6 Principles to Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

Living life the ACT way

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has 6 core principles to increase psychological flexibility.

ACT focuses on teaching the behavioral pivot between “feeling good” to “becoming good at feeling”.

Acceptance

You make room for unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and sensations to exist. There’s no trying to change what is happening, just allowing it to be what it is. Instead of resisting, you decrease distress by tolerating unpleasant sensations or discomfort.

Cognitive Diffusion

You are not your thoughts. You do not have to act on your thoughts, much less, believe everything you hear in your mind.

Take a step back and see your thoughts as words coming and going like a river stream. If you’re walking down the street and you see the words “turn around and head back to your house” randomly written somewhere, you wouldn’t automatically turn around and head back home; the words in our mind work similarly.

All the words, ideas, or thoughts rushing through our minds aren’t absolute truths. Sure, they can be helpful at times, but they’re not what ultimately defines us.

Contacting the Present Moment

Be here. Right now. There’s nothing else to do.

Mindfulness exercises are useful, but don’t overthink it.

Observing Yourself

To live a life in alignment with your values and to do the things that truly matter to you, you’re going to have to let go of your ego.

The need to sustain an identity. This is problematic because it creates rigid patterns of behavior. This rigidity gives rise to behaviors that tend to not be in alignment with our values, it pushes us away from what matters.

Observe yourself, and know that you can make decisions that are committed to meeting your goals in spite of what your mind is telling you about who you are.

Values

What do you most care about? Is it your family? Your career? Your sense of exploration? Your dog? Telling the truth? Writing a novel? That new hobby you just picked up?

Whatever the values are, through introspection, you will find that there’s at least one thing that you value in your life. This one thing will be something that when put into action, will steer you toward behaviors that are meaningful.

Committed Action

The most critical step in this entire process.

Take all of the things that you’ve learned; seeing yourself and your thoughts as separate, identifying the things that matter most to you, and then doing the actions that veer toward the things that matter to you.

For example, if one of your values is that you want to write a novel, you would organize your day so that you make time every day toward that goal. The negative thoughts about not being good enough or that your day is too busy don’t matter, you will create the space and time to do it no matter what.

Accept that it won’t be easy and the challenges will come up, but you will continue to show up in spite of the challenges.

Write out your goals and accept the wave of discomfort.

Gina Lily is a writer and Behavior Analyst. She’s a quirky Floridian with a drive toward conversations that sit below the surface and add value to life. She’s married and has two dogs, a feisty chihuahua, and a barking dachshund. She loves photography, technology, literature, travel, and discoveries on what it means to be human.

She’s on Instagram: gina_lily & and you can subscribe to receive more of her publications.