Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

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• ISBN13: 9781572244252
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a new approach to psychiatric help that rethinks even our most basic assumptions of mental well-being. Starting with the assumption that the normal condition of human being is suffering and struggle, ACT works by first encouraging individuals to accept their lives as they are in the here and now. This acceptance is an antidote to the problem of avoidance, which ACT views as among the greatest risk factors for unnecessary suffering and poor mental health. The process of ACT includes help for individuals to identify a set of core values, a personal set of objectives that matter to them personally. The therapy then encourages the individual to commit to behavior that furthers these values despite potentially painful emotional obstacles. Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life offers a five-step plot for coping with painful emotions such as anxiety and depression. It teaches you how to learn life-enhancing behavior strategies that work to further the goals you value most. You’ll learn to engage with and overcome painful thoughts and feelings with step-by-step acceptance and mindfulness-based techniques. You’ll find out how to let go of control, and renovate compassion and flexibility. The realization that painful feelings cannot be controlled will open you to the possibility of fully emotional living. Once present, engaged, and aware, you can start to erect new lives for yourself filled with significance and meaning. This book is not about overcoming pain or fighting emotions; it’s about embracing life and feeling everything it has to offer. In this way, it offers a way out of suffering by choosing to life a life based on what matters most.Amazon.com Review
Trying to “change” negative thoughts through cognitive gymnastics is like trying to win a war single-handedly. Why waste a life trying the impossible? In Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, advocate Dr. Steven Hayes escorts the mildly depressed, mad, and anxiety prone through a new approach to handling suffering–universal human suffering caused by language’s illusions. Rather than fighting off terrible thoughts and feelings with internal pep talks, Hayes perfectly clarifies how to embrace persons pessimistic and foreboding mental voices (much like welcoming home one’s cranky, play-worn children), “defuse” them with respectful attention, and commit to leading a purposeful life that includes their occasional ranting.

Intriguing exercises help readers identify their core struggles, parse these into manageable pieces, and renovate effective ways to go beyond rumination. The work progresses easily, thanks to Hayes’ engaging style and his grace in education readers. Critics of cognitive and behavioral therapies will warm to Hayes’ logical explanations of language’s pitfalls (even language used by additional therapeutic approaches); his sometimes goofy–but surprisingly effective–exercises; well-timed etymology lessons; and his mysterious ability to predict and skillfully take up reader reactions throughout the workbook. Ironically, the path to life clocks many hours in the mind; plot to dedicate an intensive month of introspection to this program. Anyone who has been accused of thinking too much, who begrudges compliments, pines for a different life, or feels trapped at a mental dead end can benefit from Hayes’ superior guidance.–Liane Thomas

Dr. Steven Hayes answers a few questions about his book, and describes how his research was inspired by his own struggles with panic and anxiety.

Questions for Steven Hayes

Amazon.com: Can you give us a lay person’s primer on acceptance and commitment therapy?

Steven Hayes: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is based on a rather remarkable fact: when normal problem solving skills are applied to psychologically painful thoughts or feelings, suffering regularly increases. Our research program has shown this in thousands of patients, in nearly every area of human suffering. Fortunately, we have learned why this is and we have developed some ways of correcting it.

The basic research underlying ACT shows that entanglement with your own mind leads automatically to experiential avoidance: the trend to try first to remove or change negative thoughts and feelings as a method of life enhancement. This attempted sequence makes negative thoughts and feelings more central, vital, and fearsome–and regularly decreasing the ability to be flexible, effective, and pleased.

The trick that traps us is that these unhelpful mental processes are fed by agreement OR disagreement. Your mind is like a person who has to be right about everything. If you know any people like that you know that they are excited when you agree with them but they can be even more excited and wound up when you argue with them! Minds are like that. So what do you do?

ACT teaches you what to do. I will say what that is, but readers need to know that these mere words will not be useful in and of themselves. Minds are too clever for that! That is why the book has so many exercises and why we have a free discussion group on line for people effective through the book (http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/ACT_for_the_Public/). What ACT teaches is acceptance of emotions, mindful awareness of thoughts, contact with a transcendent sense of self, and action based on chosen values. This constellation of skills has shown itself in controlled research to help with an amazingly large range of problems, from anxiety to managing the challenges of physical disease, from depression, to stopping smoking.

Amazon.com: Some of this work is said to have come from your own battles with anxiety and panic. How did these thoughts apply to your own struggles?

Steven Hayes: It was my own panic disorder that first place me on to the problem we have now confirmed in our research. My panic disorder started a small over 25 years ago. I watched in horror as it grew rapidly, simply by applying my normal problem solving skills to it. Anxiety felt dreadful and seemingly made it impossible to function, so it was obvious to me that I first needed to get rid of it before my life would improve. I tried lots of things to do that. But this very effort meant I had to constantly evaluate my level of anxiety, and fearfully check to see if it was going up or down as a result of my efforts. As a result, anxiety quickly became the central focus of my life. Anxiety itself became something to be nervous about, and meanwhile life was place on hold.

After two or three years of this I’d had enough. I started to conduct experiment with acceptance, mindfulness, and valued action as a replacement for of detecting, disputing, and changing my insides.

I remember a moment that symbolizes the change in direction. In the middle of a panic attack, with a guttural scream like you hear in the movies, I factually shouted out loud to my own mind. “You can make me feel pain, you can make me feel anxiety,” I yelled. “But you cannot make me turn away from my own experience.”

It has not been a smooth path and it was several years before anxiety itself was obviously way down (getting it to go down was no longer my purpose, remember, but ironically when you stop trying to make it take place, regularly it does), but nearly immediately life opened up again. ACT is the result of over 20 years of research, following the lead this provided.

Amazon.com: You are a language researcher and chapter two of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life is called “Why Language Leads to Suffering.” Can you tell us why you suggest that language is a source of human suffering?

Steven Hayes: Human language (by that I mean our symbolic abilities generally) is central to effective human cognition. It evolved to keep us from starving or being eaten–and it has done a pretty excellent job of that.

The key to symbolic processes is the ability to tell events in new and arbitrary ways. Our research program has shown this ability even in 14 month ancient babies, and we now know it comes from direct training from parents and others as part of normal language development. It is a wonderful skill. It allows us to imagine futures that have never been, and to compare situations that have never really been veteran. That is the every essence of human verbal problem solving.

But that same process has a downside for human beings. For example, it allows us to dread things we have never veteran (e.g., death). It allows us to run from the past or compare the dull present to a fantasized future and to be miserable as a result. And in my case it lead to the common sense but ultimately unhelpful thought that I needed to get rid of anxiety before I could live well.

We get a lot of training in how to renovate and use our minds, but we get very small training in how to step out of the mental chatter when that is needed. As a result, this mental tool starts to use us. It will even aver to BE us. The overextension of human language and cognition, I judge, is at the core of the vast majority of human suffering in the developed world and human equipment (the media) is only amplifying the problem by exposing us to an ever increasing stream of symbols and images. Learning how to get out of your mind and into your life when you need to do that is an essential skill in the modern world.

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