I love this little visual. It is signed off by an A Rae who I can't find online for context, but they have managed to sum up a lot in this graphic. These steps remind me so much of some of the ACT exercises I do with people in therapy, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts on what it's all about. This way of approaching things has helped me in my own journey and I have seen it help so many of the people I now walk alongside.
ACT (said like you say the word act) stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and it's all about how to develop psychological flexibility - the ability to make space for difficult thoughts and feelings and keep taking steps towards what matters most to us in our hearts. Mindfulness comes into this, because it is difficult to make space for something we can't observe or put a name to. This isn't just a mindfulness graphic though - they take it that next step further into the realm of identifying the messages in our emotions and taking small steps to meet our needs.
All human emotions are normal and have messages for us. They are basically our body's indicator system: they let us know what our mind has detected without having to stop and think, and their primary function is to drive us into action. Ever noticed the word motion hidden in there? Not a coincidence. When we lived in the stone age and our brains were evolving, we had to be able to react quickly to danger and we had to be able to stay in the tribe to survive the kinds of dangers we faced then. Nowadays things aren't quite so simple and we rarely need to react so fast and automatically like that, but we are still wired up that way.
What I love about ACT is that it is grounded in decades of research about how humans really work, rather than some idealized version of what one privileged group (i.e. psychologists) thinks other humans should be like. Our minds are designed to be mostly negative. It's a survival function. Two thirds of the universal emotions are negative, but we have constructed a society that tries to keep us in the one positive third all the time and frames the others as some form of weakness. Mental health has come to be equated with being happy and confident and loving ourselves all the time, when in reality that is not how we are designed. We end up fighting against our own responses and other people's too. But trying to stop ourselves from thinking and feeling what we do, trying to force positivity on ourselves, or pathologising and judging the difficult things we notice within us, usually just works to intensify them.
The research tells us that trying to avoid negative thoughts and feelings ultimately makes us have them more often. Let's do a little experiment. For 30 seconds, try not to think of a white bear.
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What happened when you did that? Most people notice they can keep the thought out of their mind by distracting themselves with other thoughts for a time, but the white bear keeps intruding back in. We set the thought up as a threat and our mind starts scanning for the threat. Some people are really good at distraction and can keep it up for a fair while. You might have held the opposite in your mind to push it away, a black bear perhaps. But that takes effort and eventually the thought comes back again, especially if you did it for longer than 30 seconds.
This was actually a famous series of experiments beginning in the 1980s, inspired by an observation made by Dostoyevsky in 1868: *"Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." *In the first experiment people who tried to suppress the thought, actually thought about it at least once a minute, and then later when they were allowed to think about it they did so much more than a group of people who had been allowed the whole time. In another experiment they measured people's physical stress responses during the exercise and discovered that not thinking about a white bear produces an increase in all of our physiological stress responses and the number of times the forbidden thought arose. And that's just a white bear, imagine how much worse that is when it is something we really care about, like am I good enough, or will I ever succeed, or that important mistake we made. In contrast, a group of people who have permission to think about a white bear the whole time, have fewer stress responses and fewer white bear thoughts than the people who were instructed to stop them.
Staying away from unwanted thoughts and feelings, trying not to think and feel what we do think and feel, trying to stay away from the things that trigger them, and trying not to show what sits inside us is known as experiential avoidance. There is nothing wrong with distraction and suppression themselves. We need to be able to do these things for short periods so we can prioritise where our attention goes and how we respond; it is functional to stop ourselves from shouting in a super corporate work meeting, or to stop ourselves from laughing at a funeral or to get up and do something else when the mind chatter is getting too intense. It stops serving us when it becomes habitual.
Avoiding our thoughts and feelings takes extra effort that can make everyday tasks more exhausting, and they rebound back on us later, often when we least want them to, like when we lie down to sleep at night and there are no more distractions. Another problem with avoidance is that while we are distracting ourselves, we are often not paying attention to or doing what matters to us. So we manage to stay away from the thoughts and feelings, but at the cost of a life we value and who we want to be. This is where misery lives.
The thing is, every time a human takes a step towards the things that matter to us, the problem-solving part of our minds helpfully starts warning us of all that could go wrong, so we are guaranteed to have some negative thoughts. Some of these automatic thoughts and feelings are useful for us to follow, so it would be disastrous if you could switch them all off. That's a sure fire way to end up saying all the offensive things, wandering into danger, overlooking our limitations, and repeating our past mistakes. But not all of our automatic thoughts are useful and focusing on them for too long can get us into hot water. Our minds are not our best friends and they are not our enemies either. The problem is not the thoughts and feelings themselves, the problem is getting hooked by them and following them down a path that leads us away from who we want to be.
The question becomes one of workability instead of right-or-wrongness - is this response working to move you towards the life that matters to you? What are we valuing in this moment and what is one small tiny step we can take in that direction? There is always something we can do in the presence of darkness to move towards the light. When we fight the darkness we get lost in it. When we allow it to be there, our eyes adjust and a way forward becomes clear.
The ACT model in a nutshell:
- Be Present (present and observing)
- Open Up (unhook and allow)
- Do What Works (know your values and test out the towards moves).
This little animation from Russ Harris sums it up really well...
And if you're up for a longer watch, this Ted Talk from Steven Hayes, one of the ACT originators, shares more about what this looks like in practice. Here, Hayes shares a bit about his own lived experience of panic disorder and how developing psychological flexibility helped him get unstuck.
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This post is intended for information-sharing only and should not replace advice from a clinician who is informed of your particular set of circumstances. There's a LOT more to ACT than what can fit in a little blog post. Good therapy is about the relationship, no single model suits everyone who encounters it though there is one out there that will, no therapy model is without its downsides and tricky spots, and they always need to be adjusted to suit the person and their context. Everyone I introduce ACT to finds themselves stuck with it at times, especially if they've already encountered therapies like CBT. Just do what works for you.
[Edit: just moved a couple of things, for ease of reading and corrected a typo - always a typo!]