Steven C Hayes

This week we talk to Steven C Hayes about getting out of our minds and into our lives
Steven C Hayes is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. He is an author of over 35 books and over 500 scientific articles. He is considered one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
In 1992 he was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the 30th “highest impact” psychologist in the world. His work has been recognized by several awards including the Exemplary Contributions to Basic Behavioral Research and Its Applications from Division 25 of APA, the Impact of Science on Application award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.
He is best known for his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
 
In This Interview, Steven C Hayes and I Discuss:

The One You Feed parable
His book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life
That you know if your thoughts are good or bad by the fruits that they bear
The ACT approach to therapy
The difference between pain and suffering
The importance of putting the human mind on a leash
That suffering comes from when we mishandle the present moment, and we amplify certain thoughts and feelings
The meaning of Cognitive Fusion: when we can look only from our thoughts and not at our thoughts
The importance of and various types of contemplative practice
Various diffusion techniques (listed in a free episode download!)
The concept and practice of experiential avoidance
The full impact of acting for "short term gains with long term pains"

For more show notes visit us at our website

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's a burden that comes if you don't know how
to reign in the human mind. Put it on a leash.
It will lead you instead of you leading in. Welcome
to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have
recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like

(00:22):
garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

(00:44):
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

(01:11):
Our guest on this episode is Steven C. Hayes, a
professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada.
He's known for his analysis of human language and cognition
and its application to various psychological difficulties. He was the
first Secretary Treasurer of the American Psychological Society and is
the author of thirty eight books and hundreds of articles.

(01:33):
He is best known for his book, Get Out of
Your Mind and Into Your Life. Here's the interview. Hi Steve,
welcome to the show. I'm glad to be here. I'm
excited to have you on. I was introduced to your
work through a listener, Paul from Belfast. So Hi Paul,
who is a therapist there, and he said to me,
you know a lot of the things that you talk
about on your show sound a lot like ACT, the

(01:55):
therapy that you helped found, and so I took his advice,
looked you up, booked you for the show. And then
as I read the book, I was like, oh, I
can see why Paul said that, and we'll explore a
lot of those areas. But I found a few different
things that you know right off the bat that are
common in ACT, and that seemed to be things that
we talk a lot about on the show about sort
of accepting your emotions and feelings as they are, but

(02:18):
acting anyway. You know where you have to act your
way into right thinking. And you also draw a clear
difference between pain and suffering, which is something that we
have explored a lot on the show, more through a
Buddhist lens, but it kind of says the same thing.
So I'm excited to explore some of those. But let's
start like we normally do, with the parable. There's a
grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life,

(02:41):
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about
it for a second, and he looks up at his
grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And

(03:01):
the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like
to start off by asking you what does that parable
mean to you in your life and in the work
that you do. Well. I like it because it's looking
at the function how we actually interact with the world within.
We have all got so called positive and negative thoughts, feelings, memories,
and bodily sensations, and it's interesting to think about what

(03:23):
does it mean to feed it? What do we feed
it with? And I think we feed it with our
life moments. We feed it with attention, undue attention. And
it's not that you want to ignore or fail to
understand that you've got fear or pride or sadness. But
when they claim more than their due share of time?

(03:43):
How did that happen? In the work that we do.
Often it happens because the mind basically tricks you into
thinking that first you have to win the fight before
you can live. And so just yet another round and
yet another moment with even more focus on things that
I have not been serving you well, and the idea
that when they're finally finished, handled, dealt with, gotten, rid

(04:06):
of life can start and people can literally pour years
and decades into the feudal attempt to win the war within,
and the ticks on the clock start mocking them because
they realize it isn't just the pain, uh, it's the
suffering that comes from my life not being lived. And

(04:27):
so we're interested in, yes, learning from our thoughts and
feelings positive and negatives. Put put that in scare quotes,
because it turns out some of the positive ones are
negative and the negative ones are positive. And then by
your fruits, you know them by what they yield and
feeding them to the extent that they take you in
the direction of what you most deeply care about. I

(04:50):
take that to be at the essence of the parable,
and it's really at the center of the ACT work
and how you make that discrimination, how you make choices
about to feed and what you're feeding it with, and
what you can do when you find yourself feeding something
which is actually building suffering in your life unnecessarily. And
so ACT stands for acceptance and commitment theory. And in

(05:13):
a sentence, I think, I'll just try and give my
quick overview and then we'll go further into it. But
to me, what I got taken away from it was
to accept how we feel and what's happening in our lives,
stop trying to change it so much, and then commit
to living in accordance with what's most important to us,
regardless of how we're feeling inside at any given moment. Yeah,

(05:36):
I wouldn't say regardless, but and and I would want
to refine what I mean by acceptance. Acceptance and commitment therapy,
or when we use it an organizational settings are called
acceptance and commitment training. Because the ACT has quite a
broad applicability, it uses acceptance. In the original etymology of
the word, it comes from a Latin word that means

(05:57):
to receive, and the connotation original really was, which is
still in English but not very often, is to receive,
as is to receive a gift. We will sometimes give
a gift and we'll say here, will you accept this?
And that's what life is saying to us with its moments,
because what what feelings, thoughts, memories, and bodily sensations are

(06:17):
are the projection of your history into the current situation
based on the this, the form and the appearance of
the situation. And that's actually a gift. Have you been
abused and you're going home from a bar with somebody,
you want to feel uncomfortable if that person is not safe,
and if you're determined not to feel uncomfortable, you will

(06:39):
do things that not say. If you're facing a challenge,
you want to feel anxiety that might remind you you're
going to need to be prepared. You can't just go
in there unprepared. But you want it to be linked
to what it is that you're trying to do in
your life, and so you need the attentional flexibility to
move from taking the gift that's offered in the president

(07:00):
moment based on your history, and then moving your attention
towards what builds meaning and purpose. And so in act,
the commitment part is a commitment to building larger and
larger patterns of values based action. Whereby values we mean
not just our judgments and evaluations, but we mean are
freely chosen qualities of being and doing that we want

(07:21):
to put into our life moments during the time we
have on the planet. And so that kind of dance
of showing up to your history and the present situation,
directing your attention towards what moves you towards larger patterns
of meaning and purpose based action is the dance that's
inside our lives. I think we all learn it, and
we can show that people who do better in life

(07:43):
over time are people who become more what we call
psychologically flexible. But act can speed it up because we
know what the basic processes are a little better. We
have some procedures to move them. Some of them are
taken from the wisdom traditions, some of them were things
we've created ourselves, and all of that. In an act
perceptive is based on a solid basic science tradition of

(08:06):
understanding the underlying cognitive processes that are involved in in
this whole enterprise. So we're bring some things new to
the table. We borrow a lot from things that were
here from many hundreds of not thousands of years. But
we're trying to put it into a a simple model,
but a powerful model that tells people how to both
show up to their history and then direct themselves towards

(08:28):
the kinds of futures that they're trying to create in
the moment. Excellent. So one of the places that you
start is you make a distinction between pain and suffering,
and then you say that to a certain extent, as humans,
we suffer because we're verbal creatures. You know, our our
agility with language has lots of wonderful things, like it's

(08:50):
allowed us to create the society we have and survive
and all that. But that for our internal world, this
can be problematic. Can you elaborate on that. Well, we're
the only creature that is able to relate events bi
directionally and in networks and change what we do based
on arbitrary qualities of those events and social convention, not

(09:10):
on their formal properties. At chimpanzee can learn the larger
two piles of pennies, let's say, but only human being
can learn that dime is bigger than the nickel, which
it certainly isn't. And we can show that in the lab.
We can show that children don't develop normal human language
if by age twelve months sixteen months they're not actually

(09:31):
deriving these relationships by directually and in networks. For example,
if you know the names for something without training, when
you hear the name, your orient towards that thing, you
would think non human animals do that. No, they don't,
not even the language to train chimps and controlled studies,
and so this from this little seed, which is actually
based on an extension of social cooperation, comes because we're

(09:52):
their tribal primates. From that seed, we've had built the
capacity to imagine futures that have never been compare things
that are impossible to compare, but we can do it
intellectually and it's our greatest achievement and no doubt. But
we're the only species that will commit suicide because we'll

(10:12):
feel better when we're dead. We're the only species and
knows how to suffer amidst plenty. And so there's a
burden that comes if you don't know how to reign
in the human mind, to put it on a leash.
It will lead you instead of you leading it. And
this thin corticole overlay that's probably two thousand or two
million years old will dominate over parts of us that

(10:33):
are half a billion years old in the case of
learning processes, a billion and a half in terms of
basic habituation processes. I mean, we've got things going on
inside of us that are feeding emotion, intuition, felt sense, etcetera.
That are thousands of times older than the symbolic thought
that we're carrying around and spending our time focused on.

(10:56):
And if you're not careful that judgmental process us, we'll
tell you, for example, that this moment is unacceptable. It
can't be. This somehow violates laws the universe to have
the pain of loss, betrayal, death, deturations that happen with
physical disease or aging and so forth. In it will
suggest that what you need to do is to suppress it,

(11:18):
avoid it, don't look at it, deny it, tuck yourself
out of it, which, for reasons that I can explain,
tend to only amplify and build the impact of difficult
life events if you're really, really, really really determined not
to feel anxious, well, then anxiety is something to be
anxious about. And as a panic disordered person in recovery,
I can tell you that can amplify to the point

(11:39):
that you can't function. You literally can't speak on a
phone call, you can't give a lecture, you simply can't function.
And it's all because the so called solutions have created
this self amplifying process that takes you an untenable place.
So suffering, I think as unnecessary. Pain is built in.
Suffering comes when we miss handle the present moment and

(12:01):
we amplify the impact of difficult thoughts and feelings. Although
we've learned more recently the difficult thought feelings can include
joyful thoughts and feelings. People who are highly avoidant or
is afraid of love and joy and connection as they
are of sadnessphere and rejection, you end up trying to
hold your breath into your life is over as a

(12:22):
model of health, which is not a very healthy place
to live. So I don't think suffering is needed. If
you look around you in the animal Kingdom, we have
lots of examples of pain, and I guess you could
call that suffering if you want. But we don't have
billionaires who have the trophy house, the trophy spouse. The
kids will love them everything and reach into the drawer
and pull out a gun and blow their brains out.

(12:42):
And that happens every day, every day. Uh, you know,
something like the human population will struggle for two weeks
or more with thoughts of leaving this planet by their
own hand at a moderate severe level. I mean, it's
just everyday normal functioning to deal with even the most
extreme anti life, nonfunctional thing we can imagine, which is

(13:04):
to take away life on purpose, and in smaller ways,
we do that all the time as we mishandle the
present moment and the things that it includes, some of
which are painful. You talk about cognitive fusion, and what

(13:31):
you say is that the problem that what you're describing
here is that when we can look only from our
thoughts rather than at our thoughts. What what do you
mean by that? Yeah, we kind of live inside these
cognitive networks and we allow them to structure the world
that we're in, and that happens so thoroughly that we

(13:51):
miss that the world is being structured our past, it's
being reconstructed. Our history is being interpreted. We're story in
we don't. They have the choice to have cognition or not.
These are learned processes. There's no such thing as un learning.
And human psychology or psychology period there's inhibition, but there's
no delete button on the nervous system. There's no minus

(14:14):
button on that calculator. There's plus buttons and multiplication buttons,
and that's it. And so if you've ever seen or
thought or heard of or experience anything that's difficult or
will be there for the rest of your life, the
issue is what do you do when it's there? Are
you going to feed the wolf or you're going to

(14:34):
let it assume it's natural? Part this process of cognitive
fusion has kind of an innocent thing. If I asked
you to taste what a glass of apple juice might
taste like right now, almost everybody can do that very quickly.
You probably will start salivating even to it, even though
there may not be any apples insider within reach. You're
just hearing the sounds through wires from an old bild

(14:57):
guy talking months ago. Here comes the smacking of the
lips and the salivating around what, after all, is an
event that has nothing to do with apples. I mean,
apples are called you a Bucas and Croatian, they're called
apples here. It doesn't matter what sound it is. It'll
have that effect and it's fine. The fusion part comes

(15:19):
this from the Latin word that means to pour together.
It's fine to have these functions poured together with symbolic thought.
The problem is that flies underneath our radar screen, and
we don't know how to back out of it. If
we can't get rid of thoughts I mean, and I
don't think we can get rid of any bit of learning.
If I were to tell you, if you can remember
three numbers, I'll give you a thousand dollars, and numbers
are one, two, three. If a minute from now I

(15:40):
ask you what are the numbers, you'll answer. And I've
only done it twice now, And I bet you almost
everybody listening could do it a week from now, maybe
maybe even a month from now, maybe at the end
of your life. Why why what a stupid thing? Well,
it's because that's the kind of critters we are. Learning
works like that. So if you've had really painful thoughts

(16:01):
or difficult thoughts or life narrowing thoughts, and you've allowed
them to dominate over your behavior. What you can do
is pull the plug on their impact over time that
you can't put the pull the plug on their presence.
The metaphor I use for pulling a plug and impact
would be like if you heard an actor in a
movie say some lines. You're very unlikely to adopt them

(16:22):
yourselves as being personally meaningful, even though you're hearing them
in a way that will create psychopathology or something. You
might but if it hit you the wrong way, But
how would we interact with our own thinking sort of
when we needed to the way an actor might reading
their lines. What turns out we can do that, and

(16:42):
if that's in fact exactly what goes on with contemplative
practice when you learn to watch thoughts dis passionately. But
we've developed other methods to do that, and we will
sing our thoughts, get them down to a single words,
say them repeatedly, hundreds of times, over and over thirty seconds,
Sam and the voice of Donald duck Well, turn them
into objects and be very interested in their size, shaped, color,

(17:03):
and speed. Will take the really difficult ones and write
them on our chest, will print t shirts that have
our secret thoughts. You know, there's probably four or five
hundred diffusion methods that our methods the ACT community has
developed to undo the unnecessary impact of thinking on behavior

(17:25):
by the failure to see thinking in flight as a process. Yeah.
I thought that was one of the really interesting parts
of ACT is that that's pretty common these days, with
mindfulness being such a thing and contemplative practices being more common,
there's a lot of discussion of, well, learn to watch
your thoughts in a non judgmental way. You know what

(17:46):
I got in the book was there was lots of
different ways to give yourself that little bit of distance
from your thoughts. I mean, you use a great analogy
in the book where you say that diffusing from our
thoughts is like taking off our glasses, holding them out
several inches away from our face, and then we can
see like that, we can both see through the glasses

(18:06):
like say they made the world yellow. We can see like, oh,
they make the world yellow. So we know the mechanism
doesn't mean that the world doesn't still look yellow a
lot of the time, but at least we understand that
it's a it's a projection. And so I thought ACT
was really powerful in a lot of those different ways
to diffuse from those thoughts. Yeah, and some of these
are in the wisdom traditions, I mean champing for example.

(18:28):
Or when you dig down to the process and there's
an underlying basic science to actually study this, you begin
to realize that, gee, you could do this through hundreds
of different ways. And we've done that, and some people
include act as part of the mindfulness based traditions. We
actually will use contemplative practice, classic contemplative practice as part

(18:50):
of what we do, but there's no reason not to
add other methods that point at and actually move the
same processes that we know that contemplative practice will move.
And so most people, I don't think, would think that
is stilling a difficult thought down to a single word
and saying it over and over again for thirty seconds
is mindfulness. But but it moves some of the same processes.

(19:14):
And and I get emails from people that got one
just not too long ago, from somebody said, I've been
meditating all my life. I was raised as a Buddhist,
the guy from South Korea, and uh, I was reading
your book and I started applying some of these methods,
and I suddenly realized, Oh, that's why I'm meditating in
the West. I think we are taking these wisdom traditions

(19:38):
and trying to put them onto the factory floor. And
that's fine if you can go there, But I do
worry about Joe six pack and whether or not he
or she is gonna, you know, do a ten day
silent retreat and frankly, if I can get a thirty
second process in there of you know, taking a really
difficult thought in singing it to the tune of Happy Birthday,

(19:58):
you know, I I want to do that because it
opens doors that very quickly we can show produce changes
in your attentional processes, in your amount of distress and
the amount of believability of these thoughts. We even have
some new measures showing so a new studies showing that
some of the biological effects of meditation, it turns out,

(20:19):
are fostered by these diffusion and acceptance processes, including things
like how long your telomeres are. In a recent study,
the correlation between your length of telomeres and these psychological
flexibility skills that counted for the variants beyond age in
how your chromosomes are tied off, like you know, like

(20:39):
the plastic ends of your shoelaces. You don't want your
telemeres to unravel because it has negative effects. And well
in meditation does the same thing. It'll do these telomere shortening.
But when you know the process, then we have other
ways and some of these things I think we can
get into the factory floor. We can get into our
normal cultural process the seas, into schools and organizations and

(21:02):
churches and businesses, and so that's really the game we're playing.
Can we understand the processes and develop procedures that move them,
including contemplative practice, but not committed only to that one way.
I mean, after all, in the East, those methods are
mostly used by monks, not by normal people, and we're
trying to put it into the healthcare system on the West.

(21:24):
Is the only way that you foster these processes, And
I just don't think I agree with that. I don't
think that's either helpful or necessary or progressive scientifically and
culturally alone. It's progresses as far as it goes. But
then there's more we can do. And it's not hostile
to the wisdom traditions, it's builds on them and amplifies them.

(21:47):
In my opinion. Yeah, I agree. We will put some
of those, you know, list a couple of those different
um diffusion techniques in the download that's available for this
show at one you feed dot net slash haze. I'm
actually gonna do a TED talk on two weeks and
so I know there's there's one that you have seen
that I've got coming, so maybe and I'm going to

(22:09):
walk go through some of those fun techniques of people
are able to see it, and we'll definitely link to
your TED talk. There's an analogy that you make to
describe the idea of willingness, the willingness to be open
to our lives, and an analogy that I think wraps
up a lot of the act process and you talk
about you know, if you imagine there's a radio, there's
a dial on the front, which is the discomfort dial,

(22:33):
and then there's a dial on the back which most
of us don't see, called the willingness dial. Can you
play out that analogy for us. We've come to our
experiences with a problem solving mode of mind, and we
look at them in the context of finding a solution
to these problems as opposed to a more sunset mode

(22:54):
of mind. Of appreciating what they are and experiencing them
for what they are. And when you do that, if
you're we're to have let's say, allowed radio, I mean,
who wouldn't want to try to turn it down? If
I'm experienced anxiety as a panic disordered person in recovery,
I can tell you, of course, my mind says, turn
turn the dial down. I don't like feeling all that anxiety.

(23:16):
I want it down. I want to lower, want it lower. Now. Unfortunately,
part of what you're doing when you're doing that, is
you're clicking into a problem solving mode, the essence of
which is something fundamentally unacceptable that violates what needs to
happen about the present moment, and unbeknownst to you, completely
out of you because it's the assumption on which you

(23:38):
adopted that problem solving mode of mind. Is this willingness
a dial or in some ways more almost like a switch,
because it tends to be almost honor off, which is
more this question, are you willing to have this moment
fully in defense as it is not as what it
says it is? Yes or no. That's not problem solving,
that's being here. It's very much more like looking at

(24:02):
a sunset and seeing it we're looking away. You're probably
not going to treat it as a problem to be solved.
It's not a math problem. You're not gonna say, God,
that's too pink and eat some blue over there. You're
either going to appreciate it or you're not looking at
it in the same way. When we come to you know,
our difficult emotions, for example, instead of automatically clicking into

(24:23):
a mentality that says it's the dial on the front
that's important, we can reach around and catch the context
that was there, which is the dial on the back.
And it turns out when you set that thing high,
we're you're open to having it. Though dial on the
front could be high or low, you've abanned an interest
in that, and either of those settings high or low
on the front doesn't stop you from living the kind

(24:45):
of life you want. When I turned as a panic
disordered person away from the I'll start living when posture
from that this has to go down before I can live,
posture to one of I'm not going to run from
my own experience kind of posture that we're going to
start inside. Well, what happened was I still had anxiety attacks,

(25:05):
there were still number ten and anxiety attacks, but there
weren't panic attacks because and my definition is this, if
you have a really strong emotional reaction and you come
out of it even more willing to live the kind
of life you want to live, even if that happens again,
you just did something progressive and you can do that.

(25:26):
You can do that regardless of the level of difficult thoughts, feelings, pain, etcetera.
And we see it in the literature and these controlled
studies on act with anxiety, depression, pain and so forth.
And what that means those we abandoned the moment to
moment interest of measuring our lives with these little spoonfuls

(25:47):
of how much pain do we have? And more are
moments filled with the kind of qualities of being and
doing that we find most important. Are we living our values?
Or we connect with others? Are we loving, participating, contributing, creating?
And turns out you can do that with lots of

(26:08):
critical thoughts on board, with lots of difficult feelings and
bodily sensations on board. You don't do it by ignoring
it or dismissing it. You do it by opening up
to it and then directing attention towards what's important, and
that kind of one to punch just what we call
psychological flexibility. So yeah, the hidden dial is an example
of fusion. Fusion allows these judgments and plans to disappear

(26:34):
into the network. We don't even realize we're treating ourselves
as if we're a problem to be solved instead of
sunset to be appreciated. And until you kind of stop
and see how the illusion is created, you really don't
have freedom to do anything different because your mind will
just run on automatic pilot and all of us over

(26:55):
feed our problem solving repertoires. Were taught to do it
in schools. I mean, every it is being taught how
to make your mind go faster. Nobody's being taught how
to put brakes on your mind, unless you're lucky enough
to live in a school that teaches at least some
contemplative practice skills. And so we really are constantly feeding
the wrong wolf to stay with your metaphor, and then

(27:16):
we're surprised at the outcomes the wrong wolf that you're
referring to. There is this desire to escape from what

(27:36):
we're feeling versus being willing to embrace it. So the
discomfort dial is kind of what life gives us. Right,
There's not a lot we can do with it. Right,
It's like you get handed something and and so what
you do with it is really what we're talking about.
And one of the things that you say, and this
this hit home for me. I've been thinking a lot
about this in my own life over the last week.

(27:59):
Um is the idea. You call it experiential avoidance, which
means you don't do certain things in order to not
have that feeling. And in my own life where I've
recognized it most is not having difficult conversations about things
by by just sort of going okay and sort of
because the fear that comes up is Um, I don't

(28:22):
want that fear. So the way I can make the
fear go away is just to say okay. And it's
interesting the way you describe that, because you say when
you do that, there's a temporary, short term feeling of
relief because you're like, okay, that feeling goes away. But
I want to read something you wrote about experiential avoidance
because I think it's really good. And you say that
consider the possibility, as unlikely as it may seem, that

(28:43):
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.
That is really a feed the wolf situation, isn't it.
You know that. I think people have this idea if

(29:05):
I can get the short term benefit of avoidance, that
I've actually somehow lessened the role of that event in
my life and I have strengthened it because that wolf
was just eaten down that little bit of my life
and it's going to come back asking for even more.
And so if if I am walking down through an
anxiety disorder, for example, and I'm making these kind of compromises,

(29:30):
the role of anxiety and difficult thoughts around it isn't
getting smaller, It's getting bigger because it's being fed. If
you're unwilling to face the disappointment, disapproval, conflict, etcetera, that
might happen, possible rejection, exclusion from the group. I mean,
there's painful things that could happen if you're honest with
other people around you. No doubt, the problem is as

(29:51):
you walk down that journey, that social fear will claim
more and more territory. It'll seep it's self into more
corners of your lives, will be more attending to the
threat that it might show up, and it has this
kind of effect of resentment, disconnection, etcetera. I'll give you
an example. There's research showing that people who make those

(30:14):
compromises socially in the name of having good relationships with
the people because you'd be afraid, if you're honest, that
it might be conflicted, you will value the relationships you
have with that person less. That's a high cost. Ding,
ding Ding, It's a huge cost. It's over here, you know.
But you why. It's a natural process where the short

(30:37):
term and the long term, so it doesn't line up properly.
And everything about learning tells us that shortest short term
is more powerful than long term. The only thing that
really can compete with that is seeing repeatedly over time
how it works and getting that point where enough is
enough and I am not willing to sell myself short

(31:00):
in the name of these short term gains. And you know,
we thankfully have the ability to look more long term.
That's a cognitive process as well. At least in part.
And so if you can sort of stay true to
what your values are, which are these chosen qualities that
you want to build out in your life. For example,
in that relationships situation, I bet you that there are

(31:22):
values of honesty, of connection, of communication that could help
you through the hard part of looking somebody's the eye
and trying to be fair and compassionate but also honest
and respectful of yourself even if it's scary, and you
know that will begin to build some momentum towards a

(31:45):
different kind of way of relating to others and with
regard relating to your own fears about others or emotions
about relationships. So it's it's hard for us because we're
constantly being tempted by our problem solving mode of mind
into short term gains with long term pains, so we
can control suffering, but in the attempt to control pain,

(32:10):
we produce more. So if I go back to that
metaphor of the dial, it's kind of like some of
the noise from that dial is built in and some
is artificial from us turning it up as we try
to turn the knob and the in the back down
to the I don't want this, I can't have this,

(32:31):
this must not occur. Well, good luck with that, because
you're actually pretty likely to have more, not less, of
what it is that is most painful for you. And
panic is a good example. You can start with small
amount of anxiety and end up with an amount that
is very, very, very difficult to deal with. But you
did things to produce that, and when you pull a

(32:52):
plug on it, it will gradually assume a more normal level,
or it won't. But you've abandoned your interest in that
question in the service of the kind of life you
want to live. And then it so happens that you
know it's not a secret what happens when you do that,
pain starts assuming a more natural level. The metaphor used

(33:12):
would be like if you put salt in a glass
of water, instead of trying to pick out the dissolved grains,
add some more water to it, and it can become
quite drinkable. Not because you subtracted anything, there's no delete
button on the nervous system, but because you filled your
life's moments with love and connection, communication and values, with acceptance,

(33:33):
self compassion and kindness, and you know as you do
that life becomes more and more joyful and livable, or
at least alive and vital. Even when it's painful and
things happen, when you're disappointed, or people die or things happen,
there's things built into life that you want to be
there for. You know, my mother died about a year

(33:55):
and a half ago, and I was there choose, aged
ninety two, des about turn, had my hands on her
as her feature in black, and her final breasts came,
and it was a sacred moment. I mean, there's as
painful as I could imagine anything being painful, but I'd
pay thousands and thousands of dollars for the privilege of
being there because that pain was meaningful, it was important.

(34:16):
That's not suffering, it's something else. It's a living and
our mind doesn't understand that. I want to ask you
a question about behavioral patterns. So you you talk about
this idea of creating larger behavioral patterns, and um, we

(34:38):
spend a lot of time on this show talking about
behavior change, habit change, and this was a concept that
I haven't come across in a lot of research that
I've done. So I was wondering if you could explain
that a little bit more. What a creating a larger
behavioral pattern means. What you want is you want issues
of habit and mindlessness to work for you instead of
against you. You know, you're not always hasn't with the

(35:01):
choices that are in every single moment. If you can
build out patterns, larger and larger patterns of values based action,
we know that integrated patterns that are repeated tend to
be relatively resistant to change. It's not that you can't
change it, but you have this kind of momentum. And
that's true on the negative side's true on the positive side. Uh.

(35:23):
You know, I'm a behavioralist and you can show this
in animal models and very clearly and in human models
as well. This concept of habits is a real useful thing.
That's why the contemporative practice traditions, of course, emphasize practice
so much and right living and so forth, that you
you have to build these habits. So if you take

(35:43):
something like, Okay, I've confronted myself around a particular pattern
that I deeply want to change. Let's say it's um,
there's a health practice that I think is really important.
I want to let go of some of these consumption
of things that are not healthy for me, whether it's
cigarettes or too much alcohol. I want to eat good food,

(36:04):
and I want to exercise and I get enough sleep. Well,
that's a lot to do all it once, and you
start wherever you start, and you begin to build a pattern.
But it takes something like, okay, I'll do a lot
of addiction work, and there's several randomized trials of act
for addiction. Let's say somebody has put down excessive use
of alcohol, but then they slip. What their mind does

(36:27):
is say, see, I told you you can't do it.
You said you're going to do it, and you didn't
do it, and now you've slipped, You've lost it, you've
blown it, your failure again, maybe you should have another drink. Okay,
But at that moment, what happened is you were building
a pattern. The pattern changed. Can we look at that
and say, which pattern do you want commit? Slip? Recommit

(36:53):
or commit slip abandoned interest in this health practice? You
have a choice us. There are two different patterns. And
what we found in that literature on smoking, on substance abuse,
and so forth, it's not so much that we prevent slips.
It's that we take the fun out of them, because
you can't go mindless on it and say, oh, I

(37:14):
guess that means I can just give up. No, it
means what's the next pattern are you going to build here?
And so we found it, for example, in smoking, where
there's several good randomized trials and actors really quite good there. Um.
The pattern seems to be that when people slip, they
come back and quit, which is so unusual in the

(37:35):
smoking literature that they don't even sometimes take that measure.
Once you slip, you're out of the study. So by
the time you go a year out, let's say people
are smoke free because they came back. They came back,
they came back, they came back. You know. As that happens,
these habits of mind begin to work for you. As
you treat yourself more compassionately, as you step up to

(37:56):
the kind of values based life you want to have
with your family and your loved is, your work, or
with your health practices, it begins to receive. It becomes
just the way that you live, and that will be
relatively resistant to change when it's well grooved and well
practiced and integrated into very large patterns, so that it
isn't just that I quit smoking or stop drinking. I'm

(38:19):
now also running, and I'm now also doing yoga, and
I'm now also getting at least date our sleep, and
I'm now also you know, eating really well. So that's
what I mean by larger and larger patterns of values
based action. It's a lot of process that ever stops
because no matter how big gap, there's more big to get.
And it's not gonna be always consistent. You're gonna make slips,

(38:41):
but you're gonna come back more robustly and more able
to direct your life in the direction you want to take.
If you've spent a lot of time taking these building
blocks of openness, of honesty and flexible attention to the
now value s based action, and now you've grooved it
into actual behaviors, done over and over and over again

(39:03):
in larger and larger and larger patterns. So that's kind
of what we try to do with our work. Clinically
with ACT, we sort of have a family dentist model.
You know, if people slip, you know come back. Sometimes
you don't see the relevance and and so you've built
out a good pattern and new things happen, you don't
see how to integrate it. Do you have a moment
for me to tell a story on that? Sure? Well, okay,

(39:27):
so I developed tentatives from just being a punk rocker
and entirely too many concerts standing very close to very
large speakers, and so as it starts to come in
when I about sixty years old, I'm sixty seven. Now
I can eat more and more frustrated. This noises constant.
It gets louder and louder, and it goes on for

(39:48):
like two years ago. To the audiologists, you know, I'm
doing all the things that they say to do. It
doesn't work. And then I actually catch myself thinking things
like if I shoot myself, the sound will go away,
and you know, I go like, dude, that's a suicidal thought.
Maybe you should apply your life's work to it. It
took three years for me to even realize I could

(40:09):
do that, and with one week it was handled completely.
We've since done randomized trials showing that act is very
good for it. We have measures of experiential avoidance, fusion, etcetera.
In the area of tenacious and it predicts psychosocial disability
and distress. If you're constantly unaccepting of the noise. Guess
guess what you hear constantly. Conversely, I'm talking to you,

(40:32):
I hear the noise. It's there. The last time I
heard it was probably a week ago, when I was
telling somebody else this story, because I just don't care anymore.
There isn't anything for me to learn from it other
than not a good idea to, you know, go to
punk rock concerts without your protection by the way, young people,
take those little iPads and iPods out of your freaking ears,

(40:54):
or turned down the volume because when you're sixty it's
going to be doing this um. But there's anything else
for me to learn. So acceptance in that case just
looks more like I don't care. You can't make me care.
I was not going to attend to it, as It's
not that I'm not going to attend to it, because
then i'd have to be seeing if it went away,
and that would mean attending to it, and I'd be

(41:15):
feeding the wolf again. The kind of not feeding here
is abandoning all interest. And so it occurred when it
rings the ring, so it doesn't doesn't I've just abandoned interest. Well,
but my point here of the larger patterns is it does.
I don't want to falsely say it means that with practice,
life is smooth sailing and you don't have challenges because

(41:37):
life grows and you get thrown curveballs and you may
not see. But if you have these skills, you can
apply them to the new things because they apply over
and over and over again, whether it's a death in
the family, or an injury that you've experienced, our financial loss,
or a major failure in some way, or you name it.
As these things happen, you can bring the same kind compassionate,

(42:02):
flexible attention to what is and shifting attention towards values
that worked in all these other areas. That's the benefit
of building these larger patterns. It's not that you don't
have challenges, but that you can respond to them when
you see the relevance with a skill set that will
be helpful to you. Well, we are out of time, um,

(42:23):
but I can't let it end without at least asking
about a couple of the punk shows you saw. As
a former punk rocker myself, I've gotta I gotta know
about a couple of these and then we'll then we'll
wrap this up. I lived in Greensboro at the time,
and these punk rock bands at at the time was
like black flag and acts and circled jerk symbol these
kind of words. And they would drive from Atlanta to

(42:45):
d C because they weren't that popular yet and they
couldn't fly, so the vans would stop on Wednesday nights
in Greensboro, halfway between these two big cities on the
East Coast, And so Wednesday night was bar night in Greensboro,
and uh and these very small venues packed to the
gills with these bear chested, tattered up, screaming uh quote

(43:11):
unquote singers. But man, the energy was so awesome. I
mean I was I was a little sex Pistols fan
and all the rest, but to see these guys up
close is just awesome. Bad for my ears though, me
me too. Chris and I both have spent too much
time around really loud amplifiers, so um, I don't have
the I don't hear as well as I should. That's

(43:33):
the issue I have now, But there might be more coming. Well, Steve,
thanks so much for taking the time to come on
the show. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I really enjoyed
the book Get Out of your mind and into your life.
I would recommend it to listeners. And as I said,
we'll have a download available with the show that has
some of the diffusion techniques and a few other things

(43:54):
from your work, and that's that when you feed dot
net slash Haze, and we'll definitely link to your ted
talks also, So thanks so much for taking the time
to come on. It was great talking to you. I
had a good time and I hope it's been useful
to the people listening. Great. Bye bye. You can learn

(44:28):
more about Steven C. Hayes and this podcast at one
you feed dot net slash Stephen