The One You Feed - Steven C Hayes

Episode Date: April 19, 2016

This week we talk to Steven C Hayes about getting out of our minds and into our livesSteven C Hayes is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. He is an author of over 35 books and over 500 scientific articles. He is considered one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.In 1992 he was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the 30th “highest impact” psychologist in the world. His work has been recognized by several awards including the Exemplary Contributions to Basic Behavioral Research and Its Applications from Division 25 of APA, the Impact of Science on Application award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.He is best known for his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy In This Interview, Steven C Hayes and I Discuss:The One You Feed parableHis book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your LifeThat you know if your thoughts are good or bad by the fruits that they bearThe ACT approach to therapyThe difference between pain and sufferingThe importance of putting the human mind on a leashThat suffering comes from when we mishandle the present moment, and we amplify certain thoughts and feelingsThe meaning of Cognitive Fusion: when we can look only from our thoughts and not at our thoughtsThe importance of and various types of contemplative practiceVarious diffusion techniques (listed in a free episode download!)The concept and practice of experiential avoidanceThe full impact of acting for "short term gains with long term pains"For more show notes visit us at our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's a burden that comes if you don't know how to rein in the human mind and put it on a leash. It will lead you instead of you leading it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about

thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth.

If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen C. Hayes, a professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. He's known for his analysis of human language and cognition and its application to various psychological difficulties. He was the first secretary treasurer of the American Psychological Society and is the author of 38 books and hundreds of articles. He is best known for his book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. Here's the interview.

Hi, Steve. Welcome to the show. I'm glad to be here. I'm excited to have you on. I was introduced to your work through a listener, Paul from Belfast. So hi, Paul, who is a therapist there. And he said to me, you know, a lot of the things that you talk about on your show sound a lot like ACT, the therapy that you helped found. And so I took his advice, looked you up, booked you for the show. And then as I read the book, I was like, oh, I can see why Paul said that. And we'll explore a lot of those areas.

But I found a few different things, you know, right off the bat that are common in ACT and that seem to be things that we talk a lot about on the show. About sort of accepting your emotions and feelings as they are, but acting anyway, you know, where you have to act your way into right thinking. And you also draw a clear difference between pain and suffering, which is something that we have explored a lot on the show, more through a Buddhist lens, but it kind of says the same thing. So I'm excited to explore some of those, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the

grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So, I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do? Well, I like it because it's looking at the function, how we actually interact with the world within. We've all got so-called positive and negative thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations. And it's interesting to think about,

well, what does it mean to feed it? What do we feed it with? And I think we feed it with our life moments. We feed it with attention, undue attention. And it's not that you want to ignore or fail to understand that you've got fear or pride or sadness, but when they claim more than their due share of time, how did that happen? In the work that we do, often it happens because the mind basically

tricks you into thinking that first you have to win the fight before you can live. you into thinking that first you have to win the fight before you can live. And so just yet another round, yet another moment with even more focus on things that have not been serving you well, and the idea that when they're finally finished, handled, dealt with, gotten rid of, life can start and people can literally pour years and decades into the futile attempt to win the war within. And the ticks on the clock start mocking them because they realize it isn't just the pain. It's the suffering that comes from a life not being lived. And so we're interested in, yes, learning from our thoughts and feelings, positive and negatives. Put that in scare quotes, because it turns out some of the positive ones are negative and the negative ones are positive. And then by your fruits, you know them, by what they yield and feeding them to the extent that they take you in the direction of what you most deeply care about. I take that to be at the essence of the parable, and it's really at the

center of the ACT work and how you make that discrimination, how you make choices about what to feed and what you're feeding it with and what you can do when you find yourself feeding something which is actually building suffering in your life unnecessarily. And so ACT stands for Acceptance and Commitment Theory. And in a sentence, I think I'll just try and give my quick overview and then we'll go further into it. But to me, what I got taken away from it was to accept how we feel and what's happening in our lives, stop trying to change it so much, and then commit to living in accordance with what's most important to us, regardless of how we're feeling inside at any given moment? Yeah, I wouldn't say regardless, but, and I would want to refine what I mean by acceptance. Acceptance and commitment therapy, or when we use it in organizational settings, we call it acceptance and commitment training because ACT has quite a broad

applicability. It uses acceptance in the original etymology of the word. It comes from a Latin word that means to receive. And the connotation originally was, which is still in English, but not very often, is to receive as is to receive a gift. We will sometimes give a gift and we'll say, here, will you accept this? And that's what life is saying to us with its moments. Because what feelings, thoughts, memories, and bodily sensations are, are the projection of your history into the current situation based on the form and the appearance of the situation. And that's actually a gift. If you've been abused and you're going home from a bar with somebody, you want to feel uncomfortable if that person's not safe. And if you're determined not to feel uncomfortable, you'll do things that

not save. If you're facing a challenge, you want to feel anxiety that might remind you you're going to need to be prepared. You can't just go in there unprepared, but you want it to be linked to what it is that you're trying to do in your life. And so you need the attentional flexibility to move from taking the gift that's offered in the present moment based on your history and then moving your attention towards what builds meaning and purpose. is a commitment to building larger and larger patterns of values-based action, whereby values we mean not just our judgments and evaluations, but we mean our freely chosen qualities of being and doing that we want to put into our life moments during the time we have on the planet. And so that kind of dance of showing up to your history in the present situation, directing your attention towards what moves you towards larger patterns of meaning and purpose

based action is the dance that's inside our lives. I think we all learn it and we can show that people who do better in life over time are people who become more what we call psychologically flexible. But ACT can speed it up because we know what the basic processes are a little better. We have some procedures to move them. Some of them are taken from the wisdom traditions. Some of them were things we've created ourselves. And all of that, in an act perspective, is based on a solid basic science tradition of understanding the underlying cognitive processes that are involved in this whole enterprise.

So we bring some things new to the table. We borrow a lot from things that were here for many hundreds, if not thousands of years, but we're trying to put it into a simple model, but a powerful model that tells people how to both show up to their history and then direct themselves towards the kinds of futures that they're trying to create in the moment. Excellent. So one of the places that you start is you make a distinction between pain and suffering. And then you say that to a certain extent as humans, we suffer because we're verbal creatures.

You know, our ability with language has lots of wonderful things, like it's allowed us to create the society we have and survive and all that. But that for our internal world, this can be problematic. Can you elaborate on that? Well, we're the only creature that is able to relate events bidirectionally and in networks and change what we do based on arbitrary qualities of those events and social convention, not on their formal properties. A chimpanzee can learn the larger of two piles of pennies, let's say, but only a human being can learn that a dime is bigger than a nickel, which it certainly isn't. And we can show that in the lab. We can show that children don't develop normal human language if by age 12 months, 16 months, they're not actually deriving

these relationships bidirectionally and in networks. For example, if you know the names for something without training, when you hear the name, you'll orient towards that thing. You would think non-human animals do that. No, they don't. Not even the language-trained chimps and controlled studies. And so from this little seed, which is actually based on an extension of social cooperation, comes because we're the tribal primates from that seed.

We've built the capacity to imagine futures that have never been, to compare things that are impossible to compare, but we can do it intellectually. And it's our greatest achievement, no doubt. But we're the only species that will commit suicide because we'll feel better when we're dead. We're the only species that knows how to suffer amidst plenty. And so there's a burden that comes if you don't know how to rein in the human mind and put it on a leash. It will lead you instead of you leading it. And this thin cortical overlay that's probably 200,000 to 2 million years old will dominate over parts of us that are half a billion years

old in the case of learning processes, a billion and a half in terms of basic habituation processes. I mean, we've got things going on inside of us that are feeding emotion, intuition, felt sense, et cetera, that are thousands of times older than the symbolic thought that we're carrying around and spending 99% of our time focused on. And if you're not careful, that judgmental process will tell you, for example, that this moment is unacceptable. It can't be. This somehow violates laws of the universe to have the pain of loss, betrayal, death, deteriorations that happen with physical disease or aging and so forth. And it will suggest that what you need to do is to suppress it, avoid it, don't look at it,

deny it, talk yourself out of it, which for reasons that I can explain, tend to only amplify and build the impact of difficult life events. If you're really, really, really, really determined not to feel anxious, well, then anxiety is something to be anxious about. And as a panic disordered person in recovery, I can tell you that can amplify to the point that you can't function. You literally can't speak on a phone call. You can't give a lecture. You simply can't function. And it's all because the so-called solutions have created this self-amplifying process that takes you to an untenable place. So suffering, I think, is unnecessary.

Pain is built in. Suffering comes when we mishandle the present moment and we amplify the impact of difficult thoughts and feelings. Although we've learned more recently that difficult thoughts and feelings can include joyful thoughts and feelings. People who are highly avoidant or as afraid of love and joy and connection as they are of sadness, joyful thoughts and feelings. People who are highly avoidant or as afraid of love and joy and connection as they are of sadness, fear, and rejection. You end up trying to hold your breath until your life is over as a model of health, which is not a very

healthy place to live. So I don't think suffering is needed if you look around you in the animal kingdom. We have lots of examples of pain, and I guess you could call that suffering if you want, but we don't have billionaires who have the trophy house, the trophy spouse, the kids who love them, everything, and reach into the drawer and pull out a gun and blow their brains out. And that happens every day, every day. Something like 50% of the human population will struggle for two weeks or more with thoughts of leaving this planet by their own hand at a moderate to severe level. I mean, it's just everyday normal functioning to deal with even the most extreme anti-life, non-functional thing we can imagine, which is to take away life on purpose. And in smaller ways, we do that all the time as we mishandle the present moment and the things

that it includes, some of which are painful. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community

and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love.

All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You talk about cognitive fusion, and what you say is that the problem that what you're describing here is that when we can look only from our thoughts rather than at our thoughts, what do you mean by that? Yeah, we kind of live inside these cognitive

networks and we allow them to structure the world that we're in. And that happens so thoroughly that we miss that the world is being structured. Our past is being reconstructed. Our history is being interpreted. We're storying. We don't really have the choice to have cognition or not. These are learned processes. There's no such thing as unlearning in human psychology or in psychology, period. There's inhibition. But there's no delete button on the nervous system. There's no minus button on that calculator.

There's plus buttons and multiplication buttons. And that's it. And so if you've ever seen or thought or heard of or experienced anything that's difficult or will be there for the rest of your life, the issue is what do you do when it's there? Are you going to feed the wolf? Are you going to let it assume its natural part? This process of cognitive fusion has kind of an innocent thing. If I asked you to taste what a glass of apple juice might taste like right now almost everybody can do that very quickly you probably will start salivating even to it even

though there may not be any apples inside or within reach you're just hearing the sounds through wires from an old wild guy talking months ago but here comes the smacking of the lips and the salivating around what after all is a an event that has nothing to do with apples. I mean, apples are called yabukas in Croatian. They're called apples here. It doesn't matter what sound it is. It'll have that effect. And it's fine.

The fusion part comes with this Latin word that means to pour together. It's fine to have these functions poured together with symbolic thought. The problem is it flies underneath our radar screen, and we don't know how to back out of it. If we can't get rid of thoughts, and I don't think we can get rid of any bit of learning. If I were to tell you if you can remember three numbers, I'll give you $1,000, and numbers are 1, 2, 3. If a minute from now I ask you what are the numbers, you'll answer. And I've only done it twice now, and I bet you almost everybody listening could do it a minute from now, I ask you, what are the numbers you'll answer? And I've only done it twice now. And I bet you almost everybody listening could do it a week from now. Right.

Maybe, maybe even a month from now, maybe at the end of your life. Why, why? What a stupid thing? Well, it's because that's the kind of critters we are learning works like that. So if you've had really painful thoughts or difficult thoughts or life-narrowing thoughts, and you've allowed them to dominate over your behavior, what you can do is pull the plug on their impact over time, but you can't pull the plug on their presence. The metaphor I use for pulling the plug on impact would be like if you heard an actor in a movie say some lines, you're very unlikely to adopt them yourselves as being personally meaningful, even though you're very unlikely to adopt them yourselves as being personally meaningful even though you're hearing them in a way that will create psychopathology or something you might but it if it hit you the wrong way but how would we interact with our own thinking sort of when we

needed to the way an actor might reading their lines it turns out we can do that and that's in fact exactly what goes on with contemplative practice when you learn to watch thoughts dispassionately. But we've developed other methods to do that. And we will sing our thoughts, get them down to a single word, say them repeatedly hundreds of times over and over 30 seconds. Say them in the voice of Donald Duck. We'll turn them into objects and be very interested in their size, shape, color, and speed. We'll take the really difficult ones and write them on our chest. We'll print t-shirts that have our secret thoughts.

You know, there's probably four or five hundred diffusion methods that are methods the ACT community has developed to undo the unnecessary impact of thinking on behavior by the failure to see thinking in flight as a process. Yeah, I thought that was one of the really interesting parts of ACT is that that's pretty common these days with mindfulness being such a thing and contemplative practices being more common. There's a lot of discussion of, well, learn to watch your thoughts in a non-judgmental way. You know, what I got in the book was there was lots of different ways to give yourself that little bit of distance from your thoughts. I mean, you use a great analogy in the book where you say that diffusing from our thoughts is like taking off our glasses, holding them out several inches

away from our face. And then we can see, like, that we can both see through the glasses, like, say they made the world yellow, we can see, like, oh, they make the world yellow. So, we know the mechanism. It doesn't mean that the world doesn't still look yellow a lot of the time, but at least we understand that it's a projection. And so, I thought ACT was really powerful in a lot of those different ways to diffuse from those thoughts. Yeah, and some of these are in the wisdom traditions. I mean, chanting, for example, or when you dig down to the process, and there's an underlying basic science to actually study this, you begin to realize that, gee, you could do this through hundreds of different ways,

and we've done that. And some people include ACT as part of the mindfulness-based traditions. We actually will use contemplative practice, classic contemplative practice, as part of what we do. But there's no reason not to add other methods that point at and actually move the same processes that we know that contemplative practice will move. And so, most people, I don't think think would think that distilling a difficult thought down to a single word and saying it over and over again for 30 seconds is mindfulness. But it moves some of the same processes. And I get emails from people. I got one just not too long ago from somebody who said, I've been meditating all my life. I was raised as a

Buddhist, a guy from South Korea. And I was reading your book, and I started applying some of these methods, and I suddenly realized, oh, that's why I'm meditating. So, in the West, I think we are taking these wisdom traditions and trying to put them onto the factory floor. And that's fine if you can go there. But I do worry about Joe Sixpack and whether or not he or she is going to do a 10-day silent retreat. And frankly, if I can get a 30-second process in there of taking a really difficult thought and singing it to the tune of Happy Birthday, I want to do that because it opens doors that very quickly we could show produce changes in your attentional processes, in your amount of distress, in the amount of believability of these thoughts. We even have some new studies showing that some of the biological effects of meditation, it turns out, are fostered by these diffusion and acceptance processes, including things like how long your telomeres are.

In a recent study, the correlation between your length of telomeres and these psychological flexibility skills accounted for 25% of the variance beyond age in how your chromosomes are tied off, like the plastic ends of your shoelaces. You don't want your telomeres to unravel because it has negative effects. And well, and meditation does the same thing. It'll slow down these telomere shortening. But when you know the process, then we have other ways. And some of these things, I think we can get into the factory floor. We can get into our normal cultural processes,

into schools, into organizations and churches and businesses. And so that's really the game we're playing. Can we understand the processes and develop procedures that move them, including contemplative practice, but not committed only to that one way? I mean, after all, in the East, those methods are mostly used by monks, not by normal people. And we're trying to put it into the healthcare system on the West as the only way that you foster these processes. And I just don't agree with that. I don't think that's either helpful or necessary or progressive, scientifically and culturally, alone. It progresses as far as it goes, but then there's more that we can do. And it's not hostile to the wisdom traditions.

It builds on them and amplifies them, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree. We will put some of those, you know, list a couple of those different diffusion techniques in the download that's available for this show at oneufeed.net slash haze. I'm actually going to do a TED Talk in two weeks. And so I know there's one that you have seen, but I've got one coming. So maybe and I'm going to walk through some of those fun techniques so people are able to see it. And we'll definitely link to your TED talk. There's an analogy that you make to describe the idea of willingness, the willingness to be open

to our lives and an analogy that I think wraps up a lot of the ACT process. And you talk about, you know, if you imagine there's a radio, there's a dial on the front, which is the discomfort dial. And then there's a dial on the back, which most of us don't see, called the willingness dial. Can you play out that analogy for us? play out that analogy for us? We've come to our experiences with a problem-solving mode of mind. And we look at them in the context of finding a solution to these problems as opposed to a more sunset mode of mind of appreciating what they are and experiencing them for what they are. And when you do that, if you were to have, let's say, a loud radio, I mean, who wouldn't want to try to turn it down? If I'm experiencing anxiety as a panic-disordered person in recovery, I can tell you, of course, my mind says, turn the dial down.

I don't like feeling all that anxiety. I want it down. I want it lower. I want it lower now. part of what you're doing when you're doing that is you're clicking into a problem-solving mode, the essence of which is something fundamentally unacceptable that violates what needs to happen about the present moment. And unbeknownst to you, completely out of view, because it's the assumption on which you adopted that problem-solving mode of mind, is this willingness dial, or in some ways more almost like a switch

because it tends to be almost on or off, which is more this question. Are you willing to have this moment fully and without defense as it is, not as what it says it is? Yes or no? That's not problem-solving. That's being here. It's very much more like looking at a sunset and seeing it or looking away. You're probably not going to treat it as a problem to be solved. It's not a math problem. You're not going to say, God, that's too pink and need some blue over there. You're either going to appreciate it or you're not looking at it. In the same way, when we come to our difficult emotions, for example, instead of automatically clicking into a mentality that says it's the dial on the front that's important, we can reach around and catch the context that was there,

which is the dial on the back. And it turns out when you set that thing high, where you're open to having it, the dial on the front could be high or low. You've abandoned interest in that. And either of those settings, high or low on the front, doesn't stop you from living the kind of life you want. When I turned as a panic disordered person away from the I'll start living when posture, from the this has to go down before I can live posture, to one of I'm not going to run from my own experience kind of posture that we're going to start inside. Well, what happened was I still had anxiety attacks. They were still number 10 anxiety attacks, but they weren't panic attacks. Because, and my definition is this, if you have a really strong emotional reaction and you come out of it even more willing to live the kind of life you want to live, even if that happens again,

you just did something progressive. And you can do that. You can do that regardless of the level of difficult thoughts, feelings, pain, etc. And we see it in the literature, these controlled studies on ACT with anxiety, depression, pain, and so forth. And what that means, though, is we abandon the moment-to-moment interest of measuring our lives with these little spoonfuls of how much pain do we have and more are moments filled with the kind of qualities of being and doing that we find most important. Are we living our values? Are we connecting with others? Are we loving, participating, contributing, creating? And it turns out you can do that with lots of critical thoughts on board, with lots of difficult feelings and bodily sensations on board.

You don't do it by ignoring it or dismissing it. You do it by opening up to it and then directing attention towards what's important. And that kind of one-two punch is what we call psychological flexibility. So yeah, the hidden dial is an example of fusion. Fusion allows these judgments and plans to disappear into the network. We don't even realize we're treating ourselves as if we're a problem to be solved instead of a sunset to be appreciated. And until you kind of stop and see how the illusion is created, you really don't have the freedom to do anything different because your mind will just run on automatic pilot.

And all of us overfeed our problem-solving repertoires. We're taught to do it in schools. I mean, everybody's being taught how to make your mind go faster. Nobody's being taught how to put brakes on your mind, unless you're lucky enough to live in a school that teaches at least some contemplative practice skills. And so we really are constantly feeding the wrong wolf, to stay with your metaphor. And then we're surprised at the outcomes. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love.

All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The wrong wolf that you're referring to there is this desire to escape from what we're feeling versus being willing to embrace it. So the discomfort dial is kind of what life gives us, right? There's not a lot we can do with it, right? It's like you get handed something. And so what you do with it is really what we're talking about. And one of the things that you say, and this hit home for me, I've been thinking a lot about this in my own life over the last week, is the idea, you call it experiential avoidance, which means you don't do certain things in order to not have that feeling.

And in my own life, where I've recognized it most, is not having difficult conversations about things by just sort of going, okay, and and sort of because the fear that comes up is um i don't want that fear so the way i can make the fear go away is just to say okay and sure it's interesting the way you describe that because you say when you do that there's a temporary short-term feeling of relief because you're like oh okay that feeling goes away but i want to read something you wrote about experiential avoidance because I think it's really good. And you say to consider the possibility, as unlikely as it may seem, that it's not just that these avoidance strategies haven't worked. It's that they can't work. Avoidance only strengthens the importance and the role of whatever you are avoiding. In other words, when you avoid dealing with your problem, it only grows.

That is really a feed the wolf situation, isn't it? You know, that I think people have this idea if I can get the short-term benefit of avoidance that I've actually somehow lessened the role of that event in my life and I've strengthened it because that wolf has just eaten down that little bit of my life and it's going to come back asking for even more. And so if I am walking down through an anxiety disorder, for example, and I'm making these kind of compromises, the role of anxiety and difficult thoughts around it isn't getting smaller. It's getting bigger because it's being fed. If you're unwilling to face the disappointment, disapproval, conflict, et cetera, that might happen, possible rejection, exclusion from the group. I mean, there's painful things that could happen if you're honest with other people around you, no doubt. The problem is as you walk down that journey, that social fear will claim more and more territory.

It'll seep itself into more corners of your lives. You'll be more attending to the threat that it might show up. And it has this kind of effect of resentment, disconnection, et cetera. I'll give an example. There's research showing that people who make those compromises socially in the name of having good relationships with the people, because you'd be afraid if you're honest that it might be conflicted, you will value the relationships you have with that person less. That's a high cost. It's a huge cost. It's a winner over here. You know, but you can see why it's a natural process where the short term and the long term

sort of doesn't line up properly. And everything about learning tells us that short-term is more powerful than long-term. The only thing that really can compete with that is seeing repeatedly over time how it works and getting to that point where enough is enough. And I am not willing to sell myself short in the name of these short-term gains. And we thankfully have the ability to look more long-term. That's a cognitive process as well, at least in part. And so if you can sort of stay true to what your values are, which are these chosen qualities that you want to build out in your life. For example, in that relationship situation, I bet you that there are values of honesty, of connection, of communication that could help you through the hard part of looking somebody's eye and trying to

be fair and compassionate, but also honest and respectful of yourself, even if it's scary. compassionate, but also honest and respectful of yourself, even if it's scary. And, you know, that will begin to build some momentum towards a different kind of way of relating to others and with regard to relating your own fears about others or emotions about relationships. So it's hard for us because we're constantly being tempted by our problem-solving mode of mind into short-term gains with long-term pains. So we can control suffering, but in the attempt to control pain, we produce more. So if I go back to that metaphor of the dial, it's kind of like some of the noise from that dial is built in and some is artificial from us turning it up as we try to turn the knob in the back down to the, I don't want this, I can't have this, this must not occur. Well, good luck with that because you're actually pretty

likely to have more, not less, of what it is that is most painful for you. And panic is a good example. You can start with a small amount of anxiety and end up with an amount that is very, very, very difficult to deal with. But you did things to produce that. And when you pull the plug on it, it'll gradually assume a more normal level. Or it won't, but you've abandoned your interest in that question in the service of the kind of life you want to live. And then it so happens that, you know, it's not a secret what happens when you do that. Pain starts assuming a more natural level. The metaphor I use

would be like if you put salt in a glass of water, instead of trying to pick out the dissolved grains, add some more water to it, and it can become quite drinkable, not because you subtracted anything. There's no delete button on the nervous system, but because you filled your life's moments with love and connection, communication and values, with acceptance and self-compassion and kindness. And, you know, as you do that, life becomes more and more joyful and livable, or at least alive and vital, even when it's painful and things happen. When you're disappointed or people die or things happen, there's things built into life that you want to be there for. My mother died about a year and a half ago, and I was there. She was age 92, just about turned 93.

Had my hands on her as her feet turned black and her final breaths came. And it was a sacred moment. I mean, it was as painful as I could imagine anything being painful. But I'd pay thousands and thousands of dollars for the privilege of being there because that pain was meaningful. It was important. That's not suffering. It's something else. It's living. And our mind doesn't understand that. I want to ask you a question about behavioral patterns. So you talk about this idea of creating larger behavioral patterns. And we spend a lot of time on this show talking about behavior change, habit change. And this was a concept that I haven't come across in a lot of research that I've done. So I was wondering if you could explain that a little bit more, what creating a larger

behavioral pattern means. What you want is you want issues of habit and mindlessness to work for you instead of against you. You know, you're not always present with the choices that are in every single moment. If you can build out patterns, larger and larger patterns of values-based action, we know that integrated patterns that are repeated tend to be relatively resistant to change. It's not that you can't change it, but you have this kind of momentum. relatively resistant to change. It's not that you can't change it, but you have this kind of momentum. And that's true on the negative side. It's true on the positive side. You know, I'm a behavior analyst, and you can show this in animal models very clearly, and in human models as well. This concept of habit is a real useful thing. It's why the contemplative practice traditions, of course,

emphasize practice so much, and right living and so so forth that you have to build these habits. So if you take something like, okay, I've confronted myself around a particular pattern that I deeply want to change. Let's say there's a health practice that I think is really important. I want to let go of some of these consumption of things that are not healthy for me, whether it's cigarettes or too much alcohol. I want to eat good food and I want to exercise and I want to get enough sleep. Well, that's a lot to do all at once. And you start wherever you start. And you begin to build a pattern.

But it takes something like, okay, I do a lot of addiction work, and there's several randomized trials of act for addiction. Let's say somebody has put down excessive use of alcohol, but then they slip. What their mind does is say, see, I told you you can't do it. You said you were going to do it, and you didn't do it. And now you've slipped. You've lost it. You've blown it. You're a failure again.

Maybe you should have another drink. Okay. But at that moment, what happened was you were building a pattern. The pattern changed. Can we look at that and say, which pattern do you want? Commit, slip, recommit, or commit, slip, abandon interest in this health practice? You have a choice there, two different patterns. And what we found in that literature on smoking, on substance abuse and so forth,

it's not so much that we prevent slips, it's that we take the fun out of them. Because you can't go mindless on it and say, oh, I guess that means I can just give up. No, it means what's the next pattern are you going to build here? And so we found that, for example, in smoking, where there's several good randomized trials and actors are quite good there, the pattern seems to be that when people slip, they come back and quit, which is so unusual in the smoking literature that they don't even sometimes take that measure. Once you slip, you're out of the study. So by the time you go a year out, let's say, people are smoke-free because they came back, they came back, they came back, they came back. You know, as that happens, these habits of mind begin to work for you. As you treat yourself more compassionately, as you step up to the kind of values-based life you want to have with your family and your loved ones, your work, or with your health practices, it begins to recede. It

becomes just the way that you live. And that will be relatively resistant to change when it's well grooved and well-practiced and integrated into very large patterns so that it isn't just that I quit smoking or stop drinking. I'm now also running and I'm now also doing yoga and I'm now also getting at least eight hours sleep and I'm now also eating really well. So that's what I mean by larger and larger patterns of values-based action. It's a lot of process that ever stops because no matter how big you get, there's more big to get. And it's not going to be always consistent. You're going to make slips, but you're going to come back more robustly and more able

to direct your life in the direction you want to take. If you've spent a lot of time taking these building blocks of openness, of honesty, of flexible attention to the now values-based action, and now you've grooved it into actual behaviors done over and over and over again in larger and larger and larger patterns. So that's kind of what we try to do with our work clinically with ACT. We sort of have a family dentist model. You know, if people slip, you know, come back. Sometimes you don't see the relevance.

And so you've built out a good pattern and new things happen. You don't see how to integrate it. Do you have a moment for me to tell a story on that? Sure. Well, okay, so I developed tinnitus from just being a punk rocker and entirely too many concerts standing very close to very large speakers. standing very close to very large speakers. So as it starts to come in when I'm about 60 years old, I'm 67 now, I'm getting more and more frustrated.

This noise is constant. It's 24-7. It gets louder and louder. And it goes on for like two years. I go to the audiologist. I'm doing all the things that they say to do. It doesn't work. And then I actually catch myself thinking things like, if I shoot myself, the sound will go away.

And I go like dude that's a suicidal thought maybe you should apply your life's work to it it took three years for me to even realize i could do that and with one week it was handled completely we've since done randomized trials showing that act is very good for it we have measures of experiential avoidance fusion etc in the area of tinnitus, and it predicts psychosocial disability and distress. If you're constantly unaccepting of the noise, guess what you hear constantly? Conversely, I'm talking to you, I hear the noise. It's there 24-7. The last time I heard it was probably a week ago when I was telling somebody

else this story, because I just don't care anymore. There isn't anything for me to learn from it other than not a good idea to go to punk rock concerts without ear protection. By the way, young people, take those little iPads and iPods out of your freaking ears or turn down the volume because when you're 60, it's going to be doing this. But there isn't anything else for me to learn. So acceptance in that case just looks more like I don't care. You can't make me care. I'm just not going to attend to it. It's not that I'm not going to attend to it because then I'd have to be seeing if it went away and that would mean attending to it and I'd be feeding the wolf again. The kind of not feeding here is abandoning all interest. And so it occurs when it rings, it rings.

When it doesn't, it doesn't. I just abandon interest. Well, but my point here of the larger patterns is I don't want to falsely say it means that with practice, life is smooth sailing and you don't have challenges. Because life grows and you get thrown curveballs and you may not see. But if you have these skills, you can apply them to the new things because they apply over and over and over again, whether it's a death in the family or an injury that you've experienced or a financial loss or a major failure in some way, or you name it as these things happen. major failure in some way, or you name it, as these things happen, you can bring the same kind, compassionate, flexible attention to what is and shifting attention towards values that worked in all these other areas. That's the benefit of building these larger patterns.

It's not that you don't have challenges, but that you can respond to them when you see the relevance with a skill set that will be helpful to you. Well, we are out of time, but I can't let it end without at least asking about a couple of the punk shows you saw as a former punk rocker myself. I've got to know about a couple of these, and then we'll wrap this up. I lived in Greensboro at the time, and these punk rock bands at the time was like Black Flag and X and Circle Jerks and all these kind of folks. And they would drive from Atlanta to D.C. because they weren't that popular yet and they couldn't fly. So the vans would stop on Wednesday nights in Greensboro, halfway between these two big cities on the East Coast. And so Wednesday night was bar night in Greensboro.

the east coast and uh so wednesday night was bar night in greensboro and uh in these very small venues packed to the gills with these bare-chested tatted up screaming uh uh quote-unquote singers but man the energy was so awesome yeah i mean i was i was a little sex pistols fan and all the rest but to see these guys up close was just awesome. Bad for my ears, though. Me too. Chris and I both have spent too much time around really loud amplifiers. So I don't hear as well as I should. That's the issue I have now.

But there might be more coming. Well, Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I really enjoyed the book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. I would recommend it to listeners. And as I said, we'll have a download available with a show that has some of the diffusion techniques

and a few other things from your work. And that's at whenyoufeed.net slash haze. And we'll definitely link to your TED talks also. So thanks so much for taking the time to come on. It was great talking to you. I had a good time and I hope it's been useful to the people listening. Great. Bye. Bye. you can learn more about stephen c hayes and this podcast at one you feed.net slash stephen