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Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

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how to move from suffering to engagement with life. — location: 215 ^ref-56319

Rather than waiting to win the internal struggle with your own self so that your life can begin, — location: 216 ^ref-5777

living now and living fully—with (not in spite of) your past, with your memories, with your fears, and with your sadness. — location: 217 ^ref-1288

many of the tools we use to solve problems lead us into the traps that create suffering. — location: 222 ^ref-33140

Psychological pain is normal, — location: 242 ^ref-7957

take steps to avoid increasing it artificially. — location: 243 ^ref-8902

don’t have to identify with your suffering. — location: 244 ^ref-53478

Accepting your pain — location: 245 ^ref-50028

get out of your mind and into your life. — location: 246 ^ref-38012

the outcome of the war is no longer very important and the seemingly logical sequence of having to win the war before beginning to really live has been abandoned. — location: 256 ^ref-26783

We aren’t going to help you win the war with your own pain by using new theories. We are going to help you leave the battle that is raging inside your own mind, — location: 266 ^ref-46008

Your pain will be an informative ally — location: 294 ^ref-9192

How many people do you know really well who don’t experience periods in which they struggle with serious psychological or social problems, relationship issues, problems at work, anxiety, depression, anger, self-control issues, sexual problems, fear of death, and so on? — location: 312 ^ref-50610

About 30 percent of all adults have a major psychiatric disorder — location: 316 ^ref-39038

strong ever-present feeling of apprehension and anxiety. — location: 324 ^ref-43120

mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based living. — location: 350 ^ref-59711

learn to see your thoughts in a new way. — location: 358 ^ref-56454

If you are now stuck in the lens of your psychological pain, you may say things to yourself like, “I’m depressed.” — location: 360 ^ref-32937

undermine your attachment to a particular cognitive lens — location: 363 ^ref-7849

look at your pain, rather than seeing the world from the vantage point of your pain. — location: 364 ^ref-19903

as a rule, trying to get rid of your pain only amplifies it, entangles you further in it, and transforms it into something traumatic. — location: 376 ^ref-15830

active, vital embrace of the moment that we mean. — location: 380 ^ref-45226

Are you living the life you want to live right now? — location: 385 ^ref-63404

Is your life focused on what is most meaningful to you? — location: 385 ^ref-32861

we often put life on hold, believing that our pain needs to lessen before we can really begin to live again. — location: 387 ^ref-54519

shifting from useless mental management to life engagement. — location: 394 ^ref-59252

Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you could get out of your mind, and into your life? — location: 403 ^ref-27132

no longer try to live inside a war zone, with your psychological survival seemingly dependent on the outcome of the war. — location: 416 ^ref-28597

persistent, active engagement with the text. — location: 421 ^ref-12212

unrelenting honesty from you. — location: 424 ^ref-26975

intend this book to make a difference in your life. — location: 433 ^ref-28792

methods, if you see in your actual experience the possibility of using them to transform your life for the better, will you be willing to move forward in that direction? — location: 434 ^ref-50341

some methods of avoiding pain are pathological in and of themselves. — location: 481 ^ref-16971

all of your problems provide you with two sources of pain. It is not just your anxiety or depression or worry that creates pain. Your pain is also holding you back from living the life you want to lead. — location: 566 ^ref-48743

Generally, the more you live your life trying to ward off the pain of presence, the more pain you get, particularly in the form of the pain of absence. — location: 577 ^ref-42908

of another kind of life: a life in which what you do is connected not to your pain, or to the avoidance of your pain, but to the kind of life you truly want to live. — location: 585 ^ref-7347

not about solving your problems in a traditional way so much as it is about changing the direction of your life, so that your life is more about what you value. — location: 587 ^ref-26287

We can be afraid of negative evaluations from others, even if we haven’t ever experienced them, and we can become socially inhibited as a result. — location: 745 ^ref-5994

problem: the verbal skills that create misery are too useful and central to human functioning to ever stop operating. That means suffering is an unavoidable part of the human condition, at least until we know how to better manage the skills language itself has given us. — location: 753 ^ref-31201

Thought suppression only makes the situation worse. — location: 765 ^ref-26611

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, — location: 781 ^ref-48430

may be that those with severe obsessive thinking problems spend more effort on trying not to think these thoughts — location: 787 ^ref-42707

it can be useless or even actively unhelpful to try to get rid of those thoughts you don’t like. — location: 809 ^ref-14323

emotions. If you try not to feel a bad feeling, such as pain, not only do you tend to feel it more intensely, but previously neutral events also become irritating — location: 813 ^ref-55891

when you suppress thoughts in the presence of an emotion, eventually the emotion evokes the thought, and the suppression strategies evoke both the thought and the emotion — location: 816 ^ref-53048

friend. In a sense you will have amplified your pain in your attempt to avoid feeling it. — location: 821 ^ref-55415

not to let it move at all, but especially not forward and back. The effect? It tends to move forward and back, not side to side, simply because thinking about not having it move forward and back activates the very muscles that move it that way — location: 826 ^ref-65044

1998). The effect is especially strong under pressure situations, precisely when you would most wish it were not there. — location: 828 ^ref-24244

it reminds you of bad consequences. — location: 868 ^ref-3599

the negative consequence and current event are arbitrarily related. — location: 871 ^ref-20874

bed). Of all the psychological processes known to science, experiential avoidance is one of the worst — location: 886 ^ref-54875

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,” — location: 887 ^ref-8873

This is a dangerous trap because short-term effects are far more reinforcing than long-term effects, — location: 905 ^ref-24108

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. — location: 910 ^ref-17028

2.4, we build out that core of pain by our patterns of cognitive entanglement and avoidance. — location: 914 ^ref-17704

Because running away also means that we are taking our fearful thoughts literally, they become more believable and entangling. — location: 918 ^ref-50202

You believe the thoughts that your mind presents to you. — location: 927 ^ref-38191

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. — location: 933 ^ref-22556

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. — location: 935 ^ref-27521

it. To see what it’s like to jump off the mind-train, you have to actually do it. — location: 940 ^ref-5192

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.” — location: 994 ^ref-65390

Even positive feedback (although it feels good for a while) can have a hollow ring. — location: 999 ^ref-8912

times when you did things just to get the approval of others that in the long run felt false to you: — location: 1001 ^ref-57482

You are likely to feel an immediate sense of relief from not having to deal with the painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation. The sense of relief you gain reinforces your desire to use the same strategy the next time you are faced with the possibility of having to cope with your pain. — location: 1021 ^ref-44490

each time you do this, you actually give the painful content, that is, your painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation, more power. — location: 1023 ^ref-27905

it’s not just that these avoidance strategies haven’t worked—it’s that they can’t work. Avoidance only strengthens the importance and the role of whatever you are avoiding—in other words, when you avoid dealing with your problem, it only grows. — location: 1036 ^ref-41507

So, it’s not a question of getting free of the tube, it’s a question of how much “wiggle room” you want to have in your life. — location: 1046 ^ref-33392

be. If you let go of the struggle, the more freedom you have to make new choices. — location: 1047 ^ref-15541

As an alternative, accepting response-ability means to acknowledge the possibility that you are able to respond. — location: 1070 ^ref-28685

Who determines what you do with pain when it shows up? Being response-able means acknowledging that there is, in fact, some response you can make—you are able to respond. — location: 1079 ^ref-4863

consider the possibility that there is a real alternative to your struggle. — location: 1081 ^ref-17253

why it’s necessary for you to go through each of the exercises in this book slowly and carefully. — location: 1101 ^ref-51601

Only when you consider all the time and energy you’ve already spent fruitlessly trying to control your pain and avoid negative experiences, and then weighing the painful results, will you discover that the effort to do something radically different is worth it. — location: 1104 ^ref-16263

Acceptance (which we will also refer to as willingness) is a skill you may have heard about or experimented with in the past. It is certainly something that you can learn to do. Unfortunately, it is not something your mind can do, — location: 1141 ^ref-19159

your “willingness” here really means is you don’t want to feel anxiety, and you’ll try to jump through all kinds of mental hoops not to feel it. That’s not the same as being willing to feel your anxiety. — location: 1164 ^ref-39600

“Accept” comes from the Latin root “capere” meaning “take.” Acceptance is the act of receiving or “taking what is offered.” Sometimes, in English, “accept” means “to tolerate or resign yourself” (as in, “Aw, gee, I guess I have to accept that”), and that is precisely not what is meant here. By “accept,” we mean something more like “taking completely, in the moment, without defense.” — location: 1170 ^ref-42244

instead of trying to feel better, willingness involves learning how to feel better. — location: 1188 ^ref-44576

ACT promotes better health management as a result of changes in your willingness to accept discomfort, unhook from your thoughts, and move toward what is most personally meaningful to you — location: 1220 ^ref-9078

simple ACT acceptance metaphor, the Chinese finger trap (see chapter 3), reduced avoidance, anxiety symptoms, and anxious thoughts more successfully than did breathing retraining — location: 1231 ^ref-13396

those who are willing to have these private experiences have less post-traumatic stress over time — location: 1237 ^ref-50400

People who are more emotionally willing to experience negative emotional experiences enjoy better mental health and do better at work over time. — location: 1239 ^ref-6231

The effect is significantly greater than the effects of job satisfaction or emotional intelligence — location: 1240 ^ref-7213

The more substance abusers believe that drugs or alcohol reduce their negative emotions, the more likely they are to relapse — location: 1242 ^ref-51060

when I try to close myself off from the painful parts of my past, I also close myself off from the helpful things I’ve learned from my past. — location: 1251 ^ref-24452

if you cannot feel your distressing feelings, you cannot take proper care of your own health. — location: 1274 ^ref-34712

experiential avoidance predicts a gradual worsening quality of life over time — location: 1275 ^ref-14453

shift it from something unwelcome that is being visited upon you to something you are creating deliberately, — location: 1291 ^ref-54482

Do you need to be threatened by your own creation? — location: 1292 ^ref-15710

If you commit to a particular act, use mindfulness and defusion strategies when your mind starts giving you problems with pursuing that path, and move forward accepting what your mind offers you; — location: 1321 ^ref-55588

you will be in a better position to live a full and meaningful life—with or without unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and sensations. — location: 1323 ^ref-47399

give up trying to control your internal thoughts and feelings before you could move in the direction you want to go. — location: 1329 ^ref-59475

focusing your control strategies on your actions rather than your insides? — location: 1332 ^ref-16016

pain plus unwillingness to feel that pain equals suffering. — location: 1346 ^ref-43118

What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought. — location: 1371 ^ref-40800

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. — location: 1467 ^ref-5774

the simple belief “anxiety is bad” is correlated with many forms of psychological problems, from anxiety disorders to depression — location: 1483 ^ref-43706

evaluation and self-conceptualization. — location: 1502 ^ref-37354

You can learn to change the process by which you perceive yourself. But to work on this process you must start with the pain you’ve been avoiding. — location: 1510 ^ref-54960

we would like you to track your pain to try to bring into the light of day some of the thoughts that co-occur when you are struggling. — location: 1512 ^ref-59149