'Psychological Flexibility: Steven Hayes - the founder of ACT

Psychological flexibility is often described as the ‘super skill’ of resilience, wellbeing and mental health. It is your ability to ‘make contact with experience in the present moment fully and without defence’. Research has found that it is associated with higher quality of life and wellbeing. As regular listeners will often hear me say, we are not our thoughts – we are aware of our thoughts. This is a profound insight that can have a huge impact on your experience of life, and is the cornerstone of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy - and psychological flexibility.

This week I am truly delighted to be joined by Steven Hayes, the founder of ACT. ACT is is all about developing Psychological Flexibility, and is one of the most profoundly helpful psychological interventions in the world. While so many other approaches focus on changing the content of your thinking, for example from negative to positive, this is all about changing how you relate to your thoughts and feelings.

In this episode we discuss:

• How we lose touch with our innate belonging and develop the 'conceptualised self'
• Recognising the ‘I hear, nowness of awareness’ and its profound importance
• Steven's panic attacks – which led him to develop ACT (and my experience with insomnia which ACT had a profound help with)
• Recognising the importance of not turning from the content of experience
• Flow state and our true nature
• Learning how to put the mind ‘ on a leash’
• Walking through an exercise in self-compassion
• Psychological flexibility – just how important it is
• Developing it with the six steps of ACT
• Mental Defusiuon techniques – 'Mental breaks to stop mental breaks'
• Living your values and how to uncover them

Steven Hayes website, including his 'ACT toolkit': https://stevenchayes.com/

Steven's TED TALK on Psychological Flexibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79_gmO5ppg

Steven's TED TALK 2 on 'mental breaks': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSHpBRLJrQ

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