Depression and anxiety disorders often make it difficult for you to make room for harsh memories and emotions. That’s why you feel it tough to live a meaningful and values-driven life while managing your thoughts with compassion. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is one of the effective techniques that help you steer clear of distressing or painful feelings.
Although your mind and body are strongly connected to each other and they work together to protect you from pain but sometimes, the emotions and thoughts created in your brain cannot be pushed away automatically. You need some therapy to keep them away.
According to studies, it is your brain that pulls your hand away from hot things even before you realize the pain, but your response to pain is not controlled by the brain. Similarly, when you get upset from some life event, you at first start avoiding to face such situations. Sometimes, people respond to difficulties abnormally. They ignore meeting with people who want to discuss their grief. They don’t want to label themselves as a sad, afraid or emotionally disturbed person.
This is, no doubt, a positive way to prove yourself emotionally but recognizing difficulties as part of life is a more convenient and reliable source to heal yourself.
What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?
The true meaning of the acceptance and commitment therapy is to learn how to face and handle uncomfortable emotions while experiencing difficulties in avoiding such thoughts. ACT actually teaches you to accept the realities of life as an inevitable part of it and protect yourself from the thoughts and emotions that lead you to distress. The technique also helps you acknowledge the difficulties of life and commit to living in line with your values.
Lets learn the basics of Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) technique so that you may benefit from it. The article will teach you how to try the ACT technique and what to expect from this therapy.
Values and Goals of ACT Therapy
As an individual you also have some values that may serve as guides that not only shape your life but also help you set your goals according to the life experiences. On the other hand, your goals are the specific target actions that explain your values.
Your personal development, knowledge and creativity determine your values while your goals are the reflection of your values that you set for your future life.
The Basics of ACT Therapy
The easiest way, described by the mental health experts, is avoidance. This strategy helps you solve your problems but relying too much on this strategy can spoil your life. It also proves unhelpful in certain circumstances where facing reality is indispensable. You can understand the strategy when you get into a hot argument with your best friend and then you start exploring your feelings that help you find a way to approach the subject delicately.
But the situation may be different, when you are going to give a presentation in your class and feel hesitant due to speaking publicly. Then you start diverting your attention from worries and focus on preparation. This is actually known as performance anxiety which is in short term known as procrastination. Sometimes, procrastination causes great distraction and leaves you unprepared before the presentation.
As a result, on your big day you feel more nervous and believe in yourself thinking that public speaking is very difficult and frightening. Next time in the future, when you plan to give a speech, you feel more anxiety and stress.
This is the reality that you give up preparing due to distracting anxiety not for laziness. Here ACT comes to help you. Acceptance and Commitment therapy teaches you new skills to accept those harsh feelings without focusing on distractions or avoidance techniques.
ACT also helps you learn to leave you with painful feelings. It never teaches you to eliminate or control undesired sensations, thoughts or feelings. It helps you avoid repressing the emotions that make you sad,it, instead, helps you accept uncomfortable feelings as an inevitable part of life and help you learn how to overcome them when they are overwhelming.
ACT therapy is the best proven way to learn that the unpleasant feelings are not unbearable. This emotional development brings a greater emotional flexibility and self-trust in your life.
Last but not least, ACT therapy teaches you to reshape your values, relationships and emotions with difficult experiences. This guides you how to continue your life with all difficulties and doing what matters most even when distress is at peak.
It even helps you recognize your core values and targets. You easily learn how to use your values to steer your choices, so that your actions get aligned with what matters to you without the sensations of self-doubt, fear or discomfort.
The Benefits of ACT Therapy
Experts consider ACT therapy as a trans-diagnostic therapy. This means the therapy can be applied to anyone who has a mental health concern.
Research suggested that people who experience multiple mental conditions at the same time can use this technique to resolve their issues.
Many mental health doctors use ACT therapy to treat:
1: Substance use disorder (SUD).
2: Chronic stress and anxiety.
3: Treatment non-adherence (difficulty in following your treatment plan as prescribed by your provider).
- Substance Use Disorder
Some evidence from a 2018 study has disclosed that when people use opioids to feel intoxicated, they can’t be called as substance users. They primarily use opioids to avoid the cravings and symptoms of withdrawal.
But after a long time of use, they become addicted. Here they need cognitive behavioral therapy to focus on skills how to avoid triggers for cravings,
But in expert’s opinion, ACT is the most effective therapy as it helps you:
- Focus on how you can use substance to numb or avoid unwanted depressed experiences.
- Learn to accept and tolerate the pain of negative emotions without avoiding or suppressing them.
- Explore the impacts of substance use on your ability to create a meaningful or purposeful life.
2. Chronic Stress and Anxiety
It is a commission observation that ACT is not a type of therapy that helps you get rid of anxiety or triggers distress completely. But it actually teaches you to experience the poisonous emotions as part of life without becoming frightened or anxious.
Studies support the idea that ACT is the way to techniques to change the way you respond to your stress and anxiety.
People having social anxiety often have a desire to make meaningful connections with other people. ACT works to teach you skills to start conversation or interact easily with others despite the fear of judgment or rejection.
ACT is not about the methods to decrease your anxiety. It is not a goal but after the therapy works, you automatically start exposing yourself to more social situations without becoming frightened or nervous.
This is a natural therapy technique that helps you build your life as you want. This means you learn how to involve more emotional intimacy and social connections to your life.
The simple example is, when you do a demanding job that places a lot of stress on you with a low salary. You become victims of anxiety or chronic stress. But ACT helps you absorb these emotions and teaches you to admit that the situation is temporary and after sometime when you experiences you will find a better one with a high salary. This is the reason, you start setting goals that are according to your values and help you gain satisfying career and financial security as well.
3. Treatment Non-adherence
Whenever you start following a treatment plan to help treat your disorder or disease, the results depend on the consistency. All types of diseases or health concerns have many challenges that become hurdles in sticking to the treatment plan. This may become challenging to get adhere to your treatment procedure due to some unexpected hurdles. However, Acceptance and Commitment therapy helps you overcome the hurdles that are preventing you from fully participating in your treatment plan.
People having physical injury in favor of bed rest because they worry about hurting themselves further. Sometimes, side effects of medications become the cause to stop using them. But self-care or bed rest do not work to improve your symptoms and worse feelings ,make you more sick.
Techniques to Apply
ACT Therapy teaches you core skills to overcome your worst emotions and feelings that can spoil your life standards. These skills include:
Practicing Mindfulness
You can overcome your current thoughts, physical sensations and actions by practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness matters a lot as you can easily control your response to certain situations when you recognize how you experience it and how it affects your daily life.
Bad news or events, often, grill your head with racing thoughts that make it difficult to catch your breath. Identifying such situations and in your mind and body can help you find ways to work through them. You can do this by sitting down quietly and focusing on your deep breathing.
Keeping a Balanced Perspective
ACT helps you recognize your importance that you may have forgotten. You think that you are a sensation or thought but reality is opposite. You’re, in fact, a consciousness that makes your mind and body alert about the circumstances in which you’re living. This perspective enables you to view your feelings, thoughts and emotions keenly rather than a fixed definition of who you are.
This technique helps you to get rid of living with a narrow identity. Now you can respond more quickly and flexibly to the situations you don’t like. These reactions are fully based on your values.
Identify Values and Goals
Identifying your values like showing kindness to everyone, speaking politely, handling bad situations with confidence, serving your community and keeping your promises can help align your dreams and set your goals. These actions make your life more meaningful. Thus a purposeful life becomes easier when you have a clear direction in your mind about what matters to you a lot.
Accepting Unwanted Feelings
Overcoming your feelings helps you a lot in order to reach your goals. For example, if you want to attend college in a bigger city, you have a strong job by sacrificing your leisure time so that you can collect money to reach your goal.
This tough schedule often causes frustration from time to time and you start showing resentment for those friends who don’t have to do a job to fulfill their desires. Then you feel guilty for having such negative emotions. ACT helps you learn how to carry these feelings and accept them as part of the process. Then you easily learn to fight for your goals, not against yourself.
How to Try It?
You can learn to accept heavy emotional distress by following ACT therapy. It teaches you that the emotional downfall is a part of human experiences. You shouldn’t take them as a sign of something wrong. This approach helps you to keep yourself engaged in life activities whenever life gives you toughest challenges.
Act helps you fight against uncontrolled challenges like mental health symptoms, illness, loss and pain.
It also works in a variety of therapy formats, such as online class guidance, interactive apps, and face-to-face sessions.
ACT courses involve 30 to 60 minutes sessions over a period of one year. People follow the process for the recommended time period and experience significant progress.
People with packed-schedule can choose some flexible options for ACT sessions, including:
- 1 day group workshop.
- Micro-learning programs.
You can also get help by:
- Checking your insurance plan for covered therapists.
- Using any online therapist directory to fund local mental health professionals who offer ACT.
- Asking a professional for a referral.
Conclusion
Acceptance and Commitment therapy claims that healing comes from accepting your emotions no matter which type they are, positive or negative. You cannot get rid of them but through ACT you can address depression, anxiety, and emotional distress. It also helps you learn to accept and allow distressing or hopeless feelings as part of your life experiences.
