The One You Feed - Steven C. Hayes on Developing Psychological Flexibility

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Steven C. Hayes is one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and this is his second time on the show. This time, he and Eric discuss his new book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters. Dr. Hayes is a Professor of Psychology at The University of Nevada Reno. He’s the author of 43 books and more than 600 scientific articles. He’s served as the President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy and The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. He is one of the most cited psychologists in the world. In this episode, Dr. Hayes teaches what psychological flexibility is, how to cultivate it, and the ways in which it can improve your life.Need help with completing your goals in 2020? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Steven C. Hayes and I Discuss Psychological Flexibility and…His book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What MattersAsking “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?”Understanding what you really care about. Take what you’re really struggling with and flip it over, therefore allowing your pain to speak to youThe lengths we go to in order to protect ourselves from hurt“Psychological Flexibility” vs “Psychological Rigidity”6 processes or pivots that promote Psychological FlexibilityThe masks we put on to try and connect with others and belong in addition to our true belongingPivoting from cognitive fusion to diffusionThoughts as ongoing attempts at meaning-making The ability to think multiple things and be guided by what is usefulLiving according to your values as well as the qualities of being and doingResponse Ability – deciding what this is about for you Accepting what we feel and committing to act according to our valuesSteven C. Hayes Links:stevenchayes.comTwitterFacebookFeals: Premium CBD delivered to your doorstep to help you manage stress, anxiety, pain, and sleeplessness. Feals CBD is food-grade and every batch is tested so you know you are getting truly premium grade product. Get 50% off your first order with free shipping by becoming a member at www.feals.com/wolf Daily Harvest: Delivers absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls and more. To get $25 off your first box go to www.dailyharvest.com and enter promo code FEEDPhlur: Get a luxurious scent made with transparent, clean ingredients. Eric created his own sampler set that you can try! Get this curated sampler set or create your own. Get 20% off your first Phlur sampler set at www.phlur.com/wolfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Misery is actually our ally because there's energy in there, there's caring in there, there's motivation in there. 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor?

What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to decisions decisions the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives

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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Hayes, and this is his second time on the One You Feed podcast. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Stephen is also the author of 43 books and more than 600 scientific articles. He's served as the president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. He is one of the most cited psychologists in the world. His new book is A Liberated Mind, How to Pivot Toward

What Matters. Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show. Hi, good to be with you again. Again, indeed. Yes. One of my favorite interviews was our earlier interview, and you have a new book out called A Liberated Mind, How to Pivot Towards What Matters. So I'm really excited to jump into that. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. 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 thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather. 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 that parable means to you in the work that you do and in your life. Well, it means a lot. And I think it's becoming clear to me that both of those wolves within have a role. They both have a message for us. And yes, we want to feed one over the other, but we want to kind of listen to both and find even inside some of those dark places that we go, that we're yearning for something that is reflected in the positive places that we know how to take our lives. Wonderful. Yeah, you're known for being one of the founders of acceptance and commitment therapy, which if I had to

summarize, and I'm summarizing a lot in a very small amount, but a big piece of ACT is not to eliminate negative thought and emotion, but to learn to live with them in a more skillful way and then act sort of in a way that is in accordance with our values. Yeah, exactly. And that's been about a 40-year journey of both science and clinical practice and extending it out to almost any area that human beings can think of, you know, in sports and business and health matters and so forth. So it's now sitting on top of an enormous body of work, much larger than when we talked,

because it's happening so fast now from a worldwide community. But part of what I've not really discovered, but what I've really kind of realized going forward is that it's not so much just making room for what's negative, but as I said at the very beginning, even learning from it, because there's something inside our misery that is really important to us if we know how to see it. And it's basically what is the

problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to solve it in a way that creates problems, huge problems, but we're not trying to disturb ourselves. We're not trying to get stuck in cul-de-sacs. That's not the purpose. There's a good purpose buried in there. And it turns out those are the same purposes that are right inside the processes that we now know, sitting on more than 3,000 studies that lift up and carry lives forward. And if you see that, then you can be a little kinder with yourself when you're struggling because you realize there's actually something valuable in there. It's just you can't get there this way. And that's what's in a liberated mind is building out that full realization, which really sort of makes the whole act work feel a little more mature. And it makes it a lot easier to apply to lots of places that are beyond strictly mental health or substance abuse problems.

Right. You say early in the book that the things that have the power to cause us the most pain are often the things we care about most deeply. Yeah, they're directly linked. I mean, it's easy to think about it. And all you got to do is take something you really struggle with, start with the negative ones. It's one of the most powerful ways in. And then just literally write it down on a sheet of paper, flip it over and then write down what does that suggest you care about? And yeah, you've got a solution for it. You know, if you're really feeling anxious, give it a talk, you know, your solution might be to get rid of the anxiety. But when you flip over the sheet of paper and say, what does that really care about? You know, if I could just magically put fairy dust in your head and you wouldn't have any anxiety,

you still wouldn't have accomplished what you came to accomplish. And so maybe what you're anxious about, for example, is being with people and being accepted and loved. Maybe it's making a contribution. Maybe it's being genuine or authentic or, you know, being a whole person or being more mindful and aware to be more present, to live your life more fully. I don't know what it is, but I know one way to find it is to take what you're struggling with and just flip it over and allow your pain to speak to you. And it will whisper to you messages about your purpose. And the reverse is true, too. If you think about where you really, really care about, you'll realize that those are the places you're vulnerable. I mean, you can feel it. I mean,

if you really care about being into intimate and committed relationships, as soon as somebody shows up where that might happen, you find yourself, you know, squirming and creating fights for no reason and, you know, not answering the phone. I mean, what are you doing? Well, what you're doing is protecting yourself from hurt. Because you know that, you know, inside the sweet is the end of it. You know, we are going to die. Life is limited. And, you know, just looking at your children in the face or the eyes of your lover, you

feel it, you feel vulnerable. And that's the way it comes. That's the package. And so ACT is all about how to take the whole of it and to learn from both sides of it and to focus on what's important and create a life worth living. So one of the fundamental ideas at the heart of this book is the idea of psychological flexibility. So tell me what psychological flexibility is. Well, it's kind of like a box with six sides where you can sort of break it up into three pillars. It really turns out it's one thing, just like it's one box, even though it has six sides. But the short version would be psychological flexibility is to be able to come into this moment consciously with your thoughts and feelings and memories and bodily sensations that that moment contains as they are not as what they say they are or you fear them to be and then be able

to direct your attention in a flexible fluid and voluntary way towards what brings meaning and purpose into your life by choice not by shoulds and oughts and musts and have tos not by guilt and shame not by mama telling you it has to be so, but by the choices you make. And then to build out habits of action, actual things you do with your life moments that contain those qualities. So you could say it more quickly. It's accepting, showing up and moving on. And that combination of being open, aware, and actively engaged in life hangs together. They all fit together, just like puzzle pieces. You feel the missing if it's gone.

If it's like taking two sides out of a box, it'd be a floppy box the same way. And we think we've kind of cracked the code. We think that those six things are the simplest formulation that does the most good in the most areas of human life. And I can say that not as a hope or a wish or a claim or personal experience. I'm now sitting on top of an enormous body of work by a very large community over nearly 40 years. And it comports with our wisdom traditions. It comports with our wisdom traditions. It comports with our personal experience, but it also fits good old-fashioned Western science. And that's a really cool combination. Yeah, yeah, it definitely is. And so psychological flexibility shows up and really correlates very

well with people's ability to be successful in different things they're doing. You reference a ton of studies, but one of them showed that the level of psychological flexibility overweight people have correlates directly with their ability to lose weight, engage in exercise, and stop binging. Conversely, the opposite of psychological flexibility is psychological rigidity, and that predicts anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorder, on and on and on. So what is psychological rigidity? Well, when you get entangled with your thoughts and you're avoidant of your feelings, memories, bodily sensations, and you allow your attention to be jerked to the past or future through

rumination or worry, you sort of buy into that story of who you are and how you're different and special from other people, whether it's especially disturbed or difficult or needy or especially wonderful and perfect. Either way, that kind of storied self. And then harnessing all of that to trying to get approval and achievement instantly without trial and error, without failure, slipping, falling, and learning.

Springing forth from the head of Zeus, you're just going to march on with this competence that's going to give you not necessarily a deep sense of values and purpose, but applause, money, fame, and all those kind of superficial things that the mind grasps after. Or just plain happiness defined as a happy, happy, joy, joy, smiley face button, not the real kind of happiness, which is this life well lived as a whole person. So it's pretty much a direct inverse. And those six processes also hang out together. They feed on each other. They are more like a pack of wolves than a single wolf.

And they will eat anything you put in front of it. I mean, if you want to have relationships at work or you want to be able to have a successful business or lose weight or diet or exercise or get through a cancer diagnosis or deal with a substance use problem or anxiety or depression and on and on. It accounts for a large share and compared to other sets of processes more than any other that science can name. So it's the 20% that does the 80%. Yeah, there's a lot of

other things you can add and you can build on it. And I'm very friendly to that and open to that. But let's get the basics down first. If you can get a solid foundation, it's a whole lot easier to then build on that solid foundation. And these flexibility processes are like building a house on rock and build it on inflexibility. It's like building it on sand near the ocean. Good luck with that. So the six processes that you're talking about map towards a big part of the book, which you refer to as six key pivots. So before we start going into those, let's talk about what you mean

by pivot. A pivot is a connection between a negative and a positive set of steps. That's why I call them a process, just as a word meaning a procession, like a parade. It's a series of things, but it's integrated that you're going from here and towards there. You have the negative ones, you have the positive ones, and they're paired. But, you know, a pivot is a little pin in a hinge. And what a pivot does is it takes energy that's going in one direction and it moves it in another direction. And you know if you want to move, you don't want to be standing still. Inertia kind of has to be overcome if you do that.

If you're dancing with somebody, even if you're going to swing them around in a completely different direction, it would be a lot better to have them moving than to have them standing still. to have them moving than to have them standing still. And in the same way, it turns out that misery is actually our ally because there's energy in there. There's caring in there. There's motivation in there. I mean, there's being screwed up in there too, but that's not what the way it has to be. And just like if you push on a door in one direction, the hinges move the door in another

direction and it opens up, you can move forward. And those are the pivots that I talk about in the book. And so those six things end up being six pairs. And underneath them are six, what I call yearnings. You could call them needs, or you just could call them motives. Needs sounds to me a little demanding but i call them yearnings because that's the way they often show up i think if you sort of settle down and really listen to yourself you can kind of feel yourself yearning for something can i give you a sad example sure please well this is one of the saddest it's one of the most basic because it's the kind of monkey we are we yearn to belong we're the tribal primates we're then to belong. We're the tribal primates.

We're the small group primates. We're the cooperative primates. And we come into the world in such a way that if others don't take care of us, we die. But even as adults, we get cast out from the troop. Literally, in the wild monkey land, you get cast out from the troop as in hominid species. You very likely are not going to live very long. We're even wired for it. Our brain is wired for it. You know, if you look at the eyes of a brand new baby, they start dumping natural opiates in their brain as soon as your eyes lock onto them. Your genetics are basically saying, yeah, that, that's what you want. You want that. You want that. And you need to, because otherwise you're not going to be able to connect with others around you right so we come into that naturally but then we got this

new thing on the block that you and i are doing right now symbolic reasoning language and cognition and that's probably only golly 200 000 to 2 million years old but that's best guesses and when you're not too old not when you're a, not when you're a one-year-old, not when you're that sweet, innocent thing where you just know how to connect and care, you start talking to yourself about how you're going to belong. And for the first time, you start to lie. For the first time, you put on a mask. The Greek name for a mask is the root of our word personality. That's how basic it is. You know, the clay unmovable masks were called personas.

And what that is, is the logical mind trying to belong by producing specialness. I'm smart. I'm loving. I'm kind. You're kind all the time with everybody? No, you're lying. Of course you're not kind all the time with everybody? No, you're lying. Of course you're not kind all the time with everyone. But you dare not even admit it to yourself.

That persona, that clay fixed rictus of a mask you put on has to be maintained or otherwise you're not going to be let in. And sometimes people try to get let in by having stories that are all negative. Oh, I'm so helpless. I'm so weak. I've been abused. It's so sad. Help me. Help me. And yeah, people will let you in if you claim that you're a guy grand or the weakest of the weak. Either way, you do get brought in. But very soon people tire of it. They see that it's a clown suit you're wearing, that it's not a real whole open person. They don't feel uplifted when they're around it. Plus, they themselves are struggling with the same issues.

So when you produce belonging that way, it hollows out. I can give you a really sad statistic. I mean, it just made me roll my eyes when I saw it. Something like one out of four, one out of five of your conversations, especially when you're young, contain at least a little white lie, an exaggeration. Oh, I only slept four hours last night. When you show up to your meeting. No, you slept four and a half. And you know it.

But you said four. Why? Because then you're really special. You are someone who can function on no sleep. Like that. Well, the people you tell those tiny little white lies to, you now are significantly less interested in ever speaking to again. So isn't it sad?

We're trying to earn our way in by these little pretense and masks and all that kind of stuff afraid if we're just seen as whole persons that will be rejected which is the exact opposite because people yearn for connections like that you wake up when you have connections like that when people put aside the pretense but it's almost like we can't stop it because the logical mind says you have to be special or you won't be included. It's especially bad, especially good. And then it hollows it out. Even if it works and they applaud and say, you're so wonderful, part of you says, yeah, but if they really knew you're a fraud, if they saw through it, they wouldn't want to be with you. So here you're trying to produce belonging. And even if you get it, you don't get it. So what I do in the book is walk through how you're going to get belonging.

How can you get a real experience of belonging? And it turns out you can get it by kind of a birthright, which is consciousness itself. You go back to that moment when your mama looked in your eyes. Metaphorically, you belonged at that moment that you're seen by another conscious being who's bringing you into consciousness. And if you stop dancing and prancing and, you know, all of the stories that you're buying into and trying to make other people believe, then you just slow down, open your eyes and look in the eyes of the other people around you. You're going to see people wanting to connect with you. And you're going to see consciousness there and similarity there.

Why? Because you're part of the troop. You belong by birthright. You're one of us. You're one of the goofy conscious people. And so, you know, instead of playing for the pretense and then getting nothing, why don't we go for the substance? It turns out to be a lot easier. It's a lot more uplifting.

It's a lot more real. And yeah, it's more vulnerable. It is more vulnerable. But it's so important to have the real thing. And you can feel your life shift when you get it. Terima kasih telah menonton! 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

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? 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. So let's turn to the first pivot,

and it's one that we talked about a fair amount in our previous conversation, but I think is a really important one, which is this idea of diffusion. So it requires pivoting from cognitive fusion to diffusion. So let's first talk about kind of what that is, because it's a pretty core part of all of this work. It's key, and underneath the acceptance and commitment therapy work is a whole research program on a thing called relational frame theory, very geeky stuff. But we think we've kind of figured out what is the core of human language and cognition. And so we've taken the time to build an edifice

that includes a really active basic science program about how is the world different when you begin to do what you and I are doing right now. You know, even non-human animals want to understand. They want things to fit together. They want them to be predictable. Do you know non-human animals will work for signals that tell them what's going to happen, even if it's going to tell them that something bad is going to happen. You would think you would not want to know the bad news. Humans often don't. But non-human animals will work and work for little signals that will just tell them things like, you're hardly going to get any food over the next 10

minutes, or there's a shock coming. And it doesn't stop the shock, but at least you kind of know the lay of the land, right? And you think of how important that would be to a non-human animal to be able to survive, to do that. You can see why you would want to explore your environments, know what's going on, have it fit together, know how they all kind of relate one to the other. Once we got language going, we want to do the same thing. But here's the problem. Language is something that isn't just learned by experience.

It's learned by derivation. Anything can relate to anything in any possible way let's see if we'll play a little game let's see if we can do it i want you to think of a noun any noun but don't tell me what it is i'll think of one too it's one on my desktop here and then i'm going to say mine and i'll ask you to say yours but we'll think of a relationship let's's do a weird one like, is the father of. Okay. So how is a pen the father of? An apple. An apple.

Okay. If you can't come up with an answer, your life is going to end. So Eric, you better produce. Pen drew the apple. Awesome. Pretty apt. Fits right. Perfect.

Yeah. Except here's the problem. I've done this hundreds of times, and there's always an answer. So either God so arranged the world that everything is related to everything else in all possible ways. Well, let's just do it. How's the apple the father of a pen? It produces the ink for the pen. Good. Yeah, that's good. Actually, one that came in my mind is that you ate from the tree of knowledge, and that gave you the capacity to produce things like pen. You absolutely could make Apple-based ink.

Of course you could. So you see the game? So now here's the problem. If language allows that, there's a two-way street between everything, but not just same as, but also different from, opposite to, better than, every possible relation you can think of, even goofy ones like is the father of. I mean, how often do you say that? You can always come up with an answer, and the answer is good. I mean, it fits.

It's right. It's real. No, it's not real. You made it up. right. It's real. No, it's not real. You made it up. And so how are you going to rein in that kind of a wild horse if what you seek is this experience of understanding and everything fitting together? So let me apply it. Think of something that you're proud of. And let's just do self-esteem the way people usually try to do it. I'm, and then say the rest of the sentence that's so great and you're proud about. Go ahead and do it. I'm kind. I'm kind. Now listen real

carefully and what do you hear? Does your mind just settle down on that and say, yeah, you are? I'm kind except when I'm not. for example when i you may not want to share this one when i get irritated with my girlfriend awesome but it with that was right there earlier i just brought it out right you with me on this okay so if you're yearning for coherence and understanding, that's built into you even before language shows up. But then language gives you two opinions about everything. Do you know four-year-olds understand goofy on one shoulder with horns and goofy on the other shoulder with halos? Four-year-olds. They understand that.

That means they've already got the argument going on inside their head. So how are you going to get to peace of mind, never mind purpose? And that's really what people want, I think, is peace of mind with purpose. That's what people really want is a big part of what they want. And so what we teach in ACT is to give up on coherence and it all fitting together inside the language world, literally. Because there's always a yeah, but. There's always a pro and con list. If you try to go all pro, it'll give you cons.

If you try to go all con, it'll give you pros. I'm the worst of the worst. The lowest of the low. I'm human scum. No one's lower than me. No, I'm not that bad. I mean, you'll argue with both sides. Right. So what we teach instead is to learn how to be guided by language, take what's useful, allow that to be a kind of understanding.

It works. It's helpful. This is useful. And then the cacophony continues and you notice it. Thank you, mind, very much for trying to figure this all out. And I've got some other things to do. I've heard that story before. But if it says something in that cacophony like, oh, by the way, the text deadline is one week away, this is a good thing.

You might miss it otherwise. Oh, by the way, you got the One You Feed podcast. Remember that? It was right there on your google calendar thank you mind i appreciate that but a lot of the stuff it has to say is just useless to live in your life so can we instead learn how to take what's useful and and leave the rest it turns out we can and it's a big part of what the mindfulness traditions are doing it's a big part of the wisdom traditions our spiritual traditions our prayer traditions our psychotherapy traditions

and when we've kind of cracked that code we've created several hundred goofy little things that you can do in 30 seconds that sort of bump you in that direction like take a negative thought that really grabs way too much attention and sing it say it in the voice of your least favorite politician distill it down to a single word say it over and over again rapidly on and on it goes we have you know example after example after example of ways that you can essentially put a leash on that word machine in between your ears and allow yourself to breathe even as it keeps chattering and so what we're trying to do here with diffusion then is to i'm going to quote part of what you said seeing thoughts as they actually are ongoing attempts at meaning making and then

choosing to give them power only to the degree that they genuinely serve us. So what you're basically saying is that our whole thought process, as you described in the relational piece before, we're trying to make meaning. We're trying to make narrative out of what's happening. And it's easier to then see through that process than it is to untangle that process. And the examples you just gave of this is linked to this, which is linked to this, you can create relationships, is that that linkage is so vast and so complex that when we start trying to pull on part of it, we're pulling on all of it. So it's easier just to see through the whole mechanism. Yeah, exactly. I mean, suppose apples really freaked you out for some reason.

Well, now we've got a whole other way to get to it. And you and I just did it. All I have to do is say, pen. Right. You know, so it's just helpless that you're going to be able to clean that mess up. And when you go in and try to rearrange this, it's like trying to rearrange a black widow spider nest. Have you ever seen one of those things? They exist here in Reno.

And I've taught my son to recognize it when he was quite young because babies can be hurt by black widows and very old people. Maybe I could be hurt. But they have a very characteristic web. It looks like an insane web you know like they've been eating their own poison or something because it's just a tangled nothing about well welcome to the human mind and you're going to go in there and say oh i don't like this thread no because when you weave one more thing the whole thing may rearrange like a fractal just go and you've had that happen you know you've had things like a a bad experience and now everything looks different or a dream even so it's happening when

you're not even controlling it and then your whole day is influenced by the freaking dream even if you can't remember it has a felt sense that goes with it things look different so instead of trying to you know rein in that horse, let's learn to back up a little bit and watch it. Take what's useful and respectfully leave the rest. Not leave it like an eraser, like getting rid of it. I don't want to put my hand in that web to try to get rid of it. I'm just going to make more of a mess of it. And I'm going to be building lots and lots of connections to things that I've hoped would be smaller in my life, thus making them bigger in my life.

Like I've just made Apple bigger for everybody who's listening. Kind of stupidly bigger, but it's bigger now. And in a way that is not very useful, pen to Apple is just not very useful. But somebody in this audience is going to think pen to Apple over the next hour. In fact, many, many people. Right. And in fact, if you try not to, there's data on this. It's really important not to think apple pen or pen apple.

I've now doubled the likelihood that you'll think that. Thank you very much, professor. But of course, we do that inside our own struggles. We try not to think about the betrayal of a former lover or the traumatic experience we've had or the painful emotion we felt or the scary thought that showed up. So we need to learn to do something else with that meaning-making engine in between our ears. just change your thoughts and your life will get better. My question for you is, is there a place for that though, if your thoughts that you're having are clearly mistaken? So as an example, let's say I say, Bob passed me in the hallway day and did not look at me. So Bob hates me. When the truth is Bob had a stomachache, isn't it helpful for me to know

the truth in that case? And I see your point about you start to wade into the web, but I'm kind of curious when you think like sort of, all right, it's worth if our thoughts are just plain incorrect to sort of correct them versus completely disengaging. Yeah, there's two places. If you actually look at the data on cognitive reappraisal, cognitive modification, et cetera, in cognitive therapy, CBT. CBT is the most powerful set of techniques, act as kind of part of that family, part of that tradition.

I've been president of those societies, et cetera. We kind of play nice with that larger tradition, but we have some different assumptions than classic CBT. But if you look at the data on it, when reappraisal and cognitive modification, cognitive restructuring is helpful, it's helpful because of cognitive flexibility of being able to think multiple things and then be guided by the ones that are useful. And it's even there in classic CBT, for example, to still down to an irrational thought, do a behavioral experiment. This is even before people are trained to detect the logical errors and challenge the thoughts. And already that's producing some of the larger effect sizes that are in CBT and some of the most movement. So we found in controlled research that here are the critical parts of this.

If you truly are ignorant, you truly don't know, information can be helpful. You truly don't know information can be helpful. And if you're thinking too narrowly and you're not staying open enough to be guided by experience, thinking more flexibly is helpful. But the problem is, and the reason I've always been a little concerned about it, is not that traditional CBT is trying to make people get into these artificial thought loops. But boy, you don't have to go very far on the internet before you find a lot of people who have internalized this rule in CBT kind of messages, which is don't think that, think this. Yeah, but as soon as you say don't think that, you just thought that again. Yeah.

And if you link it to thinking this this thinking this will remind you of that yeah and so you're right on the edge of these suppressive self-amplifying artificial processes that are known in the literature and why go social close it's like we're playing on the edge of a cliff come back away from the edge of the cliff and And the part of reappraisal modification that's really important is thinking flexibly. So, for example, if the person passes, one possibility is they're mad at you. Another possibility could be they had a bad sleepless night or they have gas or they're thinking about something else. And now the next time, you've got multiple possible alternatives. Let's let experience teach you.

Which of these thoughts are most workable? Which one helped you the most? Move you forward. You know, not what's literally true, because to get in there, we really have to get into the pros and cons lists and all of that. I mean, we're fully into the spider web when we really. Now, there are times, there are times, I know, for figuring out whether thoughts are really true. But mostly, it's holding them more lightly and getting more evidence and allowing to be guided by you. And

also remembering there's a lot more to you than your logical mind. You know things at the level of your guts, of your intuition. It's not magic. It's not woo-woo. It's experience that goes beyond language. Can I give you an example? Yeah, please. All right. Well, here's a little exercise I do in the book, An Imagination, but I've done it actually in a research study that's going to come out soon. I had to ask people to picture something they struggle with that's really difficult, and then to show me with their body them at their worst with that issue, as if their body is like a sculptor, and the only thing people would get is not a story from you, not a word,

but just to see your body, and then they would know what's going on inside. And then I asked them to do the same thing, you at your best with that same exact issue. Now here's what shows up. Almost universally, you at your best, your head is up, your eyes are open, your arms and hands are out. It's an open posture. Almost universally, you at your worst, your head is down, your eyes are closed, you may fold it over like a fetal position, your arms and hands are in, your fists may be clenched.

You're in a defensive posture. Okay. We all know that, but we all defend ourselves when these things show up. So we have the knowledge, but we don't know how to implement the knowledge. In fact, we don't even know we have the knowledge because when we say we know it, we mean know verbally. We mean can say the sentence. Well, there's more to us than that. That's what emotions are for. That's what memory is for. That's what felt sense is for. This is not woo-woo. It's other learning processes that are a thousand times more ancient than what you and I are doing right now. Let them play too. and they'll be helpful to you in producing a real sense of coherence and understanding and feelings and competence and the other things that are inside the other pivots. We don't have time to walk through all six, but every one of them, every pair, has a deep yearning that everybody's got. And if you mismanage it, life gets screwed up.

If you manage it well, life opens up. And the book walks through the data on that and how to do it. 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 why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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Let's pick another pivot to talk about, because we are going to run out of time here soon. What do you think? Self acceptance values? Why don't we take values just because it's so central. Okay. It's really close to a word evaluate. And it's almost the exact opposite of that because values have to have this quality of just cause sue me if you don't like it. Meaning by choice between me and the person in the mirror. It's informed by our culture. It's informed by our family.

It's informed by, I don't mean you alone in the corner, but I mean taken responsibility. This is what I want. Not what I want as an outcome, but what I want right now to be revealed in my behavior. And, you know, I mentioned earlier flipping over pain and finding purpose there. You can do it with sweet spots too. But let me do one that's kind of neat, I think, that comes from this sense of belonging and connection, especially if you can get some of the diffusion in there. You begin to see people around you who you respect, who you view as heroes and as guides. So take anything that you're struggling with, anything that's

difficult, any place where you're, you know, threatened by meaninglessness or depression or where this logical thing that tells you you're going to die, the world's going to die, et cetera, that's also doesn't know how to channel that into a sense of vitality and purpose. And here's my question. If you could pick anyone as a guide who would help you in that, anyone. Ideally someone you know, but it could be a spiritual leader or something you've only read about. Who would you pick? And then if you slow that thing down, here's one thing you're going to see. The way that person carries themselves, holds themselves, moves through the world, contains things that reflect how you want to be manifest in the world. You pick guides who are your heroes.

Think about it. I bet you did. And I bet you it's kind of what you would hope other people would see in you. And there it is. There's that sense of meaning and purpose by choice. The whole of you, not just your mind telling you you have to, or mommy's shaking her finger at you. But you're owning your own life purpose. Really, purpose is, because we have many.

And that will lift you up. We have so much data now that if you connect to what brings meaning and purpose into your life by choice, it's sometimes called autonomous choice. I kind of don't like that because it sounds too Western and individualistic, but I know what they're getting to. What they really mean is by choice, not by shame and blame or have to, but between you and the person in the mirror. These are the qualities I want to, not what I want to get as a result.

Yeah, of course things will happen, but these are the qualities I want to have reflected. When you own that, everything lifts up. Right. Examples of that being things like being a caring parent or a dependable friend or being loyal and honest, right? Yeah. They're not goals.

They are, you say, qualities of being and doing. Qualities of being and doing. You can almost always find them by, could they easily be an adjective or an adverb? So with your kids, you know, lovingly I, or genuinely I, or with care I, you know. So what would it take for you to put lovingly in your life? Part of what's cool about that, at the moment you say you want that, you're already doing it. Do you see it? I mean, at the very moment you own that, you're already doing it.

Because part of the doing it is to take responsibility. In its original sense, do you know the word responsibility used to be two words? It was response space ability. You have an ability to do this. You can respond. I mean, if you're Nelson Mandela in a cage, you can still decide. The one thing the captors can't take away, you can decide what is this about for you. And if it's about hate and retribution, when they let you out, you could produce a civil war.

If it's about justice and caring and connection, humanity, when they let you out, you can produce something different. So, you know, life can conspire against you so you can't see what comes out. You know, it's like water in a bowl. It's contained. If you drill a hole in it, then you can see that gravity matters and the water kind of wants to go down in the same way. If I put you in a cage, there's not very much loving you can do except maybe to your guards. I picked Mandeville and it turned out he was pretty loving towards his guards. guards. I picked Mandeville and it turned out he was pretty loving towards his guards.

You know, in fact, some of the guards have written stories about how it was to care for him and how moved they were by him and his dignity. And that's an example of a hero, right? So why did that come to mind? And why do we resonate to heroes like that? Why do these stories that we tell, the one you started your podcast with, because right inside those stories are our heroes, are our cultural guides as to how to be whole and free, how to be human. So in the book, I kind of walk through how to do that, what gets in the way, and show the ginormous amount of data that says, boy, this matters everywhere. You want to hollow out a human life, turn it into a valueless life, and you'll see what happens.

And, you know, acceptance and commitment therapy to sort of kind of come back to it as a whole is this idea of accepting what we feel and what we think and then committing to act according to our values exactly sounds like a simple formula it's and it kind of is simple but it's not simple in this way it's tricky because you got this problem solving engine in between your ears that claims it knows everything and mr smartyants will just constantly be tempting you into doing things that give you the short-term gain and the long-term pain. And how to flip that from smaller sooner at the expense of larger later to, no, I'm doing larger later. And so, for example, there's research on things like this. You make those values choices. Now people are more willing to do emotionally hard things. The smaller, sooner problem is immediately there.

Talk to a friend who's headed into an addiction and you can see him heading into it and you know it's not going to be a good conversation to talk to him lovingly about your concerns. Yeah, well, are you just going to watch this train like in slow motion? Is that what you want to be about? Well, it'll be emotionally hard to have that conversation. Yeah, it would. But if you go in there in a posture of love and care, not judgment and shaming and blaming, who knows what you could do? And if you don't, what happens when you get that text message that he OD'd? So, you know, values is not a happy, happy, joy, joy. None of these things are. It's happiness the way happiness really is, which is the whole of us,

sweet and sour, all of us, never a cartoon. And that empowering journey is what people seek and don't know how to get to. And as I say, I think we've kind of cracked part of the code and i'm really pleased to see that some of these processes are inside lots of other traditions so i'm not here saying act uber all this we got the answer i'm saying you know dealing with this mashup of language and cognition and these other processes is kind of our life's journey. And let's use all the tools, all hands on deck. No need to get grabby about credit or naming. I don't care if you call ACT anything or nothing. I don't care if you call it ACT at all. But I do care about whether or not you have what you need to be lifted up and empowered. I hope that the research work in the book that I summarized there reaches people

that way, whatever particular journey they're on. Right. So much of what's here does resonate through or come through in lots of other traditions. I mean, if we just look at the first few pivots, you know, diffusion, self, and, you know, acceptance and presence. I'm a Buddhist practitioner. Those things are right in the heart of the whole thing about being able to pivot on what those things are. You betcha. And, you know, I take the Buddhism thing, you know, although I've been exposed to, as any hippie was, you know, Suzuki and Watts and people like that as a, you know, and I've lived on a religious commune with a yogi split off from Paramahansa Yogananda. So I've been exposed to all that hippy-dippy stuff.

I'm old enough to have been part of that era and lived in California. But all of the wisdom traditions, whether it's Sufis, the Jewish mystics, or the Christian mystics, all mess around with literal, analytical, judgmental thought. They all try to produce a quality of presence. They all include some sort of contemplative practice or dancing or repeated prayer or koans or something that messes around with a logical problem-solving mind. And so the only thing that we brought to the table really that's any different than anything else is we took the time over nearly 20 years of what looked to the world like silence. I tell that story in the book, but it wasn't.

It was just we were off doing geeky stuff that nobody cared about until later on when it saw where it went. Of trying to create a psychology more adequate to those questions so that we can move them over into Western science and what it's really good at. Western science can validate things that are out there, and that's good. You can do a randomized trial on a meditation retreat. That's good. That's fine. You can put the monks in an fMRI and show how the brains are different. That's fine. But I wanted, not in a sacrilegious way, but in a caring way, to pull these things at their joints and to find what are the processes underneath and then see, could I move it with other processes? You know, Jon Kabat-Zinn, I had a conversation with him years ago and I said, Jon, do you care

more about the process or the technique? He said, the process. I said, and you want to put it out there in the world that can go right onto the factory floor with Joe's six pack, or you only want 10 day silent retreats that are mostly for the educated elite or for the young. And he said, I want it for everybody. I said, okay, John, you've got me for the rest of your life. I'm with you. You know, because if that's what we're up to, this is cool work. Right. Yesterday, my colleague, David Sloan Wilson, who I've written several books with, is kind of in this work.

An evolutionary biologist had a beautiful conversation with the Dalai Lama. And so you see these kind of coming together, very different Western science, evolution science, kind of geeky stuff, is now met up for the first time in the history of the planet with these ancient wisdom traditions. And who knows what we can create by doing that? Yep. Not in a sacrilegious way. We're not coming there to tear down, pull apart in any kind of, no, no, no. But I, you know, I worked for many years in the South.

And if somebody wants to run the other way, if you say the word Buddhism, well, then let's not say the word Buddhism. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say another word. Situational awareness. Exactly. You know, for me, I find this time to be very exciting because we are seeing some of this more ancient wisdom being validated by science. And I find it when, or ancient wisdom being validated by science. And I find it when, when I see those two things sort of come together, I feel like a sturdiness to it, right? If it's just some ancient wisdom and there's nothing really on the science side, then I'm like, well, okay, it's interesting. I'll explore it, but it's, it's not, doesn't feel as sturdy. And same thing. If I see something scientifically that sort of doesn't tie back into that, but when I see those two things come

together for me, this is just me personally, right? Given my interests. When I see those two things come together, it feels really sturdy to me. Well, and that's awesome. And can I add a third thing? Please. And we are part of the development of it. So your ideas about new things that have never been done before, but that you think touch the deep processes that are inside the things you know about and that science actually shows is helpful to you. They have a place at the table too, but we need to evaluate them. We need to look at them, give them a fair

look, look at the data, let's see. You know, that third piece is important because I don't want to just live inside a traditional thing. I can with my my spiritual religious work i'm in a particular you know particular dharma whatever but when we're talking about the modern world you know the world people are living in now i'll give you an example we're living inside a world where there's more prosperity physically ever in the history of the, if you had to pick a time to be born, and you can only decide when but not where, this moment is the very best choice on almost any measure. Health, violence, malnutrition, starvation, you just make a list, okay? Accept anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and accept mental well-being. Those things are going in the opposite direction. You know, our young people are a standard deviation worse than they were just a decade or two ago.

And it's not just blah, blah, blah. They're actually killing themselves. So don't just be telling me it's self-report. It is not. In that modern world, I think, comes this fact that science and technology has given us a huge exposure to pain, to comparison, and to judgment and difference. And those put together have attacked the core sense of we that this you know this tribal primate relied on we better invent a new way we better invent things that have never been done on the planet because our challenges on the planet are different than have ever been and now we have the capacity to

do things like make the planet unlivable blow blow ourselves off the planet, etc. So, you know, time's up. You know, we've got to get serious about it. So it's all hands on deck. And that includes, you know, folks who were underneath the tree thousands of years ago, but it also includes you. What are your ideas? And I think Western science is a cool way to vet that. We can't rely on the slow traditions of religious

evolution, for example. That takes hundreds of years, and we need some of these answers in a matter of tens of years. So that's my little rant, and it is what we've tried to do inside the ACT work. Yep, yep. Well, that is a great place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much for coming on the show again, Stephen. I think we all know it. We all sense it. And Western science can be of help, but it's not the whole answer. It's going to take all of us. Amen to that. Amen to that. Well, thank you, Stephen. Thank you. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.

Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

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