Steven C. Hayes > Quotes

“What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“Suppressing Your Thoughts Suppose you have a thought you don’t like. You’ll apply your verbal problem-solving strategies to it. For example, when the thought comes up, you may try to stop thinking it. There is extensive literature on what is likely to happen as a result. Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner (1994) has shown that the frequency of the thought that you try not to think may go down for a short while, but it soon appears more often than ever. The thought becomes even more central to your thinking, and it is even more likely to evoke a response. Thought suppression only makes the situation worse.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning ‘by chance’ or ‘an occurrence’, which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it—especially to avoid any sense of ‘unhappiness’. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.”
― Steven C. Hayes

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It’s about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“The process of living is like taking a very long road trip. The destination may be important, but the journey experienced day to day and week to week is what is invaluable.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“When you try not to think of something, you do that by creating this verbal rule: “Don’t think of x.” That rule contains x, so it will tend to evoke x, just as the sounds “gub-gub” can evoke a picture of an imaginary animal. Thus, when we suppress our thoughts, we not only must think of something else, we have to hold ourselves back from thinking about why we are doing that. If we check to see whether our efforts are working, we will remember what we are trying not to think and we will think it. The worrisome thought thus tends to grow. If”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The truth about mental health is that the causes of all of the mental conditions you hear about are unknown, and the idea that “hidden diseases” lurk behind human suffering is an out-and-out failure.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Does the client experience life as merely imposed or rather as something he or she can author in a meaningful and ongoing way?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Why willingness? Because I absolutely know how my pain works when I am unwilling, and I’m sick and tired of it. It’s time to change my whole agenda, not just the moves I make inside a control and avoidance agenda.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

“Suffering occurs when people so strongly believe the literal contents of their mind that they become fused with their cognitions. In this fused state, the person cannot distinguish awareness from cognitive narratives since each thought and its referents are so tightly bound together. This combination means that the person is more likely to follow blindly the instructions that are socially transmitted through language. In some circumstances, this result can be adaptive; but in other cases, people may engage repeatedly in ineffective sets of strategies because to them they appear to be “right” or “fair” despite negative real-world consequences.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Most of us think of evolution only in terms of genetics, but that is a mistake. Culture, thought, behavior, and the expression of genes (the genes you have can be turned on or off) also evolve. In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance. We have been given the great gift of being able to adapt our thinking and behavior intentionally, and to change our circumstances deliberately, to better suit healthy, purposeful living. The six flexibility skills form such a powerful set because each allows us to meet one of the six essential criteria for evolution to occur. They provide us with the tools to intentionally evolve our lives.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“If you were on a bus trying to go east in a maze of dirt roads in a large valley, you might not be able to tell your direction from moment to moment. If someone took a series of snapshots, sometimes the bus might be facing north, or south, or even west, even though all the while this is a journey to the east.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, Volume 2 of 2

“As human beings increasingly look inward, life begins to seem more like a problem to be solved than a process to be fully experienced.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Popular books promise that we can and should learn how to feel good, manage our anxiety, or get rid of our depression—but not so much information about how to learn from our own experiences. Our medications are anti-depressants, or anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotics, as if the only sensible goal is to subtract them. Our disorders are called “mood disorders” or “thought disorders” or “anxiety disorders”—once again feeding a cultural view that is often outright hostile to anything painful. We’ve got to put aside this unhelpful messaging to create some space to try truly new things.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“I begin to experience myself as a conscious human being at the precise point at which I begin to experience you as a conscious human being. I see from a perspective only because I also see that you see from a perspective. Consciousness is shared. Moreover, you cannot be fully conscious here and now without sensing your interconnection with others in other places and other times. Consciousness expands across times, places, and persons. In the deepest sense, consciousness itself contains the psychological quality that we are conscious—timelessly and everywhere.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The single hardest burden for a human being to carry is a lack of nurturance in childhood. Physical or sexual abuse, neglect, constant criticism: in the face of such treatment, our bodies and minds brace for a tough life ahead, even down to the level of how our genes are expressed. Genetics research has revealed that our life experiences influence which of our genes will become more or less active. For example, a specific group of genes is involved in responding to stress. A lack of nurturance intensifies their activity, making us less able to handle stress and decreasing our resistance to disease. We can also experience emotional instability or emotional blunting that can be lifelong.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“We are in this stew together. We are caught in the same traps. With a small twist of fate, I could be sitting across from you, and you could be sitting across from me—both of us in opposite roles. Your problems are a special opportunity for you to learn and for me to learn. We are not cut from different cloths, but rather from the same cloth.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking “How effectual are they?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change