A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT

Your thoughts become highly comparative and evaluative and begin wandering.

Our remarkable allegiance to verbal rules is a major contributor to psychological inflexibility. We follow them so strictly that we never deviate even when they are making our problems worse—

You can devise reverse compass habits for all sorts of behavior you want to change. For example, I’ve found that when I’m tempted to procrastinate, even a few minutes of work on the avoided task will help me get into full gear again later that day or the next day, rather than falling down the rabbit hole of putting things off for extended periods.

Acceptance allows us to stop directing our attention to unnecessary problem solving about the pain we’re feeling, instead turning our attention toward the helpful insights these feelings offer.

It is what we do that matters, and that gives us the means to live in a way that is richly meaningful to us, despite even quite difficult challenges.

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. His classical conditioning principles explain how animals can come to associate a previously neutral event, such as the ringing of a bell, with, say, the presentation of food immediately following it, so that the animal learns to salivate at the bell tone.

The key point is that values-based living makes goals meaningful,

Evolution also requires that we keep doing what works.

By listening to our pain instead, and moving toward that yearning to feel, we can identify the discrepancies between the way in which we’re living and the way we want to live.