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dr ho you wanted to do a series on a.c.t
yeah none of us even knew what it was
but you came to us and say i think the
viewers would benefit from this
tremendously
why act okay so acceptance and
commitment therapy or
act is a third wave cognitive behavioral
therapy approach
and this is the newest of new yes the
newest of you but it is based on so many
of the kind of behavioral strategies
that we know work and are evidence-based
and it adds an additional layer and i
think what's interesting about
act is that it really emphasizes that
you don't have to wait until your
suffering is over
to begin living your best life so this
idea
could be kind of paradoxical but
actually it's not
people oftentimes say well when i feel
better for my depression
then i'm gonna go out and look for a job
right then i'm gonna go
and work on my relationship then i'm
gonna see my friends
but the idea of act is that you can be
suffering and you can have fears
and you can still be out there doing the
things that are most meaningful to you
and that's what i love about it it's
sort of this really lovely idea about
being able to tackle and and go for what
you really want
even if your clinical condition is still
present
so you don't have to wait and going
after what you really want no matter
what
is going on in your life correct because
this idea that we're going to be in an
optimal state and that's when we should
tackle life
is silly because how often are we going
to
say it all the time who is ever right i
think we talk about these ideas
that we term as peak moments which we'll
talk about later but
there's sort of these moments in your
life where you feel like wow everything
is aligning and everything is wonderful
but they don't last that long yeah
they're sort of events you kind of see
them periodically they're punctuated
throughout your life
but what most people are looking for and
i think especially in this day and age
is this idea of happiness all the time
and even that definition of happiness is
really problematic because
what does that even mean does happiness
mean absolutely no pain because if you
think about some of the most
meaningful things that you've ever
gotten in your life
there's been ups and downs there's been
labor involved in getting to that next
goal
and so if you think about happiness as
sort of just devoid of any kind of
negative feeling
who can live like that for years at a
time no one
you you said something the first time we
ever interviewed
you i think i asked you about the
misconceptions of mental health or
something like that and you said
it's the fact that everybody thinks they
should be happy
all of the time and that we should never
experience stress
or challenges or obstacles it's silly
and especially you and i live in los
angeles yeah and it's like here they
they're just constantly going well nope
no negative thoughts
you can't have that only positive
thinking everything's always good
excuse me my leg just got wounded like
can i have a moment to just be
in pain or whatever yeah yeah so i love
this idea that
despite life happening we are going to
act yes one of many act puns i'm sure
during the series
we will act through that and still live
as optimally as possible
exactly and that's why we refer to this
approach as act
because it's about acting it's about
moving forward and people become so
paralyzed
and and become in a sense self-absorbed
by their pain they only reflect about
how painful their life is how horribly
stressed they are
and they don't act anymore they don't
actually
live their life and that's why i love
this approach because it's all about
living your best life
i love it okay so act stands for
acceptance and commitment
therapy yes so is this something that
has to be done with a therapist
well there's actually a couple of really
good self-help books out there
in this subject and you can utilize a
lot of the approaches on your own
with the guidance of these books one of
my favorites is russ harris's book
called the happiness trap
so russ harris wrote a book about the
happiness trap because again
this idea of happiness is a trap and
everybody is trying to pursue it and
guess what it doesn't exist
and so this is sort of his introduction
to his book that has a lot of practical
strategies that you can use on your own
but i think if you have a more serious
condition it's definitely better to work
through it with a therapist because that
can be
optimized for your individual problems
and
also they can probably also help you to
learn a couple of other adjunctive
strategies that can also help you get
some symptom relief
and when you say for more serious
problems you're referring to something
like depression
or anxiety or something like that i
would say the kind of depression or
anxiety that has been going on for a
really long time
maybe it's been throughout your whole
life and you only feel better for a
couple months at a time and you're back
in it again
you know things that are a little bit
more prolonged and a little bit more
severe and impact your activities of
daily functioning i would say that
perhaps you should see a professional
and ask for this therapy
say would this work for me um but i
think if you have sort of just the
periodic depression maybe situational
life stressors
or just trying to learn some new coping
skills then doing it with a book is
perfectly fine
okay so i've i've meant to ask this
question right off the bat but i got so
excited about these other things so i
started to go down a different line of
questioning
but what exactly is a ct okay so
acceptance and commitment therapy
is rooted in the idea that
we as human beings developed language
and it's both a blessing and a curse
so the blessing of course is that it has
allowed us to achieve
everything that we've achieved and
that's why we're the top of the food
pyramid
you know we are really kind of the
masters of
our own little universes in some ways
but
language is also a huge curse because
when we get fixated in language
and we take it too literally or we
utilize it in problematic ways
it keeps us stuck what do you mean by
that i've never felt stuck
with language i don't think okay so what
i mean by that is oftentimes
we uh try to solve a problem and
if the problem is external to us then
solving a problem
is somewhat straightforward let's say we
don't like a painting on the wall
well what are some ways to solve that
problem we could remove the painting
we could cover it up with a cloth uh we
could tear it down i mean there's a lot
of different things and we just
we can leave the room you know so that
you don't have to look at this nasty
painting you don't like
when a problem is more living inside our
heads
it's not that simple you kind of
ruminate on the same thing over and over
and actually there's a part of us that
believes that that's productive
like for example if you're anxious about
something instead of actually
moving to solve the problem you get
stuck in this cognitive loop
where you rehearse things over and over
in your head
and ultimately that just leads to more
distress
it leads to more fear can you give an
example of that yeah so
i'm thinking about for example when
somebody is ruminating about
a past problem that they've had perhaps
they've had a really serious bout of
depression and it took them a really
long time to get out of it
then they get depressed again because we
know sometimes depression recurs
and they start to think well i'm never
going to get better
and the minute they have that thought
they believe that it's the truth
because that's what we do with language
and that's how language traps us
for example if you were to have a
thought and this is kind of a classic
act metaphor if you were to
tell yourself to not think about the
pink elephant in the room
when you think about it right you think
about it because in order to say
i'm not going to think about the pink
elephant you have to invoke the pink
elephant i will not think about the pink
elephant and there it is again
right so the idea of act is that
language traps us in that way the minute
you have a thought you believe it to be
true
it's interesting and if you believe it
to be true and then you sort of like
ride that wave and you get deep into
that cognition and you start to rehearse
it in your head
that's where the escape is hard that's
where you get stuck
so okay let's unpack that because i have
a lot of thoughts on that
last night i was listening to a speech
by
i think his name's michael bedford he
runs um
the agape church in los angeles but it's
national and it by
it combines religion with western
philosophy
and stuff sure but he was mentioning
that he was in an airport
and these police officers were behind
him and he thought oh my gosh i'm being
profiled they don't want me on this
flight they're about to approach me that
and he was getting worked up about it um
and because they were really
staring at him and then what happened is
that the policemen approached
michael and said hey i just want to say
you changed my life you're amazing
thank you so much and so he realized in
that moment that even though his
thought that i'm being profiled that
these police
are going to get me the reality was not
that thought
right but in that moment his thought was
the reality
right even though in reality that's not
what was happening
yeah is is that what you're talking
about with
how our thoughts can trap us yes okay
that's that's a great example yes it did
that makes sense so so basically in some
ways there is no objective reality right
the reality is just what we think
is reality it's our perception yes yeah
and the minute that we invoke language
whatever
comes up automatically gets taken as
true it's just the way our brain works
we have to sort of
reverse engineer that if we don't want
to do that but that's just the way our
language works so for example
in order to question whether or not an
assumption is true we'd have to actually
accept it first so a good example of
this is somebody says
guess what new research came out and the
earth actually is square
in order to unpack that and in order to
interpret that and be decide if it's
true or not
and all the questions you have and all
of the rebuttals you're gonna make
against the fact that it isn't true
you have to temporarily assume first
that
that is a fact and then you can argue
against it so okay well if the earth was
square then that doesn't make sense
because we've seen all these pictures
from the satellites and clearly the
earth is not but you see how
the way language works you have to adopt
that thought
for a temporary term to be able to
interpret and unpack and argue against
it
and that is just the automatic way our
brain works so
any kind of thought you have i'm a loser
i'm never gonna get better
no one will ever love me your mind
doesn't automatically say oh
that's just a thought that doesn't just
because i had the thought doesn't mean
it's not true
the minute you have the thought you
start to think ah why would i have that
thought it must be because it's true
and then you get trapped you keep
thinking about okay well if i'm
gonna get better then why bother doing
it and we i don't even have that
intermittent thought
if i think something i don't even have
the thought of oh that's a thought so it
must be true
i just go right to well it's already
true as i'm saying it i believe it
and that's how everybody is yes that's
how all of our brains work and that
intermittent thought is actually what
act tries to get you to do as a
technique like
wait that's just a mental event yes
let's unpack that does that is that
really something or is that not
something yeah right
that's so good yeah i love that it's
kind of metaphorical and
kind of abstract anything that makes me
do this though i'm really into yeah
like if you're explaining something and
you start doing this i'm like oh i'm
gonna love this yeah yeah well when i
first heard about act i'm like
because i have such a scientific mind
yeah sometimes i just like things that
are straightforward and easy to explain
and i think that's why i love cognitive
hypotherapy that's my first love yeah
but you know act is now my second and
deeper love you're having an affair with
yeah having an affair with that
because i like the way that it actually
decides
your mind is not really just this sort
of easy to
sort of divide up no there's sort of
this consciousness there's like a
process to how we use language that
we weren't even aware of and it was
contributing to our suffering
i never thought about it that way i
never thought of language being sort of
the biggest blessing that we have as
human beings and the biggest curse
but it's so true and all of us have been
there we have
worried about something you know turn it
over and over again in our heads for
hours sometimes at a time
and yet nothing's been done you
literally are just living in your head
right and that's what act is trying to
address because when people are
distressed
that's what they often do thanks for
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