TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Happiness Isn't Normal -- Feb. 13, 2006

Steven Hayes--University of Nevada, Reno professor, past president of the distinguished Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and former panic-disorder sufferer is on the vangaurd of a new Buddhist angle on cognitive therapy, in which one doesn't argue with upsetting thoughts, but dis-identifies with them...

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Happiness Isn't Normal -- Feb. 13, 2006: "Hayes and the others teach mindfulness, the meditation-inspired practice of observing thoughts without getting entangled in them, approaching them as though they were leaves floating down a stream ('... I want coffee/I should work out/I'm depressed/We need milk ...'). Hayes is the most divisive and ambitious of the third-wave psychologists--so called because they are turning from the second wave of cognitive therapy, which itself largely subsumed the first wave of behavior therapy, devised in part by B.F. Skinner. (Behavior therapy, in turn, broke with the Freudian model by emphasizing observable behaviors over hidden meanings and feelings.)

Hayes and other third wavers say trying to correct negative thoughts can, paradoxically, intensify them, in the same way that a dieter who keeps telling himself 'I really don't want the pizza' ends up obsessing about ... pizza. Rather, Hayes and the roughly 12,000 students and professionals who have been trained in his formal psychotherapy, which is called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), say we should acknowledge that negative thoughts recur throughout life. Instead of challenging them, Hayes says, we should concentrate on identifying and committing to our values. Once we become willing to feel negative emotions, he argues, we will find it easier to figure out what life should be about and get on with it. That's easier said than done, of course, but his point is that it's hard to think about the big things when we're trying so hard to regulate our thinking."...

Sunset.

When you just read that word, no event occurred other than that your eyes moved across the page. But your mind may have raced off in any number of directions. Perhaps you thought of a beautiful sunset. And then maybe you thought of the beautiful sunset on the day your mother died, which might have evoked sadness.

Hayes uses such exercises to make the point that our thoughts can have unexpected consequences. Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life illustrates that unreliability by quoting a 1998 Psychological Science study in which 84 subjects were asked to hold a pendulum steady. Some were told not only to hold it steady but also not to move the pendulum sideways. But the latter group tended to move the pendulum sideways more often than the group told merely to keep it steady. Why? "Because thinking about not having it move [sideways] activates the very muscles that move it that way," Hayes and Smith write. To be sure, cognitive therapy doesn't ask people to suppress negative thoughts, but it does ask us to challenge them, to fix them.

By contrast, ACT tries to defuse the power of thoughts. Instead of saying "I'm depressed," it proposes saying "I'm having the thought that I'm depressed." Hayes isn't saying people don't really feel pain (he has felt plenty of it), but he believes we turn pain into suffering when we try to push it away. ACT therapists use metaphors to explain acceptance: Is it easier to drag a heavy weight on a chain behind you or to pick it up and walk with it held close?