Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

by Steven C. Hayes

  THE PROBLEM WITH GETTING RID OF THINGS—SQUARED

  There is another important reason that figuring out how to get rid of troublesome thoughts or feelings often backfires when your verbal skills are applied to your internal processes: it reminds you of bad consequences. Suppose you are feeling anxious while doing something challenging (say, giving a speech), and you think, “I’d better not feel anxious or I will completely fail at this.” Thoughts of failure can elicit anxiety for the same reason that a baby might be afraid of a gub-gub if it had been pricked with a diaper pin while hearing the word “wooo”: the negative consequence and current event are arbitrarily related.

  Anxiety is a normal response to poor performance, or humiliation. The problem is that we can bring these consequences into the current situation at any moment through verbal relations. People with panic disorder, for example, tend to think about losing their minds, losing control, humiliating themselves, or dying of a heart attack in association with the anxiety they feel. These thoughts create more anxiety partly because they relate the present to an imagined future in which there is the possibility of these dire results happening. If you have an anxiety condition, then you know that this can become a vicious circle.

  The Shark Tank Polygraph

  Suppose you were sitting over a dunk tank full of sharks while you were wired up to the world’s best tuned polygraph. You have a very simple task: don’t get anxious at all. If you do, the seat will flip you over, and into the tank you’ll go.

  What do you think would happen? It seems extremely likely you would be anxious. This is exactly what happens during a panic attack: First you feel a twinge of anxiety, then you imagine the horrors that can arrive, you react to those, and, in a matter of seconds, boom. You’re in the shark tank.

  EXPERIENTIAL AVOIDANCE

  Language creates suffering in part because it leads to experiential avoidance. Experiential avoidance is the process of trying to avoid your own experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations, behavioral predispositions) even when doing so causes long-term behavioral difficulties (like not going to a party because you’re a social phobic, or not exercising because you feel too depressed to get out of bed). Of all the psychological processes known to science, experiential avoidance is one of the worst (Hayes, Masuda, et al. 2004).

  Experiential avoidance tends to artificially amplify the “pain of presence” discussed in chapter 1, and it is the single biggest source of the “pain of absence,” since it is avoidance that most undermines positive actions. Unfortunately, this strategy is built into human language for two reasons: language naturally targets our reactions, not just our situations (a point we will explain later in chapter 5), and it makes it impossible to control pain by controlling situations, since any situation can be arbitrarily related to pain and thus evoke it (see the sunset example in the last chapter).

  Outside the body, the rule may indeed be, “If you don’t like it, figure out how to get rid of it, and then get rid of it.” Inside the body, the rule appears to be very different. It’s more like, “If you aren’t willing to have it, you will.” In practical terms, this means for example, that if you aren’t willing to feel anxiety as a feeling, you will feel far more anxiety, plus you will begin to live a narrower and more constricted life.

  Go back now and review your Coping Strategies Worksheet. If you are like most people, the majority of your coping strategies are focused on your internal processes. Usually, these coping strategies help to regulate your internal processes a little in the short run, but in the long run, they often fail or even make matters worse.

  Now, consider the possibility that this is so because each of the coping strategies you’ve developed is a way to avoid your experiences. You develop specific means by which you try to stop feeling the feelings you are feeling or thinking the thoughts you are thinking. You try to avoid the experience of painful thoughts or feelings by burying yourself in distracting activities, combating your thoughts with rationalizations, or trying to quash your feelings through the use of controlled substances. If you are suffering, you may spend a lot of time performing these distracting coping techniques. Meanwhile, your life is not being lived.

  Rankings for the Coping Strategies Worksheet

  In your review of your worksheet, you may have found that your scores in the “Short-term effectiveness” column are relatively high, while your scores in the “Long-term effectiveness” column are relatively low. This is a dangerous trap because short-term effects are far more reinforcing than long-term effects, and these problem-solving strategies do work in most areas of life for a short time. The coping techniques you’ve developed to combat your anger, anxiety, or depression probably do cause these feelings to go away for a short while; otherwise, you wouldn’t engage in them. But how powerful is the long-term effect? How much do your coping strategies really change your condition in the long run?

  If you’re reading this book, we’re guessing that the long-term impact your strategies have had on your suffering is fairly minimal or even negative. What you are left with are behaviors that have become deeply embedded in your day-to-day life due to their short-term effectiveness; but for long-term relief they are sadly lacking.

  It’s like the diagram shown in figure 2.4. Human beings have a core of pain because life inherently contains difficulties, such as disease, want, and loss, but language keeps us amplifying these difficulties into larger patterns of human suffering. Like the rings around the black center in figure 2.4, we build out that core of pain by our patterns of cognitive entanglement and avoidance.

  Figure 2.4. Gub-gubs go “wooo”: the relational net work is completed.

  When we try to run away from a painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation, it becomes more important and tends to occur more intensely or frequently. Because running away also means that we are taking our fearful thoughts literally, they become more believable and entangling. As a result, the “pain of presence” grows. Meanwhile life is put on hold while we struggle with our internal processes. As a result, the “pain of absence” grows as well. The black spot in the middle grows bigger and bigger.

  THE MIND-TRAIN

  Unfortunately, these processes are not easy to control because they are so tightly linked to our normal use of language. People tend to “live in their minds,” that is, to engage with the world on the basis of these verbal processes. Living in your mind can be likened to riding a train. A train has its own tracks and it goes where they lead. That’s fine when the tracks are going where you want to go. But if you were traveling in the direction you want to be going, you probably would never have stopped to read this book. If the life you want to live is “off the tracks,” then you have only one option: you must learn how to get off the train…at least sometimes.

  Riding your mind-train has become an automatic process. You believe the thoughts that your mind presents to you. Getting the train going in the first place happened innocently enough: you learned language; you learned how to speak, reason, and solve problems. Once you did that, your mind-train became a permanent presence in your life. Now, there is no way that you will stop thinking and generating thoughts—your mind-train will keep on running, in part, because language is so useful in so many areas. But just because the train keeps running all the time doesn’t mean you have to stay on it every moment.

  On a real train, you’re allowed to ride as long as you follow the rules. You play an active part on the trip. You’ve got to cooperate with the rules by showing your ticket when you’re asked for it, sitting in your assigned seat and staying seated, and not raising a ruckus when you miss your stop or you find out the train’s taking you in a direction you don’t want to go.

  The rules and conditions our minds lay down for us are simple but powerful: act on the basis of belief and disbelief. They say that you must react to your mind either by agreeing with it or arguing with it. Unfortunately, both reactions are based on taking your thoughts literally. Rather than seeing
your thoughts merely as an ongoing process of relating, they are reacted to based on what they relate to. They are “factually” correct or incorrect.

  When you take your thoughts literally, you are “riding the mind-train.” That is, you are responding to the thoughts your mind presents to you purely in terms of the facts they are about. Agreeing and disagreeing are both within the rules, so neither response gets you off the train. However, if you break the rules, you will find yourself off the mind-train—and isn’t this one train you’d like to get off of now and then?

  To know what an experience is really like, you’ve got to experience it for yourself, not just think about it. To see what it’s like to jump off the mind-train, you have to actually do it. You do that by breaking some of the rules and conditions your mind sets for you. And how do you jump off that train? Well, that is precisely what this book is about. At this point, all we can say is that once you are off of the train with your feet on the ground, you will see whether you are in a better position to choose a direction and live according to your values rather than simply riding the rails of your verbal conditioning.

  It will take a while to learn how to do this. But that’s the direction in which we are headed.

  Chapter 3

  The Pull of Avoidance

  The situation you are in now may feel like being in a tug-of-war with a big, ugly monster (whether you are dealing with depression, anxiety, physical pain, sorrowful memories, or some other negative situation). It seems as though you can’t win. The harder you pull, the harder the monster pulls back. Sometimes it even may feel as if there’s a bottomless pit between you and the monster and, if you lose, you’ll be pulled into the pit and be completely destroyed. So, you pull and pull. You try harder and harder. You look for different ways to pull, better ways to pull, stronger ways to pull. You try digging in your heels for more leverage or you try strengthening your muscles. You keep hoping that something will work. Suppose, however, that you have a completely different job to do. Perhaps it’s not your job to win this tug-of-war. Perhaps it’s your job to find a way to drop the rope.

  WHY WE DO WHAT CAN’T WORK

  When unhappy people really look at their behavior, it’s usually easy to see that that their experiential avoidance isn’t working. Think about what you discovered when you completed your Coping Strategies Worksheet in chapter 2. By now, it should be clear to you that the behaviors you’ve developed to avoid your pain have not been particularly effective in the long run. If they had worked, you wouldn’t be where you are now. The problem is that it’s devilishly difficult to see that experiential avoidance behaviors can’t be effective. There are at least five reasons why it is so difficult to see this truth.

  1. Controlling works so well in other areas of your life (the world outside your body) that you assume it will work for your thoughts and feelings as well.

  This point is easy to understand. For example, in the space provided below, list some examples of successful occasions when controlling by conscious problem-solving worked for you in the external world: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________

  It’s very likely you were able to generate some relatively noncontroversial examples of times when being able to control events in the external world worked for you.

  2. You were taught that you should be able to control your thoughts and feelings. For example, when you were little, you may have been told, “Stop crying, or I will give you something to cry about,” or, “Big boys don’t cry,” or, “Don’t be afraid, only sissies are afraid.”

  Now, think of yourself when you were a child. See whether you can remember any messages given to you by others that suggested you should easily be able to control your emotions or thoughts. If you remember any, list them here: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________

  3. When you were very young, the giants around you called “grown-ups” seemed able to control their thoughts and feelings. For example, you might have felt scared a lot, but it seemed as though Daddy wasn’t ever scared; you might have cried a lot, but the grown-ups around you hardly ever cried. This fact, when combined with point 2 above, may have caused you to internalize this message: You should be able to control your scary or sad feelings because others are successful at exercising that kind of control. This doesn’t mean you actually learned to control your feelings, but it might mean that you learned to keep quiet about how you really felt so others wouldn’t be disturbed by your emotions.

  If your experience was something like this description, in the space below, try to list examples of how other people seemed more confident, calmer, or happier, and more able to control their internal emotional states than you were: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________

  Sometime later in life, we learn that the idea that other “grown-ups" can control their feelings is an illusion. For example, when we grow up, we might learn that Daddy wasn’t really so “calm.” He may have had an alcohol problem you didn’t fully appreciate as a child, or perhaps he was taking tranquilizers to cope. Or, when you’re an adult, you might learn that the kids at school who looked so together on the outside were struggling on the inside in some of the same ways that you were struggling.

  Now, see if you can remember when you first realized that the people who looked so together to you when you were very young were actually struggling. List those occasions here: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________

  4. While you were growing up, you received a constant stream of messages that good health and great happiness depended on the absence of difficult private experiences. For example, think of all the commercials you’ve seen in your lifetime for products like beer, cigarettes, psychiatric drugs, vacations, sexy cars, fashionable clothes, and so on. Isn’t it true that many of these commercials convey this message: “Happiness equals the ultimate absence of painful thoughts or feelings—and, if you buy this product, you will feel better and be that much closer to happiness”?

  See if you can remember some media messages like that, and write down the message or commercial. Then answer this question: What do you think the underlying experiential avoidance message was? _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________

  5. Sometimes, it appears that controlling our unwanted thoughts and feelings actually does work in the short-term. For example, you might have had a recurring thought that you are worthless, and to compensate for this thought you became a workaholic. This may seem to have solved the problem of feeling worthless, but, generally, working so much just pushes the feeling deeper. This process is explored, in part, in chapter 2 where we discussed thought-suppression. If you have dark feelings and deliberately cover them up, whatever you do to compensate for feeling bad about yourself may begin to remind you that “Deep down there is something wrong with me.”

  If you’ve tried to use your accomplishments to cover up your difficult feelings, you probably know what happens when you act like a workaholic. When you are applauded for your accomplishments, you may feel as though you are fooling others because you know what is really going on for you beneath your calm appearance. You might be thinking, “If they only knew.” Even positive feedback (although it feels good for a while) can have a hollow ring. This is sometimes called the “imposter syndrome.” Fooling others doesn’t work partly because who can be buoyed up by the opinions of fools?

  If this is your experience, list examples of those times when you did things just to get the approval of others that in the long run felt false to you: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________
_______________ _______________________________________________________________

  ACCEPTING THE POSSIBILITY THAT EXPERIENTIAL AVOIDANCE CAN’T WORK

  Two main factors keep people stuck in the system of experiential avoidance. The first factor is that the rule “If you don’t like something, get rid of it” works very well in the outside world. The second factor is that the short-term effects of experiential avoidance, that is, the application of that rule to our private experience, often can be positive. The linchpin that holds together the system of experiential avoidance is that the utility of human language in dealing with the world outside is based on the rule “If you don’t like something, get rid of it,” and the short-term effects of experiential avoidance, the application of that rule to our private experience, often can be positive.

  For example, think of someone who has a snake phobia. His friends are all planning to visit the zoo, and this person is afraid to go with them. He is terrified they’ll want to go to the snake exhibit and that he won’t be able to handle being there. Although he wants to spend time with his friends and he would love to see the other animals at the zoo, ultimately, he finds an excuse not to go. Now, try to imagine what it’s like to be this person and answer the following questions by circling one of the answers on the right.