Quotes from Steven C. Hayes

As human beings increasingly look inward, life begins to seem more like a problem to be solved than a process to be fully experienced.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.

Psychological rigidity is at its core an attempt to avoid negative thoughts and feelings caused by difficult experiences, both when they occur and in our memory of them.

The core of the ACT approach is built upon the idea that human language gives rise to both human achievement and human misery.

The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!

In the ACT approach, a goal of healthy living is not so much to feel good as to feel good. It is psychologically healthy to have unpleasant thoughts and feelings as well as pleasant ones, and doing so gives us full access to the richness of our unique personal histories

This relationship is learned over hundreds if not thousands of examples; what is consistent across examples is not the content of the answer but rather the context, or perspective, from which the answer occurs. That is the case with all other deictic frames, such as I/you, we/they, and now/then.

The "I/here/nowness" of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.

The Zen master Seng-Ts'an was fond of saying "If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid great confusion?

A good way to assess for self-as-context is to examine the flexibility of perspective taking via the interview itself.

What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought.

There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning 'by chance' or 'an occurrence', which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it—especially to avoid any sense of 'unhappiness'. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It's about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.

Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.

You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?

The process of living is like taking a very long road trip. The destination may be important, but the journey experienced day to day and week to week is what is invaluable.

Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.

The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.

Why willingness? Because I absolutely know how my pain works when I am unwilling, and I'm sick and tired of it. It's time to change my whole agenda, not just the moves I make inside a control and avoidance agenda.

Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.

The goal is not to "fix" people but rather to empower them. What the psychological flexibility model provides is a characterization of key features that can be changed, but it does not specify how to link history to those features, nor precisely how to intervene in a step-by-step fashion.

Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.

If you were on a bus trying to go east in a maze of dirt roads in a large valley, you might not be able to tell your direction from moment to moment. If someone took a series of snapshots, sometimes the bus might be facing north, or south, or even west, even though all the while this is a journey to the east.

We are in this stew together. We are caught in the same traps. With a small twist of fate, I could be sitting across from you, and you could be sitting across from me—both of us in opposite roles. Your problems are a special opportunity for you to learn and for me to learn. We are not cut from different cloths, but rather from the same cloth.