How to Break the Anxiety- Fear-Avoidance Cycle

The ACT Matrix in Practice

• Who or what do I care about? (inside-toward)


• What does it look like when I'm moving toward what I care about? (outside-toward)


• What difficult thoughts and feelings get in the way? (inside-away)


• What does it look like when I'm focused on avoiding or lessening those thoughts and feelings? (outside-away)

Inside vs. Outside On the other hand, the distinction between inside and outside helps us discriminate between what’s happening inside our skin—our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations—and our behaviors in the outside world that might be flowing from those internal experiences.

What is the ACT Matrix? At a high level, the ACT Matrix is a tool to help us better understand where avoidance is coming from and how it’s driving our behavior.

It does this by helping to discriminate our experience along two dimensions:Toward vs. AwayInside vs. Outside

Toward vs. Away To understand the distinction between toward and away, you can think of a researcher in a lab trying to guide a mouse through a maze.

The ACT matrix works because it incorporates many of ACT’s core processes in a simple yet powerful way:

• Defusion - by writing down your thoughts, you notice them as thoughts, rather than allowing them to become unquestioned lenses through which you see the world.


• Values - by writing out what is important to you, you can take steps to orient toward it

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The anxiety-fear-avoidance cycle arises when our behavior is increasingly about away moves. For us to be aware of avoidance when it arises, we have to know what it is we tend to avoid and what our behavior looks like when it’s driven by avoidance.

When the mouse is motivated by shocks, that’s away behavior. When the mouse is chasing the scent of stinky cheese, that’s toward behavior.

The researcher can either give the mouse a small shock every time it walks backwards, or they can place a piece of stinky cheese at the end of the maze, and watch the mouse move through of its own accord.