Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is about two things:
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Learning to make room for tough thoughts and feelings without letting them run your brain.
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Choosing actions that line up with your values, even when this is hard to do.
ACT therapy helps with adjusting to new harsh realities and making brave decisions.
As the old saying goes “The right thing and the hard thing are almost always the same thing.”
Like PCT and CBT, ACT has decades of studies behind it, with consistent results across problems like chronic stress, obsessive thinking, and long-term pain.
ACT isn’t about learning to ‘love’ the pain and challenges in your life, but it is about accepting them as part of you.
ACT helps most with persistent anxiety, grief and loss, chronic pain or illness and workplace stress or burnout.
These are situations in life where you can’t change the facts but you can change your level of reaction.
The basic insight of underpinning ACT is that most of us are not in contact with the full experience of our life because we are avoiding pain.
Avoiding pain doesn’t just delay our reckoning with our problems, it actually increases them further down the road. It is the difference between cleaning a dirty pot straight after using it or leaving it to form a grimy crust.
We all do this in some areas of our lives, but when the pattern becomes so engrained that we can’t keep functioning, we need a framework like ACT to level up our mental flexibility and teach us the skills to sit in discomfort.
Mindfulness is one such skill, but one of the key findings of the ACT method is the power of our own personal ethics. Acting from our own values helps us overcome discomfort and even chronic pain. Decades of studies on the psychology of ACT have established that our deep values are what guide us and make meaning from our lives, even when we are suffering.