lessons. But it’s important that such rewards not overwhelm intrinsic motivation—which comes from within—especially once you are the one determining how to motivate yourself.

We can be the ones overwhelming our own intrinsic motives. We can easily become entranced by the desire to impress, to be admired, or to please others quite apart from whether the accomplishments we’re undertaking are actually meaningful to us. The satisfaction from those rewards will diminish over time. If, for example, we’re pursuing applause from others, rather than focusing on serving others, the day will come when applause feels empty. When the going is tough and we’re not doing well, we’ll be quickly frustrated, getting angry with ourselves, and impulsively thrashing about trying to find a reason to keep going. We may become obsessive about trying to prove our competence or avoidant of the shame of not being perfect. Procrastination is one way we avoid these situations; we mistake it for a way to keep feelings of failure or anxiety about the prospect of failure at bay, but it only ultimately intensifies them. Of course, often we also just abandon the effort altogether.

I’ve taught dozens of people to play the guitar, and I’ve learned to predict who will learn to play well: those who enjoy the (pretty bad, maybe even atrocious) music they produce as a beginner. If someone tells me in the first session how they picture themselves being applauded for their great skill or how they want to be famous and play in a rock band, I know there is heavy sledding ahead. They’re a long way from any such outcome, and grasping at it will make learning the basics like fingering or playing simple scales that much harder for a biologically built-in reason: immediate consequences dominate over delayed consequences. Even at the level of underlying brain chemistry, if the immediate consequences are not reinforcing, behavioral habits are devilishly hard to establish.

we all had the same parents not so very long ago.

When leaders use individual rewards as incentives, they make sure it doesn’t feel like a crude transaction and is instead an expression of authentic appreciation as part of a long-term commitment.