Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

by Steven C. Hayes

  THE “WILLINGNESS TO CHANGE” QUESTION

  Remember the two dials on the experiential radio we discussed in chapter 3? Suppose it was the case that to live the life you really want, the way you want to live it, it is first necessary to turn your Willingness dial all the way up. That means you would be willing to feel whatever feelings, memories, thoughts, or bodily sensations take place in your life. You would feel these fully and not erect any psychological defenses against them.

  Said another way, suppose that in order to live a healthy, vital, meaningful, and satisfying life you needed to give up trying to control your internal thoughts and feelings before you could move in the direction you want to go. If that was what was required, to what degree would you be willing to do that? (We are not assuming that you know how to do that yet, we are only asking about your openness to that path.) If 1 means totally unwilling and 100 means totally willing, how willing would you be to begin to experience what your history gives you, focusing your control strategies on your actions rather than your insides? Write that number here: ________

  If you find yourself writing a low number, are you holding on to the idea that a low number means that you will experience much less pain. But if that is what your experience has taught you, you wouldn’t have had a reason to pick up this book. A lower number doesn’t mean less pain, it mean less room to live. We aren’t asking if you believe that willingness will work. We are asking if willingness is needed in order to live a healthy, vital, meaningful, and satisfying life, would you move in that direction? If you still find yourself writing down a low number, reconsider your answer and see if you want to stick to it.

  What shows up for you when you think about this? In the space provided below, write your thoughts on this matter:

  _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If you had been willing to experience fully what your personal history gave you while you were engaged in actions that were important to you, how would your life have been different than it has been?

  _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ We don’t expect this to make a difference yet. Your mind may be telling you that kind of willingness is impossible or that it would condemn you to constant misery. If so, just thank your mind for its input and don’t argue back. It could be that pain is not really synonymous with suffering. It could be that pain plus unwillingness to feel that pain equals suffering. We won’t argue it either way; your own experience is the final judge. But if you are ready to begin learning new strategies that eventually will make that kind of willingness possible, turn the page.

  Chapter 5

  The Trouble with Thoughts

  In this chapter you will start to explore the ways that your mind produces thoughts. Have you ever considered how pervasive thinking itself is? Sometimes you may not even be aware of this process. Like the rhythmic hum of a heater circulating air through a room, the mind chugs along, doing what it was designed by evolution to do: categorize, predict, explain, compare, worry, judge. And just like the hum of a heater, you can go for long periods of time without even noticing it’s there.

  If we are going to do something different with thinking, first we need to catch the process in flight. Otherwise, we are constantly dealing with the unfortunate behavioral results of buying into our thoughts; that is, we tend to take our own thoughts as gospel truth, missing the pivotal point that can create their destructive effects.

  You may have had the experience of driving your car and suddenly noticing that you’ve driven for miles without any awareness of the world outside the car. Your driving habits may be so automatic that it is quite possible for you to drive mindlessly.

  The situation you are in with thought-directed behavior can be compared to finding that you’ve driven off the road and down an embankment while you were in that blank state of mind. It wouldn’t be wise to try to “solve” the repeated problem of driving into in a ditch by changing the wheels on your car. It’s too late in the process for that to help at all, and such changes are largely beside the point anyway.

  Better to back up to the moment you turned the steering wheel. It is that moment and that action that caused you to leave the road and drive down the embankment. What you first need to look for are the hand-scribbled signs on the side of the road that pointed to the right saying, “This Way.” Though you may not consciously be aware of them right now, such road signs are your thoughts. They are part (but only part!) of what leads you to drive over that embankment in the first place.

  Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive therapy, used the term distancing to refer to the process of objectively noticing what you are thinking (this is why ACT was originally called “comprehensive distancing” when it was first developed [Hayes 1987]). In Beck’s approach and in most forms of scientifically based therapy, however, distancing is only a first step in evaluating and disputing thought. Therapists use this method to teach clients to detect logical errors, search for new evidence, and change emotionally disturbing thoughts. It’s something like seeing the sign on the side of the road, and trying stop the car in order to get out and destroy or rewrite what the sign says; that way when you see it in the future, you won’t be tempted to drive over the embankment again.

  We take a different approach, one that is simpler and, as current evidence suggests, more closely linked to positive outcomes. What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought. We need to notice the hand-scribbled sign in the same way we would notice graffiti. We don’t have to follow or resist the sign, but we do need to notice it. We can notice it in the way we might notice the temperature of the room, the sounds from a CD player, or the smell of the air. The sign itself doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do anything, and it doesn’t mean anything about you, the way it doesn’t matter whether the graffiti is written in block letters or script, the air is hot or cold, the sound melodic or monotonous, or the smell sweet or sour. What matters is noticing the sign.

  Because thought refers to something and “means” something it creates an illusion. When we think about something, it seems to us that we are really dealing with that thing, much as the child in chapter 2 thought about the gub-gub. When we evaluate something, it appears as though that thing is either enhanced or minimized depending on the content of the evaluation.

  The signs on the side of the road that our minds construct are not just simple directions. They can be quite elaborate; they can even be what we call reasonable. “Get out of that relationship! You’re getting too attached, and he is too nice. You will be badly hurt,” says one sign. And even if you really want love in your life (if that is the road you’ve chosen), you may find yourself down in the ditch with yet another relationship smoldering from the impact of the crash, saying it was because he was “too into his work” or because he was “smothering me” and so on. To change a pattern like this you need to get back to the pivotal point when you first saw the sign. That is the focus of this chapter.

  The foregoing doesn’t mean you need to watch your thoughts obsessively, or that the only way to avoid driving over the embankment is to be ever-vigilant. As you learn to catch more of those moments when the signs first pop up, you will work out new ways to relate to them. (That work will begin in earnest in chapter 6.) As you build these new habits of mind, eventually you will be able to drive mindlessly for longer periods of time without driving off the road. Not that mindlessness is a goal, but no one is always mindful, and it’s nice to know that, eventually, habits can work for you rather than against you, if you lay down the right habits. Laying down those new ways of relating to thoughts, however, requires you to catch more of these thoughts as they happen.

  THOUG
HT PRODUCTION

  Your mind’s job is to protect you from danger; to help you survive. It does so by constantly categorizing present events, relating them to analyses of the past and predictions of the future, and evaluating what has been or might be obtained by action. After building up a head of steam over the last 100,000 years it is unlikely that the human mind will stop doing these things anytime soon. Like it or not, inside your skull, you have a “word-generating machine” relating one event to another from morning to night.

  It is impossible to stop thinking, especially deliberately. When we do things deliberately, we create a verbal path (a rule) and try to follow it. So, when we deliberately try to stop thinking, we create the thought that goes, “we shouldn’t be thinking a thought,” and we try to follow it. Unfortunately, since this verbal path is itself a thought, the process merely mocks us. The exercises in chapter 2 that demonstrated the internal inconsistency in thought-suppression explore this point in greater detail.

  Your next step is to begin to notice your thoughts, in flight, in real-time. Although we are thinking constantly, we consciously notice that we are thinking only occasionally. Anything that comes so naturally and occurs so commonly recedes into the background. How often do you notice that you blink your eyes, or breathe?

  We Are Fish Swimming in Our Thoughts

  Fish swim in water naturally. They don’t “know” they are under water, they just swim. Thinking is like this for human beings. Thoughts are our water. We are so immersed in them that we are hardly aware they are there. Swimming in our thoughts is our natural state. You can’t take a fish out of the water and expect it to live as a fish. But what would happen if the fish became aware of the water?

  EXERCISE: What Are You Thinking Right Now?

  Try writing down your thoughts as they run through your mind right now. Take a few minutes and write down as many thoughts as you can, while they are occurring, in the space provided below:

  _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ What did you find? How many thoughts were you able to describe? As you wrote, wasn’t it the case that other thoughts about the thoughts you were thinking popped up? If you stumbled for a moment and you thought something like, “I’m not thinking anything,” did you understand that this too was a thought?

  It is very likely that the small space above wasn’t nearly enough to contain all of the thoughts you were thinking in those few moments. Consider what this means. If there was a constant stream of thought in the last few moments, aren’t other moments much the same? If so, hundreds or (more likely) thousands of these events are occurring every day. It’s no wonder we regularly drive off the road. Often the road itself is poorly lit (that’s why we’ll do some work with values in chapters 11 and 12), the signs at the side of the road are frequent and confusing (much of that seems built-into the human mind), and we give these signs power through our habits of mind.

  One primary habit of mind we will work on dismantling is the habit of taking your thoughts literally. If thoughts are what they say they are, any experience that can program a thought is an experience that can control your behavior. When we take thoughts literally, we are at the mercy of every random experience life throws at us. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer (1989) described an interesting example of how literal thought works when she considered the virtues of saliva.

  The Virtues of Saliva

  You’ve probably not thought much about the virtues of saliva but they are many. Feel how warm and moist the inside of your mouth is. Feel the slipperiness of your tongue inside your mouth. If your mouth were entirely dry, your tongue would rub against your mouth’s interior in a very irritating way. If you’ve ever had “cottonmouth,” you know how unpleasant that can be. Now, try swallowing and feel how your saliva makes the action of swallowing slick and smooth, comfortable and easy.

  Imagine how it would feel if you didn’t have any saliva. Have you ever tried to swallow when your throat was so dry that you felt as if there were sand in it? Saliva has antiseptic qualities that naturally wash away germs and protect your teeth and gums. That’s why conditions that restrict saliva flow quickly lead to tooth decay and gum disease. For example, methamphetamine (also known as “speed”) produces severe dry mouth, and after just a few years of use, meth addicts’ teeth literally crumble and fall out (so-called “meth mouth”) because chronic loss of saliva removes the protection that saliva provides.

  Saliva also helps us to predigest our food. When we take the time to chew and swallow, food easily slides down the throat, and the stomach has a much easier time breaking it down. If you’ve ever wolfed down large quantities of food without chewing it, you know how it can create a heavy lump in your stomach, as your body struggles to compensate for your lack of chewing. Saliva is a truly wonderful substance.

  Now imagine a clean, spotless, beautiful crystal wineglass and imagine that each time you feel you have a little extra saliva in your mouth, you release it into the glass. You keep doing this until the clean glass is full.

  Next imagine this. Really imagine it. Try to picture it and bring the feelings that would come up for you to your mind. Imagine that you take hold of the wineglass full of your own spit, you tilt the glass into your mouth, and then you slurp down all the saliva you have collected in big gulps, until the glass is empty.

  What was that like for you to imagine? For most of us, the idea of gulping down a wineglass full of our own saliva is disgusting. It’s gross. It turns the stomach just to imagine it.

  Isn’t this strange? It’s your saliva! You produce gallons of the stuff every day and you do indeed drink it down—all day long. Without it, you couldn’t eat. As stated above, saliva has many virtues. However, the idea of drinking a glass of it is among the more disgusting acts we can imagine. The actual day-to-day experience of saliva is one thing. Thinking about saliva as a beverage is another. In this case, a wonderful substance becomes a disgusting substance. Why is that so?

  WHY THINKING HAS SUCH AN IMPACT

  Thoughts have meaning because they are symbolic; they are symbolic because they are arbitrarily and mutually related to something else. When we think, there is a mutual relationship established between the thought and the event we are thinking about. Each influences the other.

  It is this process that makes thinking useful. Consider this scenario: “Suppose all of the doors and windows in the room you are in right now were locked. How would you get out?” Watch what your mind does. As you arrive at some options, you are dealing with real events in a symbolic manner. You are relating thoughts as if you were manipulating the actual objects to which they refer. This is part of the utility of language. We don’t have to try out the various options for escape in reality; we can try them out in imagination. Remember the example of the slotted screw, the toothbrush, and the lighter in chapter 2?

  Problems arrive, however, when this process is (a) taken to extremes, and (b) applied to all thought. Cognitive fusion refers to the tendency to allow thought to dominate other sources of behavioral regulation because of the failure to pay attention to the process of relating over and above the products of relating. To put it into less abstract terms, cognitive fusion involves treating our thoughts as if they are what they say they are.

  When you’re imagining how to escape from a locked room, this process is unlikely to be harmful. Suppose you think, �
��I’ll call my friend for help on my cell phone.” The symbolic event of “calling your friend” on the “cell phone” in your imagination, and an actual event of calling your friend are two different things, but, in this case, it doesn’t matter much if the two are treated as if they were the same. You can picture your cell phone, and picture punching in your friend’s phone number, just as you might, in actual fact, reach for your cell phone and push the keys to call your friend’s number. For most forms of problem solving, thoughts are useful for that reason.

  But in other situations cognitive fusion can be quite harmful. For example, think of all the “I am” statements you produce in relation to your pain: “I am so depressed.” “I am so anxious.” “God, I’m so stressed out.” “I went to the therapist and she told me I am obsessive-compulsive.” “I am so tired of being in constant pain.” This kind of language puts you in a place where you actually identify yourself with your pain. Cognitive fusion means you are taking these statements as literal truths and, eventually, you begin to believe that you, in fact, are your pain. It becomes very difficult to see that your pain does not define you, in part because it is very difficult to see that these are thoughts that your mind has produced.

  Similarly, since much of the content of thought is evaluative, cognitive fusion also means that evaluations can become attached to events as if they were in the event, not just in our thoughts about the event. This transforms not only the thought but also the functions of the actual event. For example, although the physiological functions of saliva are not aversive, the functions of language can make them so. Drinking saliva is “disgusting” because of cognitive fusion. We swallow saliva all day long quite happily; and thirsty, nonverbal animals presented with a bowl of saliva might lap it up, as we say, “without a thought.” For us, however, the very idea makes us want to retch (notice we just said the very “idea” makes us want to retch).