Good Life Project - A Liberated Mind | Steven C. Hayes, PhD

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Steven Hayes was a young psychology professor when he started having debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. Let down by conventional wisdom, he developed his own approach, which eventually grew into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a powerful, evidence-based form of not just therapy, but liberation. His work has since influenced decades of psychotherapy and is now practiced by tens of thousands of clinicians all around the world. His latest book is A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters.You can find Steven C. Hayes, PhD at: Website-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Okay, super exciting news. If you are in San Francisco or Silicon Valley area, the Bay area, I am going to be recording a live podcast conversation in front of a live audience at the Stanford University D School on February 14th at 1030 in the morning. My guests will be Dave Evans and Bill Burnett. They are co-authors of the New York Times mega bestselling book, Designing Your Life, and the forthcoming book, Designing Your Work Life. They're also co-directors of the Life Design Lab at Stanford University. And Dave and Bill, they're not only brilliant at applying design thinking to the quest to live better every day and work lives, they're also some of the wisest, big-hearted humans out there with a list of industry

accomplishments that would make your head spin. You do not want to miss this rare chance to join also some of the wisest, big hearted humans out there with a list of industry accomplishments that would make your head spin. You do not want to miss this rare chance to join us in conversation, ask questions, who knows, maybe even trade a hug or two. So in our live podcast event, again, that's Friday, February 14th, 1030 AM at Stanford's d.school, we'll be exploring how to reimagine your approach to work and life in a way that leads to deeper fulfillment and meaning and lots more joy. And to help make it as accessible as possible, we've decided to make the entire thing free. But seating is also strictly limited, so you'll want to reserve your spots as soon as possible. You can do that right now just by

clicking the link in the show notes, then grab your seats before it's all gone. Hope to see you there. So my guest today, Stephen C. Hayes, grew up in Southern California in the 60s, but found himself taking a lot of trips up to Northern California to San Francisco area in the late 60s, summer of love time, kind of went all in on the hippie movement on a bit of a quest for self-discovery and service and really wanted to expand his idea of healing out onto a broader scale. Ended up not dropping out as some of the invitations at the time were, but rather dropping into the world of psychology, pursuing his PhD, and then beginning to teach. But along the way, he'd begun to experience anxiety and panic attacks

that eventually became crippling to him and nearly destroyed his career and his life. It was really personal, and it was this very personal experience that awakened him in a moment of absolute crisis when he was on his knees to a very different way to explore and find peace with nearly anything that might come our way and develop a whole new approach called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is this popular evidence-based form of psychotherapy that is now practiced by tens of thousands of clinicians around the world. He's now a professor at the University of Nevada,

author of 45 books, over 600 scientific articles, and his latest book, A Liberated Mind, it really introduces the idea of what he calls the six key pivots that we need to make in order to cultivate this sense of psychological flexibility that really allows us to find peace no matter what comes our way. That, I don't know about you, but that is a skill set. It is a set of capabilities that I really want to have in this day and age. So excited to share this conversation,

his story, his ideas with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman a time where you were in college in Southern California in the late 60s, but also making trips up to San Francisco area involved in that whole thing.

And do you feel like that had a strong effect on who you became and also the directing you would eventually follow? It had a huge effect. effect and you know i think um people who went through it there's different people have different journeys that even people live through it have different attitudes but people who are looking back on it have kind of categorized it you know sort of crazy hippies and sex drugs and rock and roll which i kind of get a little angry about actually actually. I feel like it's unfair. And that isn't true to my experience. I mean, I get it. Yes, sex, yes, drugs, I get that. But that's not what that was about.

That was about a whole generation trying to deal with a very tight part of our culture, where the 50s generation, you know madman kind of height my dad is this aluminum salesman you know i mean struggling through to even know how to be you know and the whole culture feeling strange with the threat of nuclear war and all that and the kids wanted to loosen up, but they also wanted to find their way. And so I was a discussant on a session on psychedelic therapy at a conference where ACT is being used to help guide a modern version of using psychedelics

for therapeutic purposes. Because you really need some guides. The chemicals themselves are not going to work. No, there's no indigenous culture that does that they don't say here take this no no no you you have preparation you have orientation you have somebody with you make sure it's so they orient you etc and we tried to do that without any guidance i mean we actually tried to do that we'd plan for weeks as to how much you're going to take from whom under what conditions who will be watching i mean that's what i did it was sacramental and you know some of it was crazy

guidance you know carlos castaneda you know you too can you know trying to find some way of connecting into well i think into a spiritual sense of self from which it's possible to make some choices about your life that aren't just kind of materialistic or programmed, that had a quality of, this is my life and I get to choose. And it kind of very quickly turned into something else. You know, my trips up to San Francisco went from Sacramento journeys to place, you know, being careful not to step on the needles and have to step over the dog poop next to the person who's stoned out lying on the sidewalk. And then very quickly back to the land, which impacted my whole generation. I went and lived on a commune. I mean, I was sort of part of the back to lander thing.

And if you look at those folks now, you know, you can drive up and they'll come out with a shotgun and ask you why you're there. And because they've got the plants in the back 40 that maybe now are legal, but weren't. So it went from the spiritual journey to this sort of libertarian but defensive kind of place.

I never really related to that. I thought, we need to get back to that. At that conference, when I stood up as a discussant to talk about it, I started weeping. And it shocked me. And the poor audience in front of me, the old man's crying. Because I remembered how important it was that we would make a difference, you know, not just for ourselves, but for others. I mean, like the yippies would show up and give away free food.

You know, it was that kind of a journey. What is inside the work that I do is to try to take psychological suffering and struggling and put it into a journey that's positive for yourself and for others. And so there's a seamlessness to it from those early hippie days to trying to put act into sierra leone to help with the ebola crisis you know to me it's one journey of how do we show up as whole human beings and make a difference in the world and create a softer, more compassionate, more values-based world. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there are some interesting parallels going on. You know, it's like history keeps repeating itself because we keep not learning the lessons. Yeah. You know, there, so when you look at the world today in this really weird way. I feel like almost like Gen Z has a lot of hippie ethos in them.

It's very, there's a level of awareness and a willingness to have a voice and to be very strongly activist and a sense of purpose being an important part of life that I feel like we kind of went through the window in the late 60s into the early 70s-ish, and then it kind of went away. And now I see it. I feel like there is a bit of a renewal of that energy. Do you sense that also? I do.

I do. And I'm lifted up by it. I kind of look out and I'll say, okay, there's hope. When things are really dark and you're looking at yet another newscast that makes you want to tear your hair out, except I'm already bald, so I can't do that. Now it lifts you up. out a way to be whole people who care about others and that kind of dual thing of taking responsibility for your own emotions thoughts etc don't dismiss that part because it'll come back to haunt you if you don't but then don't just stop there you know i look at the some of the things that have happened with you know trying bring, bring mindfulness in and things like that, help things that are, you know, good

for your health either. But then there it again, you know, there's another strand. If you're not careful of selfishness, you know, you take care of the kids. I got to go meditate. You know, like, and I think there's a, that social extension can turn into, I'm right, you're wrong, you're politics, bad, mine are great. There's ways to go wrong on that too. But if you don't have both those, if you don't have that show up and step forward thing, I'm wondering, what are you doing? Because there isn't a spiritual tradition you can name

that doesn't have those both. That right action piece and that kind of awareness piece. Whichever your religion you're talking about, a spiritual tradition, a wisdom tradition. In the modern world, people look to shrinks and psychotherapists. So I kind of like that our work has been about taking the evidence-based wing that has sometimes been too much, I think, about just fix and repair. Too much focused on syndromes and all that. Find the energy in there and yeah, learn how to step into your skin,

but then learn how to step forward in your life. Yeah, so important. It's such an interesting point you bring up also about I see so many sort of cherry picking a specific tool or modality or methodology that exists within this greater system. Very often, I think not even understanding that those things were never designed to work in isolation, that you need the context, you need the guidance, you need the

superstructure and all that it brings along with you to create this synergistic effect. And then, you know, so, you know, somebody will try this one thing and wow, it doesn't work for me. Rather than what if we zoom the lens out and look at the whole container? What if you step into it more fully? But I feel like we're, so many of us are so reductionist

in the way that we approach trying to quote, get better or feel better, that we feel like, oh, we just don't have time to do it. Like do it on that scale. Well, you know, and even that whole agenda of get better, feel better that we feel like, oh, we just don't have time to do it on that scale. Well, and even that whole agenda of get better, feel better, I'm like, where'd that come from? I mean, do a better job of feeling, how about that? Feel better.

I can take you down to Fourth Street and show you how to feel better. It'll ruin your life very quickly, you'll feel great. And we dabbled in that back in the 60s and we saw where that was that part of it went too so it wasn't just spiritual journeys people did just sort of fall into that kind of side of it you know the and the evidence-based folks you know the more science folks are tempted sometimes by this reductionistic slice and dice, smaller is truer than bigger kind of approach. And I understand that.

It's kind of built into the human mind and this kind of mechanistic pull that comes even just from naming and modeling things. You know, you start imagining that people are like some sort of big machine. The wing that I like, though, and I've been hanging out with, are these extended evolutionary synthesis types.

And I've written books with them, people like David Sloan Wilson, my colleague at Binghamton, major evolutionary biologist, because they are the ones who have this idea that it's multidimensional, multilevel, everything is changing at once, everything relates to everything else. they are the ones who have this idea that it's multidimensional, multilevel. Everything is changing at once.

Everything relates to everything else. And yeah, that can get overwhelming. And in the hands of some and the more spiritual folks and stuff, I think it does get overwhelming. Sometimes you enter into a whole long conversation. You disappear into a particular tradition that talks about this and this and this and how it relates to that. The scientist types need a foothold. And the thing that evolution can give you

is a way of doing that. And just in what's in the acceptance and commitment therapy stuff and a liberated mind and so forth is to try to take the psychological part, but then line it up with the biological and line it up with the social and cultural so that you can have a sweep to it.

It isn't just mental health, whatever the heck that is, really. It's also physical health, behavioral health. It's a step up to the challenge of physical disease. It's not just that. It's death and dying. It's not just that. It's prejudice, stigma.

It's caring about others, the suffering of others, compassion. Our minds go everywhere. And if we don't learn how to kind of rein them in and use them, there's lots of things that are important to us that we aren't able to focus on and to handle. So that's some of what I would like to do is to figure out a way to create a psychology more adequate to the challenge of the human condition that can fit into all these other things, you know, whether it's economics or physical health,

taking care of people who don't have enough to eat on the other side of the world, et cetera. There's a lot of things we have in front of us. Indeed. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. A lot of your drive, it seems like, also comes from personal experience. I know you got out of school, you ended up eventually in a teaching setting where you're a young professor and you

start to experience anxiety and panic on a level that becomes disabling. Take me back to what that was, how it started to land in your life and what it was doing to you. Yeah, I think I came out of that 60s part and into graduate school with this kind of aspiration to do something, but it quickly became to an aspiration just to succeed

and then to tick off the achievements. And I started treating myself as a horse to be whipped. And I have compassion for why. As the wisdom of panic began to settle in, it asked me to explore some of that and figure that out. But as it was lived, it was, you know, I'm puttering along, doing my ambitious development of a psychological research career thing. And then boom, I'm into a major struggle with my own emotions, beginning in a, as I tell in a TEDx talk, in a horrific department meeting

where I saw full professors fight in a way that only wild animals and full professors are capable of. I mean, it was just a horror show. I'm in there with these old bulls crashing, and I'm this untenured assistant professor, and all I want to do is ask him to stop, but it turns inside a panic attack. You can get to the point where you literally can't make sound

come out of your mouth, and so the whole group stops, looks at me, and my mouth is opening and closing like a goldfish. And I was horrified by it. I've talked to my colleague, Rosemary Nelson. Do you remember that? She said, I have kind of a sense that you were a little nervous in that meeting.

You know, but didn't you think it was a little odd? You know, I raised my hand, and then just my mouth opened and closed and nothing happened. It probably lasted 15 seconds, but for me, it was like an eternity. Boy, did I never want to have that happen again. Well, what you need to do then is you need to watch to make sure that anxiety is not coming. Yeah, but as you do that, you start feeling anxious that it might come again. And then there you are. Yeah, but as you do that, you start feeling anxious that it might come again.

And then there you are. You've plugged into the amplification circuit. If we had speakers near these microphones and we had a little amplifier, we could get to the point where you'd have to cover your ears because the feedback's reaching. Well, that's a panic attack. And the amplifier there must not feel this. That's an amplifier. And you can do that with depression.

You can do that with urges. You can do it with anxiety. And it took me a three-year spin down into health to finally figure out another way, which was the 180 degree turn into, you can't make me turn from my own experience. That's completely opposite from must not feel this. And what was it that brought you to that turning point? Well, for me, and I've tried in the work that I do to help people catch this earlier, because I don't know that I would recommend this as a pathway. To me, it took heading bottom. I mean, it took can't function.

I mean, for me to give a talk in front of five people was hard. To give a lecture in a class, and I was showing films, but my hands were shaking so bad I couldn't get the sprockets into the lineup of the film. It was back when it was real films. That's how old I am. But the bottom for me was thinking I was having a heart attack and then realizing, oh, no, this is just another version

of a panic attack at two in the morning. So I can't trust my own body. I can't do the things I came to do. I'm a teacher. I'm supposed to be able to give lectures and talks and all that kind of stuff. And I'm avoiding it like crazy or cranking it up when I'm trying to do it. Only half there because I'm doped up and getting my students to give the talks instead of me. Oh yeah, because I'm a good mentor. I really care about your vita and your career. But you can only do that so long. I think the turn, the pivot though, it goes back to things we were talking about with the 60s. There's some seeds in there, really important ones. I mean mean yeah the the eastern stuff

the suzuki's and watts and things like that that hippy dippy folks read back in the day and yeah even the psychedelic kind of thing but also i think my own journey had seeds of that that made me turning towards rather than turning away was the wise thing to do. I found my first undergraduate paper and it was on how to use exposure to expose yourself to difficult emotions, not just difficult situations. Right, so it was, those seeds were planted. Yeah, I'm not sure why it would be planted.

It's kind of a, you know, my mentor, David Barlow, really went there big time with his interoceptive exposure, revolutionized CBT exposure. He's one of the

best known anxiety researchers on the planet, wonderful man. But there it is. I'm not saying that paper was the same

as his work. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying part of a generation was kind of thinking about that and I'd forgotten. I'm just saying part of a generation was kind of thinking about that. And I'd forgotten.

I had gotten into a mindset of achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. Thank God part of me said no. Because I would have been frightening if I had been able to pull that off. You know, when I was on internship, a fellow intern said, I have the feeling if there's a publication behind me and you're standing in front of me,

you're going to knock me down. It was true. It's true. Sad, but true. I think so many people, so many of us work that way and spend a large part of our lives working that way.

You know, you're sort of offering it in the context of academia where there's this sort of predefined linear path. You know, like you go,

you get this degree, then you enter this university, then you work towards tenure and it's publish or perish and it's kind of like everyone has these universally created upon markers

of capital S success in that domain. But we all have them in every field. It may not be quite as clear or as linear. But when we lock onto, well, that is what a flourishing life is, checking off those boxes and those predefined paths, there's so much suffering that goes along with that, that we discount, we push out of the way, and we don't want to even examine. I think once you're plugged into that, you're almost doomed. I mean, yeah, you might have something you'd call happy, but the person that you are becoming is a clown suit.

It's a persona. You know, the Greek root of that was the clay masks that they wore in theater. You're becoming a clay mask. I'm a success. Ego is the kind of one wing of psychology. And it's tempting because it comes right inside human language. It's right inside the evaluative self, the storied self. What do you like? And once you get beyond the descriptives, you know, well,

I'm a male, even that, we're getting a little, what does that mean? Well, I'm 71, which I am. What does that mean?

But once you get beyond that, you're in trouble, you know, like, well, I'm kind. Don't you mean you're more kind? How else would you know you're kind?

More kind than who, dude? Than you, and you, and you. You know, I'll make the world kind again. You're like, what? What are you doing? So whether it's sweet or sad, whether it's I'm so sad and pathetic, help me, or I'm so grand and glorious, you need me.

I think, and actually what's in Liberated Mind, what's in this new book, one thing that's different about what I've talked about before is I've realized somewhere in there that the struggles that we have contain within them an energy that is not your enemy. It's actually sweet.

What you're trying to do when you climb inside that success clown suit is you're trying to get the chips that will allow you to belong. You want to be part of the group. You want to be included. You want to be loved. You want to love. This is not a bad thing,

but the mind's solution to it is, okay, I get it, you'll be part of the group when you're special, especially needy, especially able, well, if you're special, you're different, if you're different, you're already sort of a little bit disconnected from the group. And then when you start presenting that, you kind of know it's not fully true. Like, I'm smart, I'm kind of, okay, you're kind all the time with everybody? You big liar. You had to start lying to other people and to yourself. And do you not know that?

Of course you know that. Well, so now you're getting applause from people you fooled. Who couldn't believe the applause of fools? So even if it works, it doesn't work. So, of course, all the spiritual traditions have this. They all talk about. And in fact, back to the psychedelic experience, you know, the one thing that it does, I mean, the midbrain structures that it influences and that's connectivity that it changes in the brain with guidance, you can build out on this, is this narrative conceptualized self area gets so weakened that you're able to connect across time, place, and person. You're able to go behind the eyes of others,

and you'll be able to sense this sort of extended quality of space-time in person. You know, literally parts of your sensory motor system that normally get filtered out. By what? By the narrative. Why? It's not relevant. So what's scary about it is you climb inside the clown suit, good, bad, or indifferent,

whatever it is. A, you kind of know you're lying. B, you're saying you're special in order to belong, but that means you're different, so then you're disconnected. C, you no longer have access to what's actually happening.

Things are being filtered out at such a level you're disconnected. C, you no longer have access to what's actually happening. Things are being filtered out at such a level that they don't even enter into the parts of the nervous system that allows you to know. Right, it's like if it doesn't fit the narrative, then it's not acknowledged as- It's not acknowledged. I mean, it gets literally filtered out neurobiologically. You get stupider and stupider.

You live inside a self-constructed, distorted, funhouse world. You're like, let's take the, I'm the worst of the worst, lowest of the lowest. I'm broken. There's something wrong with me. That's a clown suit. That's a story. I get there's suffering there. I mean, I'm not meaning to be invalidating by saying that.

I'm saying the attachment to it, there's a pride to it. And what does it filter out? Well, if somebody compliments you, for example, or they want you to be part of a group, or they, come on, would you come to the party? Or what happens is, yeah, there's a little initial jolt and then boom, it gets just eliminated. It doesn't fit.

It doesn't fit the narrative. Yeah, but not really because, just cognitively you start to think. Oh, that's a pity invite. Yes. Rather than, oh, they genuinely want me to be there with them. So it's like you reframe it so it fits your narrative. Exactly.

Yeah. If you had somebody who truly loved you show up and you've been yearning for that your whole life, you would turn it into a distortion and push it away. I mean, it's pathetic, isn't it? I mean, it's really sad. It's pathetic in the pathos way. There's something really, there's a human condition

that's hard to carry around this evolutionarily recent adaptation, this thing you and I are doing right now, which is 200,000 years old, 2 million years old. Can't be three million because the common ancestors with the chimpanzees go back more recent than that. And your 12-month-old baby

does what a chimpanzee, so-called language-trained chimpanzee, doesn't do. Washoe the chimp, that's in my department, Washoe County, University of Nevada, Helen and Trixie Gardner, we were part of that tradition in my department.

And they don't do what a 12 month old baby does that puts them on the path that allows you to do what you and I are doing right now, namely symbolic learning. Actually underneath, I'm kind of proud of the fact that underneath the acceptance and commitment therapy work is an entire body of work on cognition that I started called relational frame theory.

And we think we've kind of figured out what the, that's the most arrogant thing you'll get me to say, what the pivot point is to entering into this kind of world versus not. And it has to do with the bi-directionality of meaning you learn it in one direction drive it into like a 12 month old baby if you give them the name for the object and say the name they'll orient towards the object language trained chimps don't do that you got to train them in both directions and once you're on that pathway that

things can refer to or have bi-ctional relationships with things, you're able to imagine worlds that never been. You can evaluate things that you've never even done. And that includes you. You can evaluate yourself. You can evaluate that persona. You can climb and construct and climb into a clown suit. So it's hard for us to do with emotions, bodily sensations, sense of self-attention, being in the world.

It's hard for us just to sort of be here because we have this symbolic mind that's constantly trying to fit us into some sort of pattern so that we can solve problems, so that we can manipulate outcomes, so that we can, on and on it goes. Which is fine.

I don't want to be a dog or a cat. And I kind of like the fact that we're talking into microphones here. You look around the world and almost nothing in here would be here without language and cognition. But it's a challenge for us. And this example of who are you so basic is a profound example of it.

Dog or cat doesn't know how to ask that question. We do. And our answers are very often unwise. Yeah. And the fact that we are endowed with that capacity, that endowment alone carries all sides of the human experience. It gives us the opportunity for abundance and possibility and connection. And at the same time for internal negativity and deconstruction of self and all this suffering.

Exactly. And you can't have one without the other, but I feel like the quest for so many of us is to do exactly that, which only leads to more suffering because it's not possible. Exactly. It's like the Buddhist ideal of suffering, like life as suffering. It's not, at least in my understanding, so much that life waking hours is spent in the pursuit of trying to lock down a sense of certainty that can never be had, that we pursue with so much of our bandwidth, something that is impossible to ever attain, which that is perpetual suffering.

Yeah, and there's a lot more to it for sure. But that is, it's always been one of my understandings of, you know, and we're wired. Like you said, this is sort of, this is the way we are. It is the way we are. And we can be wiser about it. And one of the things that is exciting to me, I mean, really, is that for the first time in the history of humanity, we're taking Western science ideas. We're walking inside, not in a sacrilegious way not to burn down the thing we're walking inside these spiritual and wisdom traditions and we're pulling it at its joints now those traditions say you

can't do that well excuse me i we can. And even the psychology tradition, I mean, I was brought into psychology because of A. Maslow, you know, peak experiences and all that. And he said, yeah, you need to be science, but you can't do it the way that the Western science is doing it. And he was my first psychology hero,

but B.F. Skinner was my second, because I thought, yes, you can. Maybe the way he's doing it, you know, from Rats to Walden 2, you know, that aspirational utopian kind of vision that was in behaviorism. But then behaviorism couldn't figure out how the mind works. And so my professional journey has been on what would happen if we could bring that same highly polished, high precision, high scope principles to the human mind in a way that we did with things like reinforcement principles? And then turn it loose on human suffering and human prosperity all the way up to peak experiences, but also learning why is it so hard to be human? And, you know, what's in

this new book is the 40-year journey, the science journey, this personal journey of that. The reason I wrote it now is I figure at my age, I either write it now or I'm not going to write it. And, you know, it's not, you know, like an ultimate answer, a panacea or anything, but there's some very counterintuitive things that have to do with how you can rein in the human mind, put it on a leash, use it when you need it, but not let it use you, and get what you really want. Because I think what we really want is pretty simple. We want to belong.

We want to be able to feel. We want to kind of know who pretty simple. We want to belong. We want to be able to feel. We want to kind of know who we are. We want to understand. We want to have meaning by choice and want to be able to be competent at organizing our life around things that are meaningful. That's it. I mean, there's other things,

but those are the six things that are in that book, and they're like the 20% that does the 80%. And I think we've kind of cracked the code i think it isn't just me it's a it isn't just act there's a whole wing of evidence based therapy work that has worked out what are the processes that liberate people when they're suffering and it turns out if you look at it in a particular way they're exactly the same processes that help you run a podcast really well. Win an Olympic gold medal.

I mean, I was in Rio and saw people win gold with ACT coaches. You know, run a Fortune 100 company. You know, I know some of the folks who are coaches for those CEOs. They're doing ACT-based coaching. Or help people in Sierra Leone step up to the Ebola crisis. The World Health Organization is putting ACT into, for the first time, a self-help program

for dealing with refugees and the South Sudanese refugees in Uganda. A very nice randomized trial just came out with WHO using ACT cartoons and tapes for illiterate populations. You know, and I look at that, I said, this is cool. You know, maybe we can get this thing down

to a small enough set that you can learn it, learn the skills. And yeah, step out of your mental health issues if that's, you know, use that. That's good, that's important. I If that's, you know, use that. That's good. That's important. I'm a clinical psychologist. I care about that.

But, you know, some of the stuff we've done in therapy hasn't then led to prosperity. So you have people without panic attacks, for example, who are not going to work. Well, what kind of, what's that about? I mean, people didn't come just to not have mental health issues. People came to live. They want relationships. They want work. They want to be able to do things.

So, and it turns out, I think, there's processes of change that you can use. And when you see it, it applies kind of everywhere the human mind goes. So I went on a rant, but it's linked to this, you know, what do we really expect of psychology? And you can come into the door of just how hard it is just to not put on the mask.

Yeah. And it really is, you know, it reminds me also, you know, like when Martin Seligman like steps in front of the APA, like it was late seventies, I guess. It says, gentlemen, we have a cake that's half baked. You know, there is, psychology for so long was focused on sick to baseline, you know,

but what about baseline to flourishing? And ACT and your work is a really, it's an interesting way to approach the full spectrum. You know, rather than going, like choosing one side or the other and then switching gears, switching modalities, it's like, no, well, here is a philosophy approach, a set of tools, a whole really ecosystem that can potentially get you whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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We've used the acronym ACT a number of times now without really breaking it down. So what actually is it? And it ties in closely with this idea of psychological flexibility. And so I'm curious, how would you actually describe what it is? And also so many people are gonna be familiar

with psychoanalysis, with CBT, CBT having gained so much broad acceptance and adoption out in the world as ways to, quote, treat yourself or to be treated or to resolve issues. What is that and how does it differ from the sort of more traditionally developed approaches? You know, it's related to those things and even to positive psychology and what Marty has done. You know, the quick definition of acceptance and commitment therapy or acceptance and commitment training, we use both those words because sometimes people are not in psychotherapy. But, you know, if you're dealing with worksite-based leadership programs, you can do ACT as a form of training. It's fine. It works there, too. You don't want all the employees to think, oh, we're all in group therapy.

Yeah, exactly. That was a, huh. Bad idea. It's all another layer of like a moon. We're lucky enough that T word can mean two different things and people can apply it to some of those. What we're using, you know, the quick and dirty way would be acceptance and mindfulness processes

and commitment behavior change processes to produce psychological flexibility. And what we mean by psychological flexibility is to be able to experience and learn from your own thoughts and feelings, and then come consciously into the present moment, inside and out, see what's there, and direct your attention towards what is of importance by choice for you what's meaningful for you by choice out of wagging fingers or shame and blame but and can you learn how to organize your behavior around that and create habits of values-based action so that even when you're not watching you're living a values-based life those are just six things i just said i can unpack them. They're like six

sides of a box. They fit together. They're only strong when they're together. You pull them apart and you just say, what is this? And is this of importance? No, it isn't unless it's related to all six. And just like sides of a box, they won't be strong unless you put them together and connect them together. So it's one thing, but it has these six aspects. You can get them down to three. There's how to be open, how to be aware, and how to be engaged. And so the six that are three that are one of psychological flexibility, being able to bring your history into the moment,

direct your attention consciously towards what's of importance and get your feet moving around it. Well, it turns out, you know, acceptance and mindfulness work. Acceptance meaning not, oh, tolerance and recognition. No, you have to accept it, but more like the original meaning of the word in Latin, which is only in English with a few places. Like you have a gift and you give it it to somebody and say here would you accept this you don't mean would you tolerate this gift to resign yourself to this gift you mean will you willingly take what i offer to you because it's of that importance i want you to actually choose to take this gift would you accept this when you start saying yes to your own history yes to your

own body yes your own emotions yes your own thoughts not yes to your own body, yes to your own emotions, yes to your own thoughts, not as what they say they are, but as what you actually experienced and be. And that empowers you to be more in the present, that mindfulness piece. But then all of that doesn't matter unless it lands in the world of behavior linked to something. I think what needs to be linked to his values.

And there we are, right over in that positive psychology part of things. But all of those things need to fit together. You know, like you mentioned positive psychology. If you just try to go positive and you haven't done the work, very commonly what you're doing is you're going positive so that you won't go negative. You've now got a little war going on inside your head.

You're going to lose that war. Because once you're in a war like that, what are you going to do with things that aren't on the list of approved emotions or virtues? Because the mind is that stupid. If I asked you just to say good or virtues, because the mind is that stupid. If I asked you just to say good or bad, and I say happy, you're going to say good. If I said sad, you're going to say bad. You are.

Anybody listening is going to do that. And yeah, but when the call comes that your mother is dying, and you dash to her bedside, which actually happened to me a couple years ago, literally flew as fast as I can to get to her bedside and watched her die. You know, that was sad. But that's how stupid the mind is.

It'll say sad bad. Like what? You're not supposed to be sad when your mother dies. But you know, if you're sad for more than two weeks, you go into the diagnostic system. You can be put on medications and the insurance company will pay for it. Does that sound wise to you?

That we create a culture where even something that basic, so yeah, ACT is trying to do this whole span of using acceptance, mindfulness, processes, commitment, behavior change processes, but basically to create modern minds for this modern world so that we have what we need to fit the opportunities and the situations we're in.

You, within that context, you talk about these things called pivots, six of them. Yeah. Tell me more about, walk me through these six things. Of course, yeah, take a long time to go way deep into them, but just so that I'd love to get a better understanding of what these are,

and also for our listeners, just a little bit more flavor on how they actually work within the context of our lives. Well, we're headed towards psychological flexibility, but that means if you're not going that way, you're probably headed towards psychological inflexibility. And it turns out there's six flexibility processes, there's six inflexibility processes. You know, this is just our organization of it, but it's pretty well worked out. We spent a lot, a lot of years working on it. And those inflexibility processes predict almost everything bad. If you want to follow people over time, and we've now done it with 10,000 people over 10-year time, and there's ginormous studies with true, not just random samples,

but representative samples of the entire population. I mean, the scientists, there's a big group, and there's about 3,000 studies, and we've been on it for a long time. And it turns out if you're doing the things that produce inflexibility, you're headed for trouble. And when things come up, your trouble is gonna get bigger. If you have one problem, you have two. If you have two, you have three.

Well, but the pivot idea is there's an energy in there. Like I use that example of the clown suit that we put on of crawling into a conceptualized self, the ego-based self, the storied self that you use to compare yourself to others, that you defend as if your life depends on it. It isn't even who you are. It's just you talking, making the story happen, right?

But what does it reflect? I think it reflects a deep yearning to belong. We think if we can't make ourselves special, if we can't explain why, we're not going to be included, we're not going to be loved, we're not going to be part of it, we'll be left behind. We're afraid if we're just here sort of naked and in the wind, conscious and connected with others, that's not enough. In fact, people love being around people who are like that. In fact, if you just think about the people who you like being around,

they're not the people who are constantly telling you how great and grand they are or how sad and unable they are. They're people who when you look at them, you see consciousness there. And you feel connected. You feel seen by them. Well, that's belonging.

And that's a pivot. A pivot is taking the energy that's inside what your mind gives you, this problem-solving mind that tells you, oh, here's how I belong, and gives you a kind of implicit verbal solution that then narrows down your behavior, gets smaller and smaller.

But if you take that yearning for belonging, you can put it, you know, pivot is like the pin in a hinge. You can put it in a new direction. In this case, the direction would be towards exploring a sense of self that is more spiritual, more transcendent, that is inherently unconnected, that is more like pure awareness or just consciousness. That's enough to be human. And that's enough to belong. It's not enough for your whole life. Well, so the concept

of pivot is that let's take what gets in our way. And the big six are buying into the story of who we are, running away from our own emotions and sensations, buying into our thoughts as literally true and trying to get them all lined up in a nice little neat row being inflexible in our attention not being able to come into the present moment because we're going trying to figure out the past by rumination or the control achieve meaning by applause or compliance or these superficial kind of, what's meaningful is how much money may I make or how many likes I get on my Instagram or whatever. whatever, and this yearning for competence, for being able to, that gets distorted into, I wanted to spring forth from the head of Zeus

instead of the trial and error, one step at a time, baby step. So there's six of them, six yearnings, six pivots from inflexibility to flexibility. And if you learn how to connect with that yearning for belonging or feeling or understanding, orientation, meaning, and competence, if you settle down, you can sort of take what's taking you in the wrong direction, find what's inside it that's important and your real ally and swoop it in the right direction and allow your pain to kind of facilitate your purpose.

And that's what we try to do in ACT. We teach people the skills to create psychological flexibility processes in lieu of inflexibility processes that allow you to get what you really want. I love that. And actually it makes so much sense to me. In this latest book, In a Liberated Mind, you go way into a lot more detail on these six pivots. But then what I thought was fascinating, I thought maybe we would pick one and dive into it, was that you then lay out a whole

bunch of individual context, like this is what it would look like in this situation. This is what it will look like in this situation, both on the full spectrum from what we would label as suffering or like sources of pain to the desire to perform at the highest level. Can we drop it? I think it would be helpful for me and also, you know, for those joining in with us, I'd love to pick one of those, and maybe can you walk through sort of like what this would look like in the context of one of those? Yeah.

Let's take one that's a little odd, I think, which is how to rein in the literal value of problem-solving mind. Because normally I think what we need to do, and we kind of yearn for understanding, for coherence, for putting it all together, but your mind is filled with chaos. I'll give you an example. Try to adopt the thought

that you're a wonderful person, that you're whole and complete and valid and perfect. If you really try to buy into that, your mind's going to start shouting at you. And if your mind's like mine, it's like, no, you're not. Right, it's like, but what about that? But what about that?

But what about that? You're like, sure, sometimes. Exactly. There was this 30-second window where, yeah, you're a decent guy. Yeah, exactly. But what about that?. What about that? What about that? Right.

Okay. So suppose we actually yearn for what we're yearning for with coherence and understanding is this sense of kind of peace of mind, of being able to sort of to know what's of use, to be able to kind of settle. And here, if we take the simplest thing, if I'd gone to the other side and said, you're the worst of the worst, lowest of the lowest, you'd have rejected that too, right? If we try to do it by just getting, for example, everything lined up in a row,

like I'm just, the way I'm going to get a peaceful mind is I'm going to come to one opinion about anything. No, you're not. You have multiple opinions about everything, including yourself. You know, just tell something that's a little more shameful even. I won't ask you to do it out loud, but think of a racist, sexist, disgusting joke that you've heard that is just like that is loathsome. It's in you.

It's influencing you when you're asleep. I can show you with an implicit measure. It's moving around your attitudes. If somebody walks in this room with 450 pounds, it'll be 300 milliseconds before you judge them. And it'll be a whole long string of things. It isn't just fat. It could mean lazy, smelly.

I'm not going to do it because I know I'm going to hurt people by making that string. You make it yourself. Don't make me do it for you. My point being, the very things that you hate are in you. How else would you know to hate them? But just because you hate them doesn't mean they've erased them. They're rumbling around why because that's how language works language is a relational process it's interconnected everything

is related to everything else and so yeah you of course have two minds because you you have a mind that is allows chaos to happen of that sort when When I'm given this as a lecture, I say, think of a noun to one person. I say, think of another noun to another person, and then I'll make up a relationship, like is father of. And so we'll get things like, how is cat the father of a chair?

There's always an answer. And when you finish it, it seems like it's really in the objects. It isn't just arbitrary. It's real. So we can relate anything to anything else in any possible way. You're going to have a nice, peaceful arrangement in that.

I mean, as soon as you start trying to do it, it starts generating more. It's like a spider web, weaving the web as fast as you can do it. Okay, so what we've done instead is we've created a whole set of methods that we call diffusion methods. It's a made up word, not diffusion, diffusion.

We started out with deliteralization, but I could never say it. So we ended up with diffusion. So let me give you a few examples. When you catch a thought that's not of service to you and you do kind of notice that it has a little hook, it kind of pulls you, you don't think it's very useful,

at least not in this situation. There's like hundreds of these methods that help you to sort of back up a little bit and notice the thought as a thought. So here's an example. Take a thought that disturbs you, you two in the morning you wake up it's about yourself let's say you got one in your mind can you find one could be a i'm or it's or an if i could be a worry could be a rumination. Sing it to the tune of Happy Birthday.

See what happens. It's weird. Just a little space opens up. Yeah, it's like this cognitive dissonance. It's kind of like, how can... It's like opening a window. There's a little air that comes in. Because when it's kind of like how can it's like opening the window there's a little air that comes in because when when it's normal you have to argue your way out of it criticize it change it something but of course that means you're creating new avenues to it number one number two it doesn't

really lose its power it's gaining power you're giving it more behavioral time and attention. Now, so examples might be, just we were the first to do this, the Titchener, the father of American psychology, had done this as an exercise to show how his theory of language worked. We were the first to use it clinically. Distill that thought down to a single word, now say it out loud, fast,

at least once per second for at least 30 seconds. I've actually done the research as to how long and how fast. At least once per second, 30 seconds is about the sweet spot. And anybody listening can try it, the painful thought. At the end of 30 seconds, believability has gone down by more than half. Distress has gone down significantly. We're living inside these cages that are guiding us, these cognitive cages.

They're like made out of rice paper, but they feel like iron bars. If you can take something like I'm bad, distill it down to bad, and say it for 30 seconds, and bad loses half of its impact. The cage is not made of iron bars. I mean, it's so interesting to me also because on so many levels,

but so much of the sort of self-help, sort of like popular self-help world would tell you to do the exact opposite. Yes. Don't identify it. Don't name it. And do not say it or repeat it because then it becomes your reality. Yeah, exactly.

And what you're saying is that you actually have research that shows the exact opposite. No, identify it, distill it down, give it a code word, and repeat it out loud. And doing so through repetition, it begins to disempower it. Yeah, take its power away. Put it on a leash. And by using these kind of odd methods, you know, say it in the voice of a cartoon character, say it in your least favorite politician imagine that it's an object and ask yourself what shape does it have what color does it have how big it is how fast does

it go is it okay to allow it to be there rod draw it on a piece of paper and allow it to just sort of sit there and then put it in your back pocket is just to say, I can carry this with me without it dictating to me where I go. There's hundreds of these things. And what's in the self-help work, take one like this, affirmations. What you need to do is you need to say, like Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, gosh darn it, I'm good enough.

And you just repeat that, and then it'll, the positive energy, you know, the real secret is you'll be, oh, good grief, when we do research on that. Affirmations work great as long as you are doing well and you don't need them. As soon as you're doing poorly and you start using them to help, they actually make it worse. This is not a technique we need. It's almost cruel because people are reading these things,

written, by the way, by people who often are very successful and so forth. Power of positive thinking. Well, positive thinking, meaning I can think many, many different things. I'm fine with it. But thinking positive in order not to think negative? Then positive now will remind you of the negative. I mean, if I say hot, you probably just thought cold.

Red, of course. Okay. So if we get into this little space, you know, white, you thought cold. Right, of course. Okay. So we get into this little space. White, you thought black. Good. Bad. You thought bad. Well, what if you're putting an affirmation out there

or a distraction thought out there or in order to subtract something? You know these are related that way. Anything can be related to anything in any possible way. That's the tool we've got in between our ears. And if you want to rein in that wild horse, you can't be playing as if it's all logical. It isn't. It's psychological.

And it isn't logical that thinking something good would remind you of something bad and make you feel bad, but it's psychological. When I was struggling with panic, I had these relaxation tapes. And I would say, I'm calm and relaxed because the tape would tell me to do it. Calm and relaxed, right? So now I'm feeling a panic attack coming on. I'm starting to look for the door.

I'm saying, I'm calm and relaxed. I'm calm and relaxed. I'm calm and relaxed. If you Google it, you'll find the thing called relaxation-induced panic. It's an empirical phenomenon that panic disorder people struggle with, which is when they try to be relaxed, they have panic attacks. It's like that research that shows that the direct pursuit of happiness actually leaves you less happy. Yes. Yeah.

Yes. I've got tinnitus. I get people hear that, and they Google, and they email me, how do I get rid of the ringing in your ears? And I say, well, first, you don't. B, second, could you learn as to how to be with the ringing

in a way that is no longer of interest to you? Sometimes acceptance has this quality of, I've extracted what's in it, and there's nothing left in there for me. And my ears are screaming right now. They were absolutely not screaming five minutes ago and for a week. Of course they were screaming.

They screamed 24-7. It's a sensory level. But I just don't care. So sometimes it looks like that. Can we take away the energy that we give it even by our yearning to control, manipulate, et cetera? So back to this pivot. I know I'm being a little chaotic.

If we take this example of diffusion, let's say there's something that you really want to do, but your mind's telling you you can't do it. You're not good enough to do it. You're going to fail if you do it. You're going to make a fool of yourself if you do it. That's not for you. Who are you?

And a thousand other things, right? The very skill that you might learn as to how to let go of that I'm bad thought or I'll never be normal or deep down there's something wrong with me or whatever with these diffusion methods. You can use the thoughts that show up that stand between you and making that call or creating that website or taking the risk to put in that application

or whatever the thing is. And is your mind going to talk to you? Yeah, it is. Is it going to tell you not to? Probably. Is that your enemy? It's just your mind doing its thing. Thank your mind very much for the help.

Explain to it that I've got this covered. I actually suggest people giving their mind a name. Mine is named George. So you can say, George, I got this one covered. Put in your application. If that requires singing, if that requires funny voices, maybe Donald Duck says, George, then do that. But not out of ridicule.

One of the things I always ask people to do is to remember how old these thoughts are and to take a little time to picture yourself as a young child when you first started having thoughts that were painful and it would stop you. Put that kid in front of you and have that thought that's stopping you right now come out of that kid's mouth in the child's voice.

What would you do? You're probably not gonna make fun of him, say snap out of it, because you remember how painful it was. So you might do something like hug the kid, do that to yourself. So that the quality of diffusion isn't this quality of self-ridicule.

It's a quality of a breath of fresh air. It's okay to be me and to have this tool that can relate everything to everything else in all possible ways, which is useful when you're doing creative work, et cetera, or when you're doing your taxes or fixing your car. It's not so useful when you turn your life over to it. And what it gives you is what you yearn for,

is that sense of coherence and understanding. You get to have it this way. Not all thoughts line up in a row, but some thoughts are more useful than others. Would it be okay to just humbly be guided by the ones that your experience tells you have been of use to you in this situation, for this purpose, and let go of the rest? I don't mean let go like erase them, but just let them be there like a five-year-old here telling you how to invest your money. Or Donald Duck maybe talking to you about how things will go.

Does that fit the challenge of how to take this pivot? No, super helpful. To see how you sort of would deploy it in a couple of different contexts is interesting. And also sort of like taking that one thing and saying, okay, so this is, this is a technique, a modality, a way of being almost. Yeah. trying to deal with something where you're experiencing it as pain or source of suffering all the way to the other side of, no, I would like to operate at this higher or different level. I have an aspiration that I would like to move towards, but somehow I'm not doing it. Like how, how might this help me figure out how to move sort of like across that full spectrum of, of life? Super powerful. I mean, it's interesting to me that you also, you chose the name of Liberated Mind for the book, which I have an association that tracks back to the world of yoga and the

world of, you know, like Eastern philosophy where, you know, the quote aspiration is always liberation, not transformation, because it's based on the assumption that you're not trying to change who you are. Like you are who you are. It's a matter of sort of like peeling away the stuff that stops you from seeing it and being with it. And, you know, Jivan Mukti translates roughly to liberated being, not transformed being, which is the aspiration. So it's interesting that you chose that frame,

not just for the book, but for the work. Yeah. Yeah. Transformation could turn into, oh, here's the kind of person I want to be. And next thing you know, you got another mask that you're trying to earn your way into being able to put on your face. Yeah, it's a slippery slope, right? Go on, what are you doing?

Slow down. You know, it is more like stripping away and finding that place within. And it does start, I think, with this thing that we started our conversation with, this more spiritual transcendent sense of self that is beyond evaluation or categorization. It doesn't have a form. I think it can get kind of spooky in some of the religious and spiritual wings. In the research work we've done, we've actually peeled it down to a point where we can do things like with kids who don't have that sense of self and we can train it it's not the act work it's the relational frame theory work but i think it's kind of cool it's all part of one thing and what we've found is that the core of this like with kids in the autistic spectrum disorder if they don't have that sense of self and they can't

take the perspective of others the core of it is it isn't just I, it's I-you. It isn't just here, it's here-there. And it isn't just now, it's now-then. In other words, we call them dectic relations. These dectic relations that kind of center into the I-here-now-ness of awareness connect you in consciousness to others. And it's ineffable because it can expand. I mean, everywhere you go, there you are, that kind of thing.

You start saying sentences that sound like Zen book titles or something because you're not talking about a form. So transform doesn't seem right. It's more like allowing. No right it's more like allowing that's more like allowing that's the and that expansion across time place in person of this sense of self that's right there in human consciousness that you can imagine what it's like to be behind the eyes of the person you're talking to, or what it's like to be in Syria and your three-year-old fell out of the boat and drowned.

And in the modern world, we force this kind of perspective, taking things through the camera on people, but without giving the full skills you need to be able to expand across time, place, and person. That means connecting with the suffering of others. It means that. So you better have the skills to be able to sit

with the discomfort. We've actually done research on that, that if I can jump, it looks like I'm jumping into another area, but it is that what we see on our television screen right now, the rise and what looks like rise in prejudice or fear of immigrants and all that kind of stuff, it's predicted by three things.

Can you take the perspective of the other person? Can you feel what it feels like when you do that? And can you not run away when it's hard? So you kind of have to make the world safe for the expansion of consciousness that the computer in your pocket has brought to you. You can see suffering at any time, anywhere, live. I'm old enough when it was controversial

to put a picture of a dead soldier in the Vietnam War in the New York Times. Now you can see it live. So you can see, and you can see the weeping. So the empathy and perspective taking is kind of forced on you. If you're going to create a liberated mind, if you're going to allow us to be the conscious beings that we are in this world, we have to find a place to open up our acceptance skills and our diffusion skills and our attentional skills and create meaning and purpose inside that

world so that spiritual part of us opens the door but it's not all of it uh liberated mind has facets and features to it in the modern world, at least to step up to the challenges that we all face. Yeah. So needed. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So as we sit here in this container and good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? Significant life. Being true to yourself, that shows up. I mean, you are inherently of significance by life itself. I think, I mean, just in your capacity to respond, to care, to love, to connect. A life of significance, if you start getting into like the little ruler, you quickly could get into,

oh, well, the person cleaning the toilets in the subway station is not living a significant life. Well, he is for you when that seat is clean or not. And he is for you when that seat is clean or not. And he is for, I mean, if you take the time to talk to people, you'll find wisdom in your children. You'll find wisdom in the person serving you your dinner. So that's what comes to mind.

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