A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
First, although you begin on a path of rigidity to avoid pain, soon enough you have to avoid joy as well.13
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
Goals are in the future until they are achieved, and then they’re quickly in the past. Values are always in the now.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
Many of us live our entire lives struggling to get out of a puzzle room in our minds. We focus entirely too much on the past and how it can help us in the future rather than on enjoying the experience of the moment in its own right. This is natural for our problem-solving minds.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
Acceptance is in the service of valued living.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
rigidly following this rule can lead people to neglect their own needs, and that can contribute to many psychological problems, such as depression.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
began to trust that I could do what I said I would do and that, in and of itself, was a huge benefit to me.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
I was like a person living with a baby tiger who had bitten my foot when hungry, and my response was to try to placate it by throwing it chunks of steak. That worked fine in the short term, but every day that went by, the tiger got bigger and stronger and needed more meat to be satisfied.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
There is no reason to stop applying the flexibility skills to new possibilities. My advice is to do one new thing every day—something that requires you to be open and present and that engages your values. To make sure your focus is broad, I suggest cycling through each of the values domains, perhaps focusing on each for a week or two at a time.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
Don’t go to the mall just to expose yourself to the anxiety of being in a mall; go with the purpose of buying a gift for a loved one.
Steven Hayes • A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT
The critical voice and its commands don’t go away, but we see them more as the products of our mental mechanisms, like the pronouncements of the contraption created by the Wizard of Oz.