Rethink Your Mental Health with ACT Founder Dr. Steven Hayes

What does it mean to live a process-based life? What processes can you engage in that will serve as protective factors for your mental health? And how can you find space even when faced with difficult thoughts, emotions, and sensations? In the launch episode of Season 2 of “Your Life in Process,” Diana explores these questions with Dr. Steven Hayes, the co-founder of ACT.

Transcript

What does it mean to live a process-based life?

And what processes can you engage in that will serve as protective factors for your mental health?

How can you find space even when you're faced with difficult thoughts,

Emotions,

And sensations?

That's what I'm going to explore today with Dr.

Stephen Hayes on your life in process.

Welcome back.

We are launching season two with a splash by having the co-founder of ACT,

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,

Dr.

Stephen Hayes on the show.

He's a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada,

And he's been listed as the 30th highest impact psychologist in the world,

Authoring 47 books and nearly 670 scientific articles.

He's dedicated his career to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering,

Leading studies on everything from peak performance in sport to stigma to how to promote mental health in refugees and trauma survivors.

It's a real honor to have Dr.

Hayes on the show.

He really has revolutionized the field of psychology and what he's embarking on now as a complete restructuring of what we've known about mental health and mental illness.

But before we launch into this conversation,

I want to explore this concept of process-based living in a personal way with you.

This season is really about you.

It's about figuring out what works for you and applying what we know from science and contemplative practice to your life in a way that fits for you and allows you to thrive.

So I want to start with defining what we mean by this concept of process.

And then I want to try it on for a bit.

So processes are a way of interacting in the world,

Inside and out,

That either can be health promoting or health degrading.

And decades of research have shown that there's some core ways of relating to your thoughts,

Your emotions,

Ways of acting,

Ways of seeing yourself,

And ways of being in the world that can lead you to feel open,

Engaged,

And purpose-driven.

Some of these things we've talked about already on season one.

We've talked about values.

We've talked about acceptance.

We've talked about committed action.

And we've also talked about getting a little bit of space from your thoughts.

All of those are core processes to human flourishing.

And that's what Stephen Hayes is talking about when he's talking about a process-based approach.

And so is mindfulness,

Being present in the here and now.

What research has found is that these ways of being in the world are really key to things like being a good parent or being a high performance athlete or surviving trauma.

So how I want you to try this on is I want you to think about a time in your life when you were thriving,

When you felt like you were growing,

You felt like you were engaged in a meaningful way,

When you felt alive and vibrant,

When you felt free,

And things were just rolling for you.

Just pick one time.

It doesn't have to be something major.

For me,

I think about this period of time when my first son was about a year and a half and we were living in Longmont,

Colorado.

And we had this little house that was close to town.

And I could push him into town and do all my grocery shopping and meeting up with friends and other little toddlers during the day.

And I had a small private practice and was doing meaningful work.

And I was growing so much in my identity,

Figuring out what it means to be a mom and how to love and how to be a mess and how to recover from something so physically challenging,

Such as giving birth.

And it was probably one of the more challenging times of my life,

But also the most rewarding because I was so engaged and flexible and committed to doing something that really mattered to me,

Which was being a new mom and having a private practice.

So think about that for yourself.

When was a time when you felt that sense of vibrancy?

And I want you to think about that time in relationship to these six core processes.

So the first one is values.

Did you have a sense of meaning and purpose that helped you stay motivated?

The second was diffusion.

Did you have maybe thoughts of self-doubt from time to time or thoughts that maybe judgment of yourself or others,

But you were able to kind of let them go and get some space for them and not let them rule your life?

The third process is acceptance.

Were you open to your full experience?

I know that for me as a new mom,

There was so much that I accepted and had to learn to accept changes in my body,

Uncertainty,

Loss of control,

A messy home,

Irritability.

What about for you during that time when you were living at your fullest?

How were you relating to your emotions?

Were you open,

Allowing?

And then what about your sense of self?

So when we are psychologically flexible,

And yes,

I'm going through the six core processes of psychological flexibility here,

How they relate to you,

When you were at your best,

Were you connected to something bigger?

Did you have some space from your ego?

Did you see yourself as a value but not all important?

That's our sense of self as context.

The fifth process has to do with being present.

How present were you?

Were you engaged in the here and now when you were with that vibrant version of you?

And then the sixth has to do with committed action,

Your behavior.

How were you acting?

What were you doing?

How are you demonstrating what you cared about?

When we engage these six core processes in our life,

And we also engage in things like taking care of our bodies,

Eating well,

Moving our bodies,

Being connected to a community,

Then life opens up for us.

These are the six core processes that make up psychological flexibility and then the processes that Stephen Hayes is talking about in the show today.

So Dr.

Hayes is going to talk about these processes in a more kind of global way today.

And I will see you on the other side where we'll kind of home in on one of them.

And over this next season,

We're going to continue to unpack them.

We are going to continue to explore that because this is your life in process,

Which means you're engaging these processes,

You're practicing these processes,

Seeing what works for you,

And it's never ending and I'm doing it right alongside you.

So looking forward to this episode and see you on the other side.

Don't forget your daily practice.

Here we are.

Good to see you again.

I got a chance to talk with you on your 70th birthday.

That was the first time we chatted.

Wow.

70th.

You dropped it halfway through the interview.

Today's my 70th birthday.

I was like,

Wow.

And I went back and listened to that interview.

So it was August,

2018,

And we were talking about process-based CBT that had just come out.

And then a year later we talked about a liberated mind.

And but I went back and listened to the 2018 70th birthday one.

It was so good.

And it was so good because I think you were on the heels of having been with your family for the weekend and you had done some kind of speech to all your kids and you were just sort of,

You know,

Spreading wisdom.

So given that 70th birthday,

Do you remember what,

What it was like for you when you turned 70 and what,

What was going on for you then?

You know,

When you start adding years,

I mean,

You do look back and forward and you kind of see things in an arc.

And I definitely was doing that on my 70th time.

Appreciating the bittersweet quality,

The poignancy,

The sweetness of family and life and the trajectory of it.

But you know,

I do wonder sometimes if we had a sense of what it's like to be old when we were younger,

Will we do a better job of sort of walking through these things and not sweating the small stuff so much and focusing on what's important and the people who are important and so forth.

But for sure,

That's central to my thinking.

You know,

I didn't,

Again,

It's like one of those perspectives shifts where I didn't know then what you were working on that's just come out,

Which is this process-based model that is blowing all of our minds.

And I was like,

I thought we were done with learning act and that was,

You know,

I felt like I've got a good handle on these six processes and I'm using them and then outcomes process-based therapy.

And so this podcast it's for the general public,

But I think that the way that you are shaking up psychology and shaking up our understanding of mental health and human flourishing is applicable to the general public.

So I'd love to be able to break some of these ideas down in a way that helps people be able to apply them to their everyday living,

Which right now is not so easy.

Yeah,

I would really like to do that too.

And one thing I could say is that's really rethinking what's happened over the last 150 years in terms of psychology,

Behavioral science,

And its role in the culture.

And I've come to the conclusion that we've been seriously misdirected,

Very,

Very seriously misdirected and for a reason that is very poignant,

Which is that our concepts and our analytic tools were driven by an attempt to categorize people instead of empower people.

And the reason for that goes back to racism,

Sexism,

Classism of the most ugly sort.

And we're living inside.

We can't even think outside of the system that we're in that is so dominated by normative categories that are put atop people that you try to apply to yourself to figure out what to do in your life that are contaminated,

They're dirty,

They're wrong,

They're statistically wrong,

And they're scientifically wrong in a way that's almost missed attention.

Yeah.

So I think that where we,

You know,

I think mental health as it stands right now is just this,

This diagnostic model.

And you either are diagnosed with OCD or you're diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.

And then you can,

As a therapist,

You're sitting there like,

Is it OCD or is it generalized picking apart these little pieces and what's getting missed is,

Is the processes.

So I think that's what I'd like to talk about today.

In process-based therapy,

What you've done is you've almost like opened up all these boxes that were the diagnoses and thrown away the walls,

And then tried to reorganize all this stuff that's in it under some big categories of things like how are,

How are you relating to your thoughts and how are you relating to your feelings and what motivates you and what are you doing in your life?

Like what behaviors are engaging in and how do you think about yourself?

So you've taken these dimensions of,

Of what it means to be human.

And then you're looking at,

Okay,

Within those dimensions,

What,

What is healthy and health promoting and that what's what gets people stuck.

It's just a total different way of looking at things,

Diagnoses.

And when you do this for a few things open up.

One is this is about you.

This is not about a normative category of been put a top your head,

Which is what the DSM,

Et cetera,

Is trying to do.

So one of the messages every voice needs to be heard and what works or not working for your life may be different than the next person.

And so you need tools to help you look at what am I doing and how does it land and what works.

Another deep message is you're not broken.

This compartmentalization of mental health and right underneath it is mental illness and right underneath that is,

You know,

Some sort of biomedical condition you have.

As soon as you say I have,

You're in trouble,

You know,

You're a one whole person.

Your relationships matter.

The organizations are in there matter.

What's happening in the world matters.

Whether you slept last night matters,

You know,

What you're eating matters.

And yeah,

The processes that are involved in mental health.

And process-based therapy leads to breaking down of those walls between traditions and between categories,

But also between the compartmentalizing that we're doing within the person.

And when that's all done,

Says,

Now,

What about you?

Can I tell a personal story just to make sense of this?

It's context and I don't want to throw you a curve ball because I know some of this I haven't written about a lot.

And so it may be like,

Well,

I do racism,

Classism,

Why are you raising that?

My son was born with a muscle disorder according to his pediatrician.

His percentile strength was basically unmeasurable as one percentile.

He couldn't hold a pencil,

Couldn't hold a knife and fork,

Couldn't hold,

Cut his own food,

Couldn't put on his own clothes,

Couldn't hang on the monkey bars,

Couldn't,

You know.

And we were told,

Yeah,

It's just a genetic disorder.

It'll always be like that.

He's never going to be good at anything physical.

Don't put him any team sports.

It only humiliate himself.

And indeed he'd come home crying because,

You know,

Nobody wanted to pick him for the team.

He was the lowest one out there.

And we put him in martial arts and he had a very sweet teacher who just had the faith,

You know,

And I'd always wince when I'd go to the classes because he would be clearly the less able of all the kids in his martial arts class.

And yet he would say,

Like all of them did,

I'm committed to constant never ending improvement towards black belt excellence,

Ma'am.

And I'd go like,

You're never going to get a black belt,

Son.

I mean,

I would never say that out loud,

But they don't have like an A for effort in martial arts.

And the only thing I can think of is to send them to Max McManus.

Max was a strength conditioning coach who taught David Wise,

Who just won the silver and the winter Olympics.

And we went in and told Max our story,

He has a genetic disorder,

He's a one percentile,

He's never going to.

.

.

And Max looked at me and said,

Let's see what he can do.

And I watched him and within a month his strength was up 25%.

Within another month it was up another 25%.

He has his black belt.

He's teaching in the dojo.

He's just joined the jiu-jitsu studio and is getting another black belt there,

Plus his second black belt in karate.

Look,

I bought into a model that said,

You can know your future by where you compare to others on a bell curve without knowing what the actual processes are that can lead you forward from where you are.

Who knows what your history is?

As Max said,

Let's see what he can do.

And so we've got people living inside a cage of mental illness predictions,

Of behavioral health problems,

And of loneliness and relationship problems,

Thinking all they can aspire to is up here.

You know,

When you give people DSM diagnosis immediately,

They feel relieved and their horizons foreshorten.

Look at the literature hugely,

Not just them,

Their entire family.

Let's not expect too much.

She has a major depressive disorder.

You even do that in learning process-based therapy.

One of the first questions you ask folks is,

Here's a bunch of therapists reading this book.

Diagnose yourself and then write about how you feel when you read that diagnosis.

Even if it's like adjustment disorder,

Like you are,

You,

You are,

You are adjusting in a way that's not appropriate.

There's you know,

It's dysfunctional adjustment.

Whereas it's as a therapist,

I'm sitting here often struggling with it.

Most of the time.

Um,

I don't want to write something down,

But I have to,

Because that's how people get paid back.

You'll get reimbursed for coming to treatment unless you write something down.

But going back to that,

Um,

The story about your son,

I get your newsletter and,

Uh,

In it,

You were talking about these processes as being sort of like a psychological vaccine based on some of the,

Um,

The work that's being done with the world health organization.

So this can apply to like your son getting a black belt,

But it can also apply to refugees and it can apply to facing a pandemic.

And I was listening back to those episodes a few years back,

They were all pre pandemic pre war episodes.

And back then you were saying,

Well,

We kind of need these things.

Like we're going to need these,

Um,

Talk a little bit about that.

Like how some of these processes are protective factors for when,

When life falls apart on us,

Which it inevitably does at some point.

And for some people,

Um,

More severely than for others,

Obviously,

But yeah.

Yeah.

Hugely.

We know that some of the processes that move you forward in your life psychologically with regard to mental health issues are also the ones that are helpful with diet,

Sleep and exercise are also some of the ones,

The deepest ones to help you deal with prejudice,

Stigma,

But also letting go of some of those things with the stuff that's filled in your head by what a culture that after all has all those isms.

And so that psychological vaccine idea is that let's work on the protective factors that promote prosperity and yeah,

Ameliorate our problems.

They did both and focus on the ones that are most powerful and most applicable to us.

My colleagues,

Uh,

Uh,

Stefan Hoffman and my,

And Joe Sorochi at the Australian Catholic university have just finished a study in which we looked at every study ever done in the history of the world up through 2018.

We had to stop there because it took two and a half years for us to do this study on processes of change that mediated that were shown statistically to be a functionally important pathway of change in any randomized trial for any therapy for any problem.

Do you know that almost 50% of the successful mediators were part of psychological flexibility or mindfulness,

Psychological flexibility and mindfulness classically conceived even before you get into things like compassion,

Which are an easy step forward.

It's right there.

Self-compassion,

Especially it's almost the same concept as self-kindness,

Self-acceptance,

Self-compassion.

It's almost the same thing.

You keep walking through it.

You end up with like two thirds,

Three quarters of everything we know about how to manage our life in such a way that we prevent and ameliorate mental health and behavioral health problems.

You can summarize with a very small list of processes.

So in the World Health Organization trial,

What they did was they focused on classic psychological flexibility processes and mindfulness and with a cartoon book,

A graphic novel and audio tapes so that even people who were illiterate could use it.

They worked with people who had lost everything.

Either people had developed mental health problems or people hadn't developed it yet.

And this was done with South Sudanese refugees in Uganda and then again with Syrian refugees in Turkey and the EU.

And if you hadn't developed the mental health problem yet,

But you were distressed by leaving everything and just grabbing your children and sitting in dirt in a tent because it was the only way you could save your life.

Sometimes with horrors along the way of attacks and rapes and seeing family members killed.

And what they found was that it could reduce the future development of mental health problems by 50%.

You can go there and get it for free in 21 different languages.

But my point being both as a protective and as an ameliorative package,

Just teaching people how to show up in the present,

Notice your thoughts and feelings in a way that's more open and flexible,

Even when they're hard.

Showing up in this present moment consciously and focusing on what's important,

But really puts meaning and purpose in your life and organizing your behavior around that transforms your life.

And so our journey in process-based therapy has simplified,

But it's also amplified in the sense of focus on yourself as a whole person.

Don't let your mind turn you into like a Vita producing machine or maybe a podcasting producing machine or maybe a wealth producing machine or whatever.

Don't let them be careful.

And I think for listeners,

It's always helpful to make it like real,

Like what it actually looks like.

And I was thinking about last night when I couldn't,

I have a sleep stuff that shows up from time to time.

It gets worse when you are over 40.

Here's the bio-psycho social model of sleep.

Yes.

The hormones matter.

So when,

When I woke up in the night,

Cause my neighbor's dog was barking and it was this incessant barking,

The dog kept on barking for an hour.

And then my mind went and traveled through all the different,

It's almost like when you are hungry and you go up to your cupboards and you just keep on looking through the different cupboards to find something to snack on.

And my mind went through every single cupboard of worry.

And it was like,

It started off with,

Um,

You know,

Worry about my son and his baseball game and you know,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And then it went into worry about Ukraine.

And then it went into worry about,

You know,

The Steve Hayes audio situation.

It was just went into every single possible worry.

And then it landed on,

Oh no,

What if I can't fall asleep?

Which is the death of your sleep,

As soon as you go to that worry,

You're done for it.

Now you're never going to fall asleep because now I have to fall asleep and I won't fall asleep.

So I,

You know,

I was thinking about,

Okay.

What would be a process-based approach to just that everyday problem that most people have,

Um,

The,

The problem of the mind and the,

And the problem of the attempts to solve the problem that get us deeper in the problem.

Yeah.

It is an amazing,

Uh,

The common problem as you know,

And you know,

Psychological flexibility correlates with insomnia and those issues are very well.

And there's a pretty good evidence that,

Uh,

It adds,

Mindfulness training,

Psychological flexibility training,

Add somewhat to the programs that we have,

If we're going to sleep.

You know,

Uh,

Mammals have been around for,

You know,

A couple hundred million years and uh,

They've been sleeping every night or every day,

Depending on whether,

You know,

They've been sleeping.

Our body's really,

Really good at it.

And then you got this recent,

Uh,

You know,

Parasite called human language has been around 400,

000 years,

2.

8 million years,

Trying to make us go to sleep on purpose by following,

By solving a problem.

And that wakes us up.

I mean,

You can just look at the underlying neurobiology when you were doing your sorting through the worry cupboard,

Your arousal systems were all 180 degrees from going to sleep.

And then it landed on that sticky one because of content,

Because you didn't need to go to sleep.

Do you know if you,

I,

I've been playing around with this because as you get older,

You face this a lot more.

I had to be the one to tell you,

But it's an old guy telling a younger person,

Uh,

This gets worse.

I've actually found it really quite helpful to take some of these diffusion skills of just noticing your mind and begin to play with a space in which you can take them to the next level in which it's no longer of any interest.

It really feels like nothing.

It's very hard to explain because when you explain,

You're going to do it with categorical words,

But it's there in all the flexibility processes.

I'm going to do one.

Let me tell you a little story about emotion and I'll do the one on cognition because cushion is almost even harder because we're talking about it in terms of using cognition.

But I mentioned the tinnitus situation and,

You know,

Havoc,

She,

Oh God,

It's ringing in the ears for those years,

You know,

It's just an old punk rocker standing in front of 60 foot tall speakers that are have kicked me out.

200 decibels is not a good idea because then when you get my age,

You hear,

You know,

24 seven,

It absolutely never,

Ever,

Ever stops.

And when I first started showing up,

I got the,

I'll just,

They gave us all this kind of goofy stuff,

Turn on noise generators.

So you're used to the noise constantly.

It doesn't help.

That was me with the earplugs,

With the dog barking.

Now I have annoying earplugs in my ears.

Didn't get rid of the dog.

Yeah.

Well,

I,

You know,

When I finally had that suicidal thought and I said,

Okay,

Wait a minute,

Steve,

Let's apply your wife's work.

I went for a long walk,

Came back,

I was probably 50% better after an hour.

I said,

I'm just going to apply psycholateral flexibility to noise.

And here's where it landed.

The upset around the noise eventually got to a point of,

I don't care.

And you can't make me,

There is a place where it isn't just accepting and open.

It's like done finished disinterested.

It's it's like the emotion.

If you had emotion,

That would be something like boredom,

The kind of boredom that's so total that it has no interest whatsoever,

Even your boredom's not interesting.

In Buddhism,

They call that renunciation.

And when you do that,

It's like a switch or something,

Something happens.

You know,

I'm hearing my voice.

My ears ring like crazy.

Now I haven't heard them in a month.

They ring 24 seven.

I just don't give a damn.

And you can't make me ha ha ha.

I just talk,

Well,

The same thing,

Cognitively in sleep.

If you practice your diffusion skills or you learn to watch your thoughts,

Watch your thoughts,

There is a place you can go where there's a silence in thoughts.

Let me say something,

A little exercise people can do to kind of notice it.

If you just notice the thoughts that occur to you right now,

People are listening to this podcast right now.

Not necessarily about what I'm talking about.

Of course,

I'm going to keep talking,

But not constantly.

I'll put in a few spaces that you can do it.

And I want you just to notice them rise and fall.

But now what I want you to notice is the betweenness.

When they fall,

They don't just start to something new.

They go,

And there's like a flat spot.

It's like your breath in and there's a flat spot before you breathe out.

The thought occurs and rises and falls and there's a flat spot.

I'm going to be quiet just for about 10 seconds.

I want you to catch a flat spot.

They don't last very long,

But they're there.

You see it?

You know how not to think.

You're not thinking all the time.

And I don't mean this in a pejorative way that you tell your teenagers.

You're not thinking,

I'm not talking about,

I'm talking about you naturally know how to do nothing cognitively.

So here's what I would say to the sleep problem.

I heard this somewhere and it was actually soothing to me and I've tried it.

I think it's true.

If you can hit a flat spot,

That's about 60 seconds long,

You're going to go to sleep.

Your body knows how does it go to sleep?

You just have to get your mind out of the way long enough.

And of course it'll wake you up again.

I mean,

You need the habits of mindfulness and the rest to calm the mind even when you're asleep.

But just try it out as one thing to do.

Work while you're lying there in the bed,

Focus on the between-ness in your thoughts,

Not on your thoughts.

And see if you can lengthen the between-ness just a little bit,

But not by thinking.

If you do it by thinking,

You're putting something in the between-ness.

You have to do it kind of by giving yourself an intentional set and then allowing that to sort of disappear and then just allowing the intentional process to come so that my intention is to expand the nothing.

And then I'm going to watch for the nothing.

And see what happens.

I've found that learning how to do nothing is a really,

Really important skill to sleeping because your body knows how to sleep,

But your mind doesn't.

That skill is an interesting one because if we were to look at what processes are involved there,

In some ways it's an intentional flexibility process where instead of focusing on going through the cupboards of my worry or the dog barking or what I should write in the text,

Back to the person I'm paying attention to the flat spot,

But that could apply to something like chronic pain.

So we could do that,

Or it could apply to your divorce and the pain of the resentment that you just are bombarded with every single day when you wake up,

You think about the resentment.

There's a flat spot where that resentment doesn't exist.

Or it could apply to working with your teenager where you just are kind of like,

They're driving you nuts by their impulsivity and craziness.

There was a flat spot where they're not.

So I could see that that,

And this is what I think,

At least what I'm trying to do these days with these processes is trying to make them apply to life where it's just super simplified.

Like,

Okay,

Say it's my flat spot practice.

How am I going to use my flat spot practice?

I love it.

I love it.

I got lots of different ways today and getting better at it.

That's tough.

Yeah.

You know,

You see it in all of the flexibility processes and if you take that thing like,

You know,

Chronic pain or the pain of a divorce or something like that,

What the mind wants to do is to say,

I need to subtract this pain.

But that's not a flat spot.

That's not a flat spot.

No,

It's not a flat spot.

It's not spontaneously stepping into the silence.

It's trying to force it down so that you get silence,

But that's very effortful.

It's actually quite noisy.

It's like,

I've got to stop thinking in order to sleep.

That's another thought,

Dude.

This is the drop the rope kind of issue in classical act.

You know,

If you're in a tug of war with a monster,

You know that maybe what you need to do is drop the rope.

The dropping the rope thing is not throwing the rope down or getting it's really,

It's doing nothing.

And so in that little opens up a little gap in which life can happen and you can step in.

In chronic pain,

When you look,

It's always there,

But you don't always look.

Notice the sound of the air system wherever you are,

Or if you're at a place where you're not running an air system,

Notice the sounds coming from outside wherever you are.

And just notice that there's something there.

There's sounds in the room you're in and you weren't noticing them before.

So is that in your voluntary control?

Not if you're doing it with a subtractive purpose,

Because every time you check in to say is it gone yet,

It's back.

If I were to check in on my sound on my ears,

Is it gone yet?

It's back every single time within milliseconds.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't a step beyond that.

That really is silence.

It's not the kind of silence that comes from no sound stimulation in the sense of the nervous system of your ear.

In the same way,

It's not the kind that comes from not having pain in some way or memory of that betrayal or in a divorce,

Or we're all being horrified by what we're seeing in the Ukrainian war.

It's different.

It's that moment of peace where purpose and new possibility resides.

And I think thinking of acceptance that way is a lot better.

It's not that kind of tolerance or designation kind.

It's the open to what's there.

If you were to describe it,

It wouldn't be a bad word to say.

It's not thing-like.

There's no edges to it.

Do you know that the word nothing was originally written as two words?

There's a part of you that is just is,

And there's no edges to it.

If there's no edges to it,

It's not thing-like.

You're not consciously aware of the limits of your consciousness.

So exploring the nothing,

Not the depressive,

Oh dear,

There's nothing but the flat spot there.

There's a peaceful place from which you notice,

And that part of you doesn't have a stake in all this drama.

That part of you is not fighting for the right to exist,

Is not struggling with the barking dog or the pain in your toe or the thoughts about not sleeping or all the things we've been talking about or Ukrainian war or whatever.

It's not that those things aren't present.

It's just that there's a person present.

You are present,

And you're more than all of that.

You're the cup that holds that,

Not just what's poured into that cup.

I think we all could use a little bit more of that in our lives right now,

The space between the doing,

You have a little bit more consciousness in your decision-making.

One of the cool things that's happening with process-based therapy and so forth,

Act as being very dominantly used now in psychedelic therapy.

And one reason why that's important is here are these chemicals that not alone,

But with guidance have been used for many thousands of years by every indigenous people,

One form or another,

In which that kind of flat spot self shows up.

And what mediates outcomes from psychedelic therapy,

When you're using it with things like trauma and things like that,

Things like a sense of an oceanic awareness,

A sense of oneness and connection across time,

Place and person,

Of seeing yourself in a really profoundly different way.

And part of what's cool about the psychedelic therapy work is that we're able to do things like fMRI studies and so forth.

We can't do that normally with spiritual experiences.

98% of the population says they have spiritual experiences like that,

By the way.

If you ask the questions properly,

Almost everybody sooner or later has these moments of sudden change in time,

Connection with others,

Sense of universality,

Et cetera.

Could we use these things to understand some of what people can learn how to do through meditation,

Through their psychotherapy work?

And it opens up a place in which that flat spot world,

We've created something here together.

A flat spot,

Yeah.

A place in which possibility,

New possibilities can occur.

You can see things that you wouldn't see before.

And that's one step at a time.

It's not like you're going to be fixed by that,

Repaired by that.

You're empowered by that.

And living the life that will put you on a journey that allows that possibility to unfold.

We're back to the story of my son and maybe a little bit about what we did when I was 70 or what you're trying to do with your podcast,

One step at a time.

Let's see.

Yeah.

I have a good friend that she says to herself,

You're not that important.

And I'm going to remind her that you're not that important.

And I kind of would add,

And you are that important.

You're both,

You're not that important.

And that's what the flat spot helps you see is that all of this isn't that important.

And it's just worry mind or whatever resentment mind or whatever I'm caught in.

And I am that important.

Yeah.

The language of nothing,

Because it's that without distinction.

It's not the,

Oh,

I'm nothing.

It's that which out distinction.

And there's another word for it,

Which would be everything.

And so it's that paradox is built in,

You know,

In that flat spot place is,

Is the possibility that's expansive.

It can go everywhere because you're attaching into something that's universal,

That is timeless.

You're part of something a lot bigger than what your mind says.

If you were to kind of summarize your hopes for where this process-based work is headed,

For those of us that want to help you share it,

What would,

What would be those hopes?

Well,

I think we need a cultural conversation around the world of letting go with top-down normative categories that have been put atop us and are ill-fitting suits.

And I haven't talked much about that dirty history,

But it goes back to the eugenics,

The fathers of statistics and the ones who gave us normal and glorified normal,

And then gave us the bell curve and glorified the tips of the distribution.

We're trying to sort people into those who are worthy of having children and those who aren't.

And so we've put that toxic idea everywhere.

And we live inside those stories from the very earliest days,

Whether it's my sons will never be,

Or I'm so great at Graham,

Or I'm interested in talent.

I've got this disorder,

I've got that disorder,

Et cetera.

If instead we begin to talk about the processes that empower people and have words for discovering what those are.

I mean,

He and she is falling apart.

They and straight is falling apart.

It's all falling apart because when you get down to empowering individuals,

It's more a matter of who are you and what are you trying to do?

And what if what you care about,

What if you feel,

What if your history matters?

Explore this area of mindfulness and psychological flexibility and other processes as well.

But I mentioned those two because they're the biggest dogs in the pen from what we know.

It's really important.

Begin to look with more mindful awareness of when you're deploying those skills in your life moment by moment,

Hour by hour,

Day by day.

And just give a little bit of a glance towards what do you really want?

I mean,

If you really want relationships that work,

Or if you really want a sense of peace of mind,

Or if you really want not to struggle with your trauma history,

Or if you really you name it.

Consider the possibility that your own life is giving you constant little indications.

This would work better than that when you just watch.

You know,

I have worked for a long time for most of my life on just dealing with my own weight.

And I eventually came to this point.

I did some of the earliest weight control stuff,

Behavior therapy stuff with my colleague and good friend,

Kelly Brownell.

I was going to say that must've been Kelly Brownell.

Yeah.

We did research together,

Working together on weight versus not.

He's now working on stigma.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

He moved from the weight loss to the stigma,

Which is good.

My lab has done some really great studies in stigma and stuff.

I just was talking to him last week.

He's a time 100 guy.

If you never look at Google and he's one of the things that I've learned now is it's a lot better for you to try different things with not just weight,

But how you eat when you eat and how it lands.

Because it's quite idiosyncratic.

People have different ways.

It isn't like one diet will do it and begin to do what works.

And the example I was going to use is I found that if I was eating an apple and walnuts in the morning,

I wasn't hungry for a long time.

And I just noticed that over a period of just trial and error.

And so I asked my wife,

You know,

Apples and walnuts are something I eat a lot of.

Here comes a randomized trial on my life's work,

Acceptance and commitment therapy focused on weight loss,

Good outcomes by adding a little thing.

And what it was was walnuts.

And I said,

Man,

This is funny.

You know,

I'm not saying eat walnuts.

I'm just saying you probably know,

Hey,

If I eat this,

I get more hungry.

Well,

Or you probably know if I exercise this way,

I don't hurt.

If I do it regularly,

I get this.

You probably know if I actually open this difficult door with my wife,

The relationship moves forward.

Even though it's difficult,

My mind's telling me,

Don't do it,

Don't do it.

And on and on it goes in every year of your life.

So I think where we're headed with the process-based vision is stop categorizing people,

Start empowering people,

Take what we know in science and do a much better job of doing this one at a time process focused.

You yourself don't have to wait.

You can do it now by just bringing a mindful eye to what life is whispering to you about what works and the domains that you deeply care about and using,

Yes,

Things that science says probably worth learning these skills,

But not in this rigid mindy way of,

Oh God,

I haven't been accepting today.

Turn it into a gentle uplifting of the person that you are and the kind of life you yearn for and see where that takes you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know what you just described with Kelly Brunell,

The reason why I knew his name was that 2002 when I was accepted to graduate programs,

I chose between Kelly Brunell and Linda Craighead.

And Kelly Brunell was doing weight loss,

Behavioral weight loss.

Linda Craighead was doing appetite awareness training.

And at that time,

The Yale graduate program was prestigious and Kelly Brunell was huge.

And I checked in with myself and I asked,

What do I know is true for me from my own history of recovery around what I want to study and where I want to go with this?

So I went with Linda and studied interoceptive awareness of appetite.

And at that time it was like,

What is this stuff?

And then added in DBT and ACT and mindfulness and yada yada.

But that's the thing is that some of us don't,

We don't do that check-in or we don't take the choice that's the less prestigious one,

But actually is the right one.

And that's,

That is for many of us,

It's like eating the walnut,

Not because someone told you to eat the walnut because your body said walnuts that that settles right for me.

And for someone else,

It's not a walnut,

But yeah,

Wonderful story.

And I know that both of those people well,

And they're wonderful people,

And you had a really good choice either way you went.

Yeah,

But I absolutely understand that choice.

And it was brave of you and you know,

Forward-looking because a lot of things have happened there in that whole space that Linda was a part of.

And she was a woman mentor with kids.

And that was the other part,

You know,

So anyways,

The choices we make in our life,

Trust your trust yourself.

Is that some of the messaging around that?

Okay.

Well,

Thank you.

Thank you so much,

Steven Hayes.

I really appreciate you and the work that you've done to change my life,

My clients' lives,

The many lives across the world that don't even know that you've changed them.

So thank you.

Well,

Thank you for the opportunity,

Some interesting places.

And I especially appreciate your willingness just to go there.

So I'm leaving with some new thoughts and some feeling as though,

You know,

We're connected in some way and the larger community maybe is connected in some way and who knows where that can go.

So yeah,

Thank you for that.

Good.

I'll see you at ACBS.

San Francisco.

There is so much to unpack from this interview with Steven Hayes.

And it feels like we barely scratched the surface of what this whole process-based way of living really means.

Some of the things that I want you to focus on based on what he shared are number one,

You as an individual matters.

It's important to ask yourself what works for you based on your experience.

Technology has long focused on these averages and statistics that sort people into boxes.

And this dates back to eugenics and white supremacy.

And if we're going to break that and break it down,

We need to honor the individual differences between us and then also find some common links.

Things like self-compassion is pretty much helpful for most all of us.

Number two,

There are some core processes that contribute to human flourishing and you can try them out on yourself and see what works best for you.

And remember the times when you were at your best.

There's some clues in there about which processes are most effective for you.

Is it helpful for you to be mindful and present when you're in a crisis?

Does it motivate you to focus on your values when you're working on hard projects or toward a goal?

Does it resonate for you to see yourself as interconnected or to develop an observing self?

Those are some of the core processes that you could begin to explore.

And then finally for your practice this week,

I want you to try out this flat spot experience that Steve and I co-created on this show.

This flat space.

It's about working with these processes of being present,

Self as context,

Cognitive diffusion.

So try this for your practice.

Take some time in the morning,

Even if it's just you're lying in bed and notice the space,

The flat space between your thoughts.

Practice it.

Practice it when you go to bed at night.

And then also notice that you could observe this flat space,

This no-thing-ness or everything-ness when you're experiencing an emotional pain during the day or a physical pain or this no-thing-ness,

This everything-ness when you're interacting with another person,

The flat space that connects you.

We're going to talk more about this concept.

And we talked to Christiana Wolf,

Who's a mindfulness meditator and physician,

And she uses this concept in her work with chronic pain.

So this is just the beginning of some of this conversation of the space between.

But I'd love for you to download the practice.

Go to your daily practice in the show notes to get that.

And thank you for sticking with me in this.

Welcome back.

Season two.

We're looking forward to what's to come for us as we live our lives together in process.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Your Life in Process.

When you enter your life in process,

When you become psychologically flexible,

You become free.

If you liked this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody,

Please leave a review.

And if you have any questions,

You can leave them for me by phone at 805-457-2776 or send me a voicemail by email at podcast at your life in process.

Com.

I want to thank my team,

Craig,

Angela Stubbs,

Ashley Hyatt,

Abby Deal,

And thank you to Ben Gold at Bell and Branch for his original music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatment.

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Life as a process kind of like harm reduction. There is an ebb and flow to all things. Making room within, to live with all the pieces of who I am.