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

~ (Author) "You've probably opened this book for this reason: You are hurting and you're not sure what to do about it..." (more)
Key Phrases: suffering inventory, willingness dial, cognitive defusion techniques, Aunt Ida, Thought Versus Buying, The Trouble (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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, angry, and anxiety prone through a new approach to handling suffering--universal human suffering caused by language's illusions. Rather than fighting off bad thoughts and feelings with internal pep talks, Hayes beautifully explains how to embrace those 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 develop effective ways to move beyond rumination. The work progresses easily, thanks to Hayes' engaging style and his grace in coaching readers. Critics of cognitive and behavioral therapies will warm to Hayes' logical explanations of language's pitfalls (even language used by other therapeutic approaches); his sometimes goofy--but surprisingly effective--exercises; well-timed etymology lessons; and his uncanny ability to predict and skillfully address reader reactions throughout the workbook. Ironically, the path to life clocks many hours in the mind; plan 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 often increases. Our research program has shown this in thousands of patients, in almost every area of human suffering. Fortunately, we have discovered 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 tendency 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, important, and fearsome--and often decreasing the ability to be flexible, effective, and happy.

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 energized 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 understand 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 working 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 ideas apply to your own struggles?

Steven Hayes: It was my own panic disorder that first put me on to the problem we have now confirmed in our research. My panic disorder began a little over 25 years ago. I watched in horror as it grew rapidly, simply by applying my normal problem solving skills to it. Anxiety felt awful 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 anxious about, and meanwhile life was put on hold.

After two or three years of this I'd had enough. I began to experiment with acceptance, mindfulness, and valued action instead 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 literally 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 happen, often it does), but almost 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 good job of that.

The key to symbolic processes is the ability to relate events in new and arbitrary ways. Our research program has shown this ability even in 14 month old 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 actually been experienced. 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 fear things we have never experienced (e.g., death). It allows us to run from the past or compare the dull present to a fantasized future and to be unhappy as a result. And in my case it lead to the common sense but ultimately unhelpful idea that I needed to get rid of anxiety before I could live well.

We get a lot of training in how to develop and use our minds, but we get very little training in how to step out of the mental chatter when that is needed. As a result, this mental tool begins to use us. It will even claim to BE us. The overextension of human language and cognition, I believe, is at the core of the vast majority of human suffering in the developed world and human technology (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.

Product Description

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a new approach to psychotherapy that rethinks even our most basic assumptions of mental well-being. Starting with the assumption that the normal condition of human existence 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 plan 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 develop 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 begin to build 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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: New Harbinger Publications; 1 edition (October 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1572244259
• ISBN-13: 978-1572244252
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,382 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

136 of 142 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A different sort of self-help book, November 25, 2005

By	Ruth A. Baer (University of Kentucky) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a different sort of self-help book. It's not just for depression, or panic attacks, or phobias, or how to stop eating or drinking too much, or how to improve your relationships, or how to get your finances in order, although it can help you with any of those things and many more. This book is about discovering what you care about the most, what your top priorities are in life, and about getting your life moving in those directions. It teaches you how to keep psychological obstacles, such as fears, worries, sadness, anger, negative thoughts, and bad memories, from getting in your way. Strangely, it doesn't tell you how to get rid of those obstacles. In fact, it shows how trying to get rid of them often makes them worse. Instead, it teaches how to work with them so they don't run your life, so that you can make room for them and go where you want to go. The book has many exercises that are sometimes funny, sometimes a little odd, and always illuminating and thought provoking. This is a different way of looking at life and its challenges. For people who feel that their lives aren't working and are willing to consider a new perspective, this is worth a serious look.

131 of 138 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fresh, Novel, Interesting, Controversial and Potentially Life Changing, February 19, 2006

By	Dr. Richard G. Petty (Atlanta) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Psychological treatments, like most forms of therapy, have been developing and adapting for centuries. In recent years the best treatment for depression, as well as a host of other psychiatric disorders, has being centered on a combination of medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). The behavior therapies largely replaced psychoanalytic theory. The transition from psychoanalysis was not smooth, and as an attempt to ridicule psychoanalytic ideas, some notorious behavior therapists used to train people with mental illness to perform simple actions and then they would watch with amusement as psychoanalytically trained colleagues concocted creative but often bizarre symbolic interpretations of behaviors that had just been created.

We may now be on the cusp another revolution in therapy that could ultimately relegate CBT to the history books, rather in the way that CBT did to psychoanalysis. This new approach has sprung directly from the Buddhist traditions, and revolves around "mindfulness and acceptance". In the Buddhist worldview, each moment is complete by itself, and the world is perfect as it is; That being so, the focus is on acceptance, validation and tolerance, instead of change, and experience rather than experiment as the way to understand the world.

For many patients it feels profoundly liberating to be able to see that thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not "you" or "reality." This realization can free an individual from the distorted reality that they often create and allow for more clarity and a greater sense of control in life.

This idea that the solution to suffering is to increase acceptance of the here and now, and to decrease the craving and attachment that inevitably keep one clinging to a past that has already changed, is quite different from behavior therapy's emphasis on developing skills for attaining one's goals.

But the notion that suffering results from things not being the way one strongly wants them to be, or insists they should be, is very compatible with cognitive-behavioral therapies. The work of Albert Ellis, who is still active in his nineties, is arguably the clearest and most consistent presentation of this point of view.

The ideas in this book are fresh, novel, interesting and controversial. Some of the suggestion will be of great help to some people. Yet two problems remain for most people, and these are motivation to change and resistance to change. Without attention to those twin demons, progress can be very difficult.

For anyone interested in personal growth and development and an easy introduction to a whole new approach to therapy, this book is highly recommended.

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An end to suffering, February 1, 2006

By	GatorSLP (St. Petersburg, Florida) - See all my reviews

I'm a layperson, can't afford therapy, so I do it self-help. I've bought many self-help books, and while they have been interesting and true, they've never had any lasting worthwhile effect, except for me to look at myself and say, "Oh, I'm doing that wrong also, again!" This book is really what the other reviewers say it is. It was a total paradigm shift, which is what people need and why the myriad of other self-help books haven't helped your self! It is not an overnight fix, it is a bit heady, but take it step-by-step, do all the exercises, and it will be very worthwhile. I'm still trying to put it into practice into my everyday life, but little by little I'm seeing change, and at least now there's hope where there was hopelessness. Thanks so much to the authors for writing a book for the masses. There are many of us out there who don't have money to spend on therapy sessions that we would like to do.