So, I just looked up “What are the important elements when writing a blog?” on Google. This is my first attempt at writing a blog and I wanted some help to get me going. Of course, I got all the usual stuff about making it salesy, branded, marketable! All the things that feed into my “I’m not good enough story!” into my “Why didn’t I think of that story” and into my “I’ve got it wrong again story”.
And I realise sitting here that all my years of working with the ACT principles have been utilised in this one moment. That this one moment will help you understand the principles of ACT so you too can start to use them in your life.
I was going to go into all the metaphors I regularly use to explain the various principles to clients. I wanted to tell you about ACT because its amazing and literally turned my life around. At the time I came across ACT I, like many people, was struggling with anxiety, with endless negative thoughts and my usual way of dealing with all this negativity which for me was red wine. Life was just a struggle, and I was never really happy and always wondering what was wrong with me.
ACT stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
It’s a simple tool comprising of 6 core principles. There is no order to these principles you just start to add them in to the mix to work with what ever you have going on. ACT has over 5000 peer reviewed studies proving its efficacy in dealing with anxiety and depression.
So, I know your dying to know the core principles so you can start to use them in your life, so here we go.
ACCEPTANCE Accepting the situation just as it is, not struggling to change it, not wanting it to be different, but with interest and curiosity accepting it. Its like we have a struggle switch that says no I should be happy, I should be content, I should know how to write a blog! And we just struggle with what is, and this becomes all consuming. What if we just accepted it and turned the struggle switch off. It doesn’t mean we have to like it, but it does mean we stop struggling against it. With my moment of doubt over my first blog post I realised quickly that I could accept that I had never done one before and I was ok to be in the discomfort.
MINDFULNESS Becoming aware of the present moment is like an anchor for our psyche, there is lots of good evidence to show that when we become aware of anything in the present moment, through our awareness or our senses, that neurons in our brain start to activate in the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of our brain and quieten down in the limbic system the reactionary part of our brain. Becoming mindful can be as little as being aware of just one breath, or your feet on the ground, to an extended practice of scanning the whole body. This is what I used when I found myself on google looking through the different sites. I realised I was getting despondent because my face went all heavy and my chest dropped down, the more you use mindfulness the more you realise that your body is talking to you all the time, but it talks in sensations which is possibly a new language to learn.
UNHOOK This is probably one of the most useful tools for anxiety and depression. Did you know that studies have shown that 90% of all human’s thoughts are negative. Yes, that’s right – you are not alone – everyone has the same amount of negative thoughts as you. In fact, did you know that your thoughts are meant to be quite negative because your brains thinking job is to look for problems. Its like a caveman brain, constantly looking for the threat. Back in caveman days a threat was a threat to survival, and it was a case of life and death to not see looming problems, but now it’s the threat of an over full inbox or a presentation that must be in on time. Ie it’s not usually about survival. The key thing to know is that when your nervous system feels a threat, your brain will literally make up stories to fit the threat. This feeds an over wrought nervous system and you now find yourself in a system, a loop of activation. What the clever scientists that have studied the brain have ascertained is that on the whole our thoughts are just words that pass by. They are often meaningless. Imagine if your thoughts were a real person and this is the dialogue they had all day, it wouldn’t make any sense, would it? You would think they were completely mad. In the Relative Frame Theory, they see the make up of the brains thinking as on the whole just words that are not who we are, they are just words passing by. What happens with our thoughts is that we get hooked up with a negative thought pattern and off we go, we start out with an over full inbox and before we know it we end up homeless and living on the streets. You’re not alone with your tendency to catastrophise. We all do it. Some people just take it more seriously than others. And this is key! So how do we unhook? Well this information is so useful that I have written a whole blog on just this you can read that HERE. But to summarise, we work with the three N’s - Notice, Name, Neutralise.
VALUES Living life by your values is not something we are taught that often. When I work with clients many people have never even thought about their values. However, when we consider what’s important to us we can start to live our life with this in mind and things find their purpose and we start to become more committed to life. For instance, in my moment of starting this blog, I realised that my value of service is very important to me, being in service to others. When I remembered that, the blog took on a whole new direction. I have developed a guided meditation you can find HERE if you want to figure out your values in life.
COMMITTED ACTION Taking action, having a plan, it can be easier said than done, but it does naturally follow on from finding out what our values are. I was committed to writing this blog because my value of being in service to people is important to me and I know if I create action in my life around this, I will live a life of purpose and meaning.
SELF AS CONTEXT Self as context, this means I am not the content I am the context that the content plays out in! Oh boy I have always struggled with the language that the powers that be in the ACT world use for this particular principle. In many ways if you get this concept, you will be free forever of your challenges with anxiety and depression and many other mental health challenges. So, lets find another way to say this. So more simply we could put it like this. You are the blue sky, all the parts of your mind, your body, your life, your roles in life, your community, society are all clouds in the sky. But you ARE the blue sky, you are the context that all these parts flow through.
You as the blue sky has been consciousness of your life from start to finish, it’s the awareness you are, it’s the part of you that never ages, that can witness an experience when you were 4 like it was happening now.
Starting to see your awareness as the blue sky, we can rise above the part that is anxious, or the part that is depressed and know that that is here AND we are more than that.
I am also a Yogi and so I could also go on to say we are sooooo much more than that! But that’s another blog!
I hope this has been helpful to you. It really does help to have a therapist work through these concepts and also with your own personal story so please get in touch if you need some help making sense of life. Im good at that!
With love
Kate xx