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Hey, this is Brett.
We're taking a break this week from a new episode.
It's Christmas.
We're gonna spend time with our family, eat a lot of food, open presents.
It's gonna be great.
So we're gonna rebroadcast episode number 868, Escape the Happiness Trap.
And while I got your ear, let me tell you about The Strenuous Life.
The Strenuous Life is an online program that we created to help you turn your intentions into actions.
We've done that by basically creating Boy Scouts for Men.
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You'll get weekly challenges that are gonna push you physically, mentally, and practically.
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I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life.
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
Happiness is the subject of thousands of articles, podcasts, and scientific studies.
Yet all this focus on happiness doesn't seem to be making people any happier.
In fact, the more they try to be happy, especially by fighting to get rid of bad feelings and clinging to good ones, the more unhappy people often become.
My guests would say that the first step in escaping this negative cycle is redefining what happiness even means.
We'll be right back.
With ACT, you allow both pleasant and hard feelings to coexist and then hook from the latter so they no longer jerk you around.
This allows you to focus on taking action on your values to create a meaningful, flourishing life or, in other words, real happiness.
After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash happiness trap.
Alright, Russ Harris, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
So you have a background in medicine, but then you made a shift in your career where you became a therapist and you became a trainer in a form of talk therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy.
So you do therapy, but you also do coaching.
And you got a book called The Happiness Trap, How to Stop Struggling and Start Living.
And you start the book off talking about how most human beings, they want to be happy.
So we have all these blog posts books apps, courses on how to be happier, but people aren't happier.
Depression's up.
Life satisfaction is down.
So what's going on there?
We have all these resources.
There are people researching scientifically how to be happier, yet we still find happiness hard to achieve.
What's going on?
Well, there's a number of different factors, but probably the biggest one is the way that we think about happiness itself.
Most people think of happiness as a good feeling or feeling good, or a state of pleasure or contentment.
And if that's your concept of happiness, then there's no such thing as lasting happiness.
How long can a state of pleasure or contentment possibly last for?
If you think of the happiest day of your life, how long were you feeling happy for before?
There was some frustration disappointment, anxiety.
In Western cultures, we don't really learn how to deal with those inevitable painful emotions.
We see them as the opposite of happiness and we start trying to avoid or get rid of all of those unwanted thoughts feelings emotions, all the uncomfortable stuff.
And we start desperately trying to create more of the good, pleasant feelings and clinging to those feelings.
And the technical psychobabble name for this is experiential avoidance.
Experiential avoidance is the ongoing attempt to avoid or get rid of unwanted thoughts feelings, emotions and memories all of that uncomfortable stuff that shows up inside us that we don't like.
Experiential avoidance is normal.
We're all...
I don't know anybody who just loves having painful thoughts and feelings.
But what happens is high levels of experiential avoidance, where people are really kind of trying very, very hard to avoid and get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings.
Well, high levels of this actually directly correlate with your risk of depression, anxiety disorders, addiction and many other mental health issues.
So if you're trying very, very hard to control your emotions, to avoid or get rid of the unpleasant ones and create and cling to the pleasant ones, it's going to create a lot of problems for you.
In my book The Happiness Trap.
It's called The Happiness Trap because popular notions of happiness create this trap that actually pull you into this vicious cycle of avoidance that makes life worse.
There's a very different way of looking at happiness, which doesn't come naturally to most people.
The kind of concepts of happiness I've just been talking about is really only become popular in the last hundred years, this idea that it's about feeling good.
But if we go back over the centuries, for most of recorded history, happiness has not been about feeling good.
It's been about doing good.
It's about living your values, behaving like the person you want to be, doing things that are meaningful and purposeful.
And when we create a meaningful life, living by our values, doing the stuff that's fulfilling and meaningful and purposeful well as we do that, we'll experience the full range of human emotions, both pleasant and painful.
We'll experience the enjoyable emotions love and joy and we'll experience the painful ones fear and sadness and anger, and anxiety and guilt.
These are all part of the rich tapestry of human life.
So if we could reconceptualize happiness as living a rich, full and meaningful life in which we feel the full range of human emotions, both pleasant and painful, we'd be a lot better off.
Yeah, that second definition of happiness, that it's a meaningful life where you can experience unpleasant emotions and feelings but still have a meaningful life.
That's like eudaimonia from the ancient Greeks, like it's a flourishing life.
Yeah, very much.
That's much more in line with the kind of meaningful, fulfilling life that encouraging.
Yeah.
So you talk about?
When we define happiness as just feeling good, we engage in experiential avoidance.
And you talk about there's different ways we can do that.
And you call it we struggle with an emotion or a feeling.
And there's different struggle strategies you describe in the book.
What are some common ways we struggle with an unpleasant emotion so we can get rid of it?
And the idea is that we'll feel that happy feeling again.
What are some typical struggle strategies?
Well, by far the most common that we all do is distraction.
It's so easy for us in our modern world, with our phones always at our fingertips, that we can just distract ourselves.
We've got some unpleasant thoughts and feelings going up.
We start scrolling through social media or watching some YouTube videos or whatever it is that we like to do on our phones and our devices.
And it kind of gives us a bit of short-term relief from whatever unpleasant feelings are showing up.
And a little bit of distraction is not a problem at all.
But we all know what happens when we do excessive distraction.
I'm sure I know I have.
And I'm sure all your listeners have experienced that sense of wasted time where you've just kind of been you know whether it's skipping through programs on television, just trying to distract yourself from how you're feeling.
And it's not really very satisfying or fulfilling.
And of course, it's only a temporary relief.
Opting out is another very common strategy.
We opt out of the difficult people places, situations or activities that bring up difficult thoughts and feelings for us.
We procrastinate on things.
We avoid difficult conversations.
We stay away from perhaps social situations that we think are going to be challenging us.
And again this kind of opting out procrastination, putting things off, gives us a bit of short term relief.
But of course, in the long term, if we do too much of this, our life gets very small.
If we do too much procrastination, that leads to many other problems because we're not really addressing the important things we need to do in life.
So all of these struggle strategies?
They have this kind of short-term relief, but in the long term they tend to make life worse if you do too much of them.
Another common one is just substances.
All of us to some extent put substances into our body to feel better.
You know whether that's just aspirin, or whether that's a glass of wine, or whether that's some chocolate, cookies or chips, or you know in the more extreme cases, you know hard drugs.
And again, very often when we do this, these substances give us some short term relief from pain.
But in the long term, if we overuse these substances, if we use them too much, too excessively, then we get all sorts of health problems, whether that's from overeating or overdrinking or addiction.
We also talk about many traditional therapy modalities.
They inadvertently maybe lead people to engage in struggle strategies.
What are some examples of that?
Well, I would say probably, again, the two most common would be distraction techniques.
I mean, these are so popular.
Some unpleasant thoughts and feelings show up.
And so you go to your happy place or you think of something positive, or you, you know, snap an elastic band around your wrist and tell those thoughts and feelings to go away.
And one of the the big problems with distraction strategies is there's a sort of rebound effect.
So they they do work in the short term, for example, you know, snapping an elastic band and telling negative thoughts to go away.
Actually, in the short term they do, but what the research shows very clearly is that in the long term they rebound with greater and greater frequency and intensity.
It's the same with kind of squashing painful emotions down, suppressing our emotions.
In the short term, we can actually do it.
But again, in the long term, lots of research to show there's a rebound effect where the emotions come back with greater frequency and intensity.
Many, many pop psychology strategies rely very heavily on thinking techniques.
It might kind of challenge your negative thoughts or try to replace them with positive affirmations.
And the thing with thinking techniques is they work quite well a lot of the time.
If your emotional pain is mild, if you're just a little bit sad or a little bit angry or a little bit anxious or a little bit guilty, you can usually think your way out of it quite effectively with these pop psychology strategies.
But the more intense your emotional pain and the greater the difficulty you're facing in your life, the less effective those techniques become.
Take the example of someone you love is dying or has just died.
There's no positive thinking strategy that's going to enable you to think away your painful feelings.
You're going to have intense feelings of sadness or anger, maybe anxiety.
I mean, it depends on you know what your relationship was like with this person and what's led up to their death, and so forth.
But one thing's sure, there's going to be lots of painful emotions.
And you can't just think that away.
You can't expect to feel happy and think positively in the face of a great loss.
Same with other very really kind of challenging situations in life.
So people often get a bit frustrated that they're trying to use these positive thinking techniques and finding they're not working.
And then it's what's wrong with me.
And it's just setting people up for failure.
So they work okay with kind of mild emotional distress, but not with really big stuff.
No, I've experienced that because I've read books about cognitive behavioral therapy.
One of the premises of cognitive behavioral therapy is that if you have this sort of negative, self-defeating thought, you're supposed to challenge it.
Let's think rationally and logically about this.
But I found sometimes when I do that, I can come up with all sorts of reasons.
If I'm like, well, I'm an idiot.
And then you're like, well, am I really an idiot?
And then I'd be like well yeah, here's all the reasons why I can come up with like and it just makes it worse.
And I'm feeling like you said, you're like, you feel dumb.
She's like, why isn't this working?
Why can't I get this thing, this cognitive behavioral therapy thing to work for me?
And then it just goes down, just continues down in a vicious cycle.
I can relate to that very strongly.
And then, of course, that just gives your mind even more ammunition.
Yeah, see what a loser I am.
I can't even do this cognitive therapy stuff anymore.
Okay, so those are some struggle strategies.
So distraction, fighting with it, trying to reason your way out of it.
You're not saying that the cognitive behavioral therapy stuff isn't useful.
It's useful in some situations, but not all the time.
You talk about another thing that we often do when we experience a negative emotion or feeling or thought, besides struggling with it, is obeying it.
What do you mean by that?
Well, a lot of the time our thoughts show up and we're not even aware that we're thinking.
Our mind says, do this, do that, do the other, and we just go along with it.
Our mind makes a judgment or an appraisal of a situation.
You know, that person's bad.
You know, this... situations too hard.
I can't deal with it.
I have to do this.
I must do that.
I shouldn't do the other.
I can't do X until Y. And we just go along with that stuff.
Our mind lays down these judgments and these rules and we just follow along blindly.
And the problem is that can keep us caught in a rut just doing the same old thing.
I mean.
A good example of this is perfectionism, for example.
You know our mind lays down all these rules.
I have to do it perfectly.
I mustn't let anyone down.
I have to stick at this and make sure everything's spot on.
And there's no point doing it unless I can do it perfectly.
And what happens is, if anyone's experienced this I know I certainly have in my life it puts just massive pressure on you.
It doesn't even occur to you that These are arbitrary rules.
Your mind has kind of come up with that.
You've got a choice about whether you follow them or whether you bend them or whether you break them.
We just kind of go on to automatic pilot and do what our mind tells us to do.
You know, another common example is people pleasing rules.
These play a big role in many people who suffer from depression.
It's like I have to please others.
I have to put their needs first.
My needs don't count.
What they want is more important than I want.
And you know, if you get caught up in the kind of people pleasing routine you Life gets pretty miserable.
It's all about sacrificing yourself to please others.
So we can identify our mind's rules by words like should have to must ought, can't unless, won't until, don't because.
We kind of want to have a look.
If I keep following these rules, is it actually giving me the life that I want?
Is it giving me the relationships I want?
You know, one of the problems with obeying these rules is they very often create tension and conflict in relationships, particularly when we start imposing those rules on the other person.
You should do this and you shouldn't do that.
And none of us likes being told what we should or shouldn't do, right?
No, no.
Okay.
So we can either struggle with these negative thoughts emotions, feelings and that can lead to a happiness trap because they usually just backfire, just makes the problem worse or there's a rebound effect, or we can obey it and just kind of follow along with it.
And that just continues just making us feel miserable.
It doesn't change anything.
Yeah.
Well, you know, just expanding the concept of obey, it's not just about obeying what our mind says.
It's also obeying our emotions.
You know Anger shows up and there's an urge to shout or yell or fight.
You know fear shows up and there's an urge to hide away escape, avoid.
And so again, we often obey our emotions.
Just let them jerk us around like a puppet on a sting, pull us into patterns of behaviors just kind of completely driven by the emotion itself.
So we connect ourselves with their emotions.
We're fused too much with our emotions when we obey.
Yeah, fused is the technical term.
Basically, the emotion dominates us and it just kind of jerks us around and pushes us around.
In everyday language, we say, I was in the grip of anger, for example.
But what that basically means is you're just allowing your emotions to rule you and dictate what you do.
So this applies to thoughts as well as feelings.
So let's dig into how acceptance and commitment therapy approaches difficult thoughts and emotions.
And you talk about the first step of acceptance and commitment.
Therapy is this idea of unhooking yourself from the difficult thought or emotion.
What do you mean by that?
Can I just, before I answer the question, explain the name, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?
Yeah.
It was created by Stephen Hayes, a professor of psychology at the University of Reno, Nevada.
And ACT is the shortened term for it.
And it gets its name because of one of the key messages accept what's out of your personal control and commit to action that improves your life.
So there's basically three strands to the therapy itself.
One strand is this idea of taking action, committed action, to do the things in life that are important and meaningful and fulfilling.
So you get in touch with your values, your heart's deepest desires for success, how you want to behave, how you want to treat yourself and others, and you use those values as a compass to guide your actions and motivate you to do the things that matter.
The second stream of the approach is learning these unhooking skills how to unhook from difficult thoughts feelings, emotions and memories so that they can't jerk you around and pull you all over the place.
Learning how to basically take the power and impact out of difficult or unwanted thoughts and feelings.
And then the third stream of therapy is really focusing your attention learning how to focus your attention on what's important right here, right now, and to engage in what you're doing so you get the most out of it.
So unhooking skills are one of those three streams and it's basically um a set of skills that really teach you how to respond to even the most difficult, painful emotions thoughts, feelings and memories in a new way, in a way that basically drains them of their power.
They're still there.
It's not a way to get rid of these thoughts and feelings, but it's a way to take the impact out of them.
You learn how to Let them flow through you.
Let them come and stay and go in their own good time, without sweeping you away, without crushing you and without you fighting with them or trying to escape from them.
Okay.
So the idea is you're not, instead of like.
I'm trying to get one example of incognitive behavioral therapy.
If you had a negative emotion or thought, the typical response would be like well, let's look at this.
Let's challenge that.
Do you have any, any real reason to feel like this?
And you'd go to kind of go through the self dialogue and acceptance and commitment theory.
When you have that negative thought and emotion that doesn't happen.
Like you're not trying to get rid of the negative thought or emotion.
No, that's right.
Yeah.
So it's basically your first step in ACT would be just to acknowledge, okay, here it is.
Here's this difficult thought or here's this difficult feeling showing up.
Yes, I know this one.
And then rather than, well, let's talk about thoughts and feelings a bit separately.
They kind of overlap, but it'd be useful.
If you've got a thought like I'm not good enough, for example, the chances are that thought has showed up hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times before.
By the time you get to therapy or read a self-help book or go and see a coach or something.
So there's no delete button in the brain.
There's no way you're going to kind of delete the I'm not good enough story so that it never shows up.
It's a steeply entrenched neuronal pathway.
And so it's a bit pointless going in and trying to fight it and challenge it and dispute it every time it shows up.
What we want to do is basically lay down a new neuronal pathway in the brain so that when i am not good enough pops up, we can go oh there's the not good enough story.
Or oh there's the inner critic, oh there's my mind giving me a hard time, oh i know this one, i've heard this before, you know.
So that instantly takes a lot of the impact out of it.
Just kind of recognizing it, acknowledging it and choosing not to fight it doesn't mean that we agree with it and believe it and buy into it, but we kind of start to see this is a thought.
These are words, or sometimes words and pictures that are popping up in my head right now.
So that's thoughts.
You can do the same thing with feelings as well, correct?
Yeah, so a painful feeling shows up anger or sadness.
And again, the first step is just to, okay, here's sadness or here's anger.
I'm noticing, you know, is tightness in my chest, is knots in my stomach, is some teariness in my eyes.
And just recognizing this is a normal human emotion.
This is an emotion that we expect to feel when life is tough, when things are challenging.
It's absolutely a normal part of being human to have painful emotions.
It's a normal part of being human to have negative thoughts.
And it's useful to recognize if we come back to thoughts, our mind generates these negative thoughts for a purpose.
It's not deliberately trying to beat us up and give us a hard time.
It's always there's an underlying purpose.
Our mind is always trying to help us avoid things that we don't want or get things that we do want.
The problem is it very often goes about doing that in a way that is ultimately unhelpful.
Often compare your mind to like an overly helpful friend, one of those friends who's trying so hard to help that they end up getting in the way and making things worse.
Have you ever had a friend like that, Brett?
Yes.
If we come back to the idea of your mind beating you up, criticizing you, telling you they're not good enough story, usually your mind's trying to help you change your behavior.
It's telling you to shape up, or it's warning you about what might happen if you keep on doing these things, how you might get into trouble.
Maybe it's trying to save you from failure or save you from rejection, but mostly it's trying to just help you shape up and do things better when it starts beating you up.
If we take other common patterns of negative thinking, like worrying and predicting the worst and catastrophizing again, this is your mind, warning you of Potential dangers, potential threats.
It's trying to help prepare you for the worst.
Make sure that you're as well prepared as you can be.
It's trying to keep you safe and avoid you getting hurt.
So if we look at pretty much any negative cognitive process, we're going to see that there's always an underlying purpose.
It's always your mind trying to help you avoid something you don't want or get something that you do want, or both, but it's just going about it in a very kind of clumsy way.
And so if we are, here's my mind again, here's the not good enough story.
I know this one.
Okay.
Thanks mind.
I know you're trying to help and it's okay.
I've got this handled.
So now we're not fighting with it.
We're not arguing with it, but nor are we buying into it, nor are we letting that kind of thought dominate us and push us around.
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And what's weird about this is really counterintuitive by simply just accepting the negative thought or emotions.
Like, oh yeah, there's that thought.
It diffuses things.
I mean, what's going on there?
Has there been research done?
Like why just kind of noticing it and accepting it just kind of takes the heat off of things?
Yeah well look, it's interesting because, you know, coming back to cognitive behavioral therapy, I mean, like cognitive behavioral therapy and ACT are fellow travelers.
And they actually do have a lot in common.
And Steve Hayes, the guy who created ACT, was intrigued by the finding in cognitive behavioral therapy that improvement happened way before you got to the point where you start disputing or challenging negative thoughts.
I kind of noticed that the first stage in CBT is that you just kind of acknowledge the thoughts that are showing up and you non-judgmentally label them.
Okay, there's black and white thinking or there's catastrophizing.
And clinical improvement started at that point.
Just the kind of noticing and non-judgmental naming of cognition, which in CBT is called cognitive distancing.
And so Steve Hayes kind of thought well, what if, instead of going on to challenge and dispute those thoughts, what if we went in that distancing further, really helping people to kind of step back and see their thoughts as nothing more or less than words or pictures?
And when we can step back from our thoughts, then we've got a lot more choice about what we do with them.
You know, I often use the analogy that your mind is a lot like radio doom and gloom.
It naturally broadcasts a lot of painful stuff from the past, a lot of fearful stuff about the future and a lot of difficult stuff that's going on in the present.
That's a normal human mind.
And have you ever had the experience?
There was a radio playing on in the background and you were so absorbed in what you're doing that you hardly even knew the radio was there.
And then suddenly the radio, you know, the song changed.
One of your favorite songs was there and you were singing along and you were very aware of it.
And then the song changed and the radio faded into the background again.
And this is what we're trying to help people do in ACT.
It's like focus on do the meaningful things, live your values, engage in what you're doing, really focus on it.
And let your mind just chatter away in the background, broadcasting all the stuff that it normally does.
If your mind's broadcasting something useful and helpful that helps you to live your life, then by all means tune in and make use of that.
But a lot of the time, a lot of the stuff on that kind of radio is going to be fairly unhelpful.
So, you know, it's like what happens if you start arguing with a radio, right?
What happens if you start trying to ignore a radio?
The more you try to ignore it, the more it bothers you or a loud voice in a restaurant or a lawnmower outside.
The more you try to ignore something, the more it bothers you.
So just kind of learning how to let it be there, let it play on and take anything that's useful.
That kind of gets broadcast along the way.
And in the book, you lay out some different strategies or techniques people can use to unhook.
We mentioned, notice a name, which is just like, well, there I am thinking that I'm an idiot.
That can work for a lot of people.
But what are some other ones that you've found useful with the people you work with?
Yeah, well, I'm wondering, could I take the listeners through a very quick exercise right now?
Yeah, that'd be great.
Okay.
So if you're listening to this I hope you're listening to this bring to mind a negative thought that tends to hook you.
You know a thought that when it shows up, it tends to jerk you around, pull you out of your life, pull you back, pull you into a dark space.
If you're struggling to come up with ideas, then just pick some version of the I'm not good enough story.
I mean, everyone's got multiple versions of I'm not good enough, whether it's I'm fat or I'm stupid, or I'm too old or not enough of this or I'm too much of that.
And so bring to mind a kind of nasty, negative self-judgment, and What I'll ask you to do is, just for the next few seconds, I'm going to get you to buy into that thought.
Believe it as much as you can, get all consumed by it.
So please don't challenge it or don't dispute it.
I want you to do the very opposite.
Let it hook you, let it pull you in.
And obviously you'll feel a bit uncomfortable when you do that.
So I hope you're willing to feel a little bit uncomfortable to learn a useful new skill.
So maybe if we just give people about five seconds of silence just to bring this thought to mind and buy into it,
I'm stupid or I'm not smart enough, or I'm fat or I'm unworthy or any other thought that really kind of tends to hook you.
Buy into it now.
Really let it grab you.
Really let it pull you in.
Now, silently replay that thought with these words in front.
I'm having the thought that.
I'm having the thought that I'm stupid.
Now, replay it one more time. with a longer phrase, I notice I'm having the thought that.
I notice I'm having the thought that I'm a lousy parent.
So I hope you viewers did that, Brett.
Did you have a go at it?
I did have a go at it.
Yes.
And what kind of happened for you?
Well, it just, it reduced the, there's like a distance put into it.
Like the phrase is like, I just noticed myself becoming more distant from that initial thought, basically.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's the common experience.
If any viewer didn't have that experience.
I just encourage you to try it again.
Pick a different thought perhaps, and try it again.
But that's a very simple.
The technical name for what we're doing there I think you mentioned it earlier is cognitive diffusion.
So kind of cognitive fusion means we get hooked by our thoughts.
They dominate us.
They have huge power over us.
Whereas cognitive diffusion means we kind of separate or distance from our thoughts and we can see their true nature.
We can see that their words or pictures or combinations thereof.
And when we can see that, then we've got a lot more choice about what we do when those thoughts are present.
Now I must say I have occasionally had a client kind of react when I introduced this exercise to them.
I remember one guy, he was massively overweight, kind of morbidly obese guy.
And, you know, I took him through that exercise and he said – but it's true.
I really am fat.
And he like pulled up his shirt to kind of show me.
I was like, well, thank you for sharing.
And it's one of the things in ACT is we never, ever get into debates about whether these thoughts are true or false.
So you know, I said to this guy he'd been referred to me because he was suffering from major depression.
And So I said to him look, I know you've seen other therapists before me and you've tried debating whether your thoughts were true or false.
And was that helpful for you?
And he's like no because, because I am fat, you know, and he had a very harsh inner critic.
You know, I'm a loser.
Yeah.
Killing myself by eating all of this.
I'm disgusting.
Look at all of this fat.
And so really, really harsh, lots of harsh self-judgment.
And so I kind of said to her I said well look, you know, your mind is actually a lot like my mind.
We all have minds that are very quick to judge us and criticize us and label us and tell us what's not good enough about ourselves.
And, you know, this is basically a normal human mind.
And I don't know how to stop your mind from speaking to you that way.
I do know that debating whether your thoughts are true or false is not likely to have any impact at all right.
So he's kind of nodding his head.
Yes.
And so it's like our aim here is to kind of learn a different way of responding to those thoughts, so that when they show up, you can take the power and impact out of them, so they don't have to jerk you around.
Because I said, you know what normally happens when all of these kind of self-critical thoughts pop up.
What normally happens when you get hooked by them?
Oh, well, I'll get depressed, mate.
Okay.
And so then when you get depressed, what do you do?
Oh, I'll eat a load of shit, mate.
Okay.
So, you know, getting hooked by these thoughts isn't really helping you.
And then remember the other part of the model is about values.
So I kind of said let's just put this unhooking stuff to one side for a moment and let's have a look at your values.
And one of my favorite ways of getting people in touch with their values is I ask this question.
If I could wave a magic wand.
So all these thoughts and feelings that you're struggling with are like water off a duck's back.
They kind of flow over you without jerking you around.
Then what would you do differently?
How would you treat your body?
How would you treat your friends?
How would you treat your family?
How would you treat your life differently?
What would you start doing more of?
What would you stop doing or do less of?
And so I asked this guy the same question.
Let's just kind of have a look at how you treat your body.
Wave this magic wand, all these depressing thoughts and feelings, lose their power.
How would you treat your body differently?
He said, well, I wouldn't sit around all day just watching the telly.
Okay, so what would you do differently?
Well, I might get up and Exercise.
Okay, so you'd be exercising more, you'd be moving more.
What else would be different?
Well, I wouldn't eat so much food.
Okay, so you might be eating more healthy food.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm going to say there's a very important value here that's getting lost.
I'm going to call it self-care.
And if you were in touch with this value of self-care, you'd be making different choices.
You'd be eating differently.
You'd be moving more, exercising more.
Yeah.
Okay.
So when your mind comes in and it starts kind of beating you up and telling you the not good enough story and telling you about you know, I'm fat, I'm a loser and so forth,
If you get hooked by those thoughts, does it help you to live that value of self-care?
Okay, so there's no question here about whether they're true or false.
It's just a pragmatic choice.
Getting hooked by these thoughts isn't helping you to live your values.
Do the stuff that's important.
So let's learn some unhooking skills here and let's not waste time debating whether things are true or false.
So it's a massive paradigm shift for people, this approach, but a very liberating one.
And I imagine this takes practice to do.
It's not some one and done thing, right?
I think most people are probably just ingrained.
If you have a negative emotion, you got to fight it, squash it down, distract yourself.
When you first try this stuff, you're not going to be very good at it.
But the more you do it, the better you're going to get at it.
Yeah, that's a great summary.
Basically, we're talking about a whole new set of skills in this approach.
And like any new skill, it requires practice.
And as you said, these things are counterintuitive.
They go against the grain.
They're not our default.
It's so...
It's so unusual for us to kind of learn how to let these thoughts and feelings be there and just take the power out of them, rather than fighting with them or running from them.
Related to this idea of unhooking ourselves from emotions.
Let's say you're experiencing a really strong emotion, like I'm, just big severe, just anxiety or depression or just this rumination.
You talk about you need to make room for that.
Again, that's counterintuitive because you think, well, I'm feeling those things.
I want those to go away.
Why would I make room for it?
What do you mean by making room for difficult emotions?
Well, I think I often talk about this idea.
There's like a struggle switch at the back of your mind.
And as soon as a difficult emotion shows up, the struggle switch goes on and you start to struggle with it.
So let's suppose anxiety shows up.
Struggle switch goes on.
Oh, no, here's anxiety.
I don't like anxiety.
I wish this anxiety was gone.
Wow.
Now you've got anxiety about your anxiety.
Suddenly it's getting bigger.
Oh, oh, anxiety is getting bigger.
How do I get rid of anxiety?
This anxiety is really terrible.
Now you've got another layer of anxiety.
You've got anxiety about your anxiety about your anxiety.
So the struggle switch kind of amplifies your emotions, makes them bigger.
You may then get angry about your anxiety.
Why does this keep happening to me?
Then you may start to feel guilty.
You know, there's starving kids in Africa.
What have I got to complain about?
Now you've got guilt about your anger, about your anxiety, about your anxiety, about your anxiety.
The struggle switch kind of massively amplifies your emotions, makes them bigger stronger, stickier.
They hang around for a lot longer.
So what we learn to do is how to switch off our struggle switch.
So anxiety shows up and it's not that I like it or want it or approve of it.
It's an unpleasant emotion.
I'm just not going to struggle with it.
I'm just going to let the anxiety be there.
I'll notice this tightness in my chest and knots in my stomach.
And I'll notice radio doom and gloom in my head is broadcasting a lot of scary stories.
And I'll just allow that anxiety to flow through me.
I'll just let it kind of come and stay and go, not fighting it, not struggling with it.
And what happens is I find that the anxiety is then free to move.
It may get higher if it's a very challenging situation.
It may get lower.
It may move on quickly.
It may move on slowly.
But the point is it's free to move and it doesn't get amplified and stuck when the struggle switches on.
So there's a number of different skills in the book that teach people how to switch off this struggle switch.
And when you learn how to do that, how to just kind of turn towards your emotions with openness and curiosity and notice what they're like in your body and kind of breathe into them and make room for them, it's so much uh, easier to have them.
Without these skills, these emotions are always going to seem awful and unbearable and your, your default is always going to be to fall back into those struggle sweaters strategies.
So when I talk about opening up, that's just a metaphorical way of speaking.
Really, people have to kind of learn these skills that are all about tuning into their body with openness and curiosity and noticing the different layers of the emotion and learning how to kind of let that struggle dissipate.
And the research on this, again, is very powerful.
There's so many.
I mean there's over 3000 published studies on the ACT approach, with over 1000 randomized control trials, which is like the gold standard of research.
And what we see is people with anxiety disorders as they learn how to open up and drop the struggle with anxiety and let it flow through them.
What we see is that their symptoms of anxiety go down and down and down and down and down, but not from doing the common sense things, not from trying to control the anxiety, not from trying to push it away, not from trying to challenge the anxious thoughts or squish the anxious feelings or replace them with relaxation feelings.
It's not from any of that.
It's from just learning this new way of kind of opening up and letting it flow through you.
So it's paradoxical stuff.
So yeah, if you're angry, the thing would be like, I just noticed I'm feeling angry.
And then just letting it be angry.
And then just kind of getting curious about your anger, thinking like well, where am I feeling my anger?
What kind of urges do I have now that I'm angry?
You're just being curious about the emotion you're having and what this does counterintuitively it diffuses the emotion.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then again, looking at, you know, what kind of angry thoughts is my mind generating?
If I go along with those in obey mode, if I obey those angry thoughts, where's that going to take me?
Is that going to take me towards the life that I want to live or away from the life that I want to build?
So you know then, kind of bringing in your unhooking skills to unhook from the angry thoughts, while at the same time using your opening up skills to let the angry feelings be there in your body.
And what happens as you do, that is, you massively reduce the impact of those thoughts and feelings, which then gives you a lot more control over your physical actions.
So This is the kind of committed action part of the model.
Instead of letting my anger control what I do, I come back to my values and I use those to guide my actions.
I do things that are meaningful, important, life enhancing.
So once I've learned how to do this, I can feel angry, but act calmly.
I can say in a calm voice, I'm feeling furious right now.
And that's going to have a very different effect than if I start shouting and yelling or doing all the typical things we do when anger is just jerking us around all over the place.
And again, this is a skill that takes practice and it's not going to be a week.
It might take months, years to practice this thing.
Oh, look, you can always get better at it.
But you know, there's lots of good research showing that people can get benefits even within 10 weeks of regular practice of this stuff.
So, you know, it's not a miracle cure or anything.
As you keep saying, and I'm glad you do, it needs practice, practice, practice.
But at the same time, if you do practice it and embrace it, you can get some pretty effective results in a short space of time.
So we've been talking a lot about unhooking ourselves from these negative emotions.
But as you said, ACT isn't just about that.
It isn't just about stopping the struggle with anxiety or anger or whatever.
It's about committing yourself to living a meaningful life, doing proactive, positive things, so you can live the life you want.
And that requires knowing what your values are.
So you walk people through how to figure out what's important to them.
That's an important part of ACT.
Let's say someone's done that.
They figure out okay, you know I want to live a healthy life and they list out a task that they want to do.
Those are like intentions we have.
We all have good intentions.
Sometimes stuff gets in the way of those intentions.
How can ACT help us to live up to our values when things get hard?
No matter how good you get at doing this stuff, there will be times where you just don't live up to your values, where you do get hooked by your thoughts and feelings and pulled into self-defeating patterns of behavior.
And when that happens, boy, does it hurt.
So we don't want to fall back into beating ourselves up.
We want to acknowledge it hurts and be there in a kind, caring way for ourselves.
However, you know, we can get a lot better at living by our values.
So there's all sorts of little ways to bring them into your everyday life.
You could start your day each day by thinking of two or three values that you just want to sprinkle into the day ahead.
You know, maybe loving and caring and playful, for example.
And then you go through your day and look for little opportunities to be loving or caring or playful.
When we start translating our values into goals and action plans, it can be very useful to write those down.
What are my goals?
What are my actions?
And to really tune into the values underlying them and to recognize that, even if I don't achieve this particular goal, there's still a thousand other ways that I can live the value underneath it.
If the value is being loving.
There's thousands of ways that I can translate that into different goals and actions.
So life will often get in the way of one particular goal, but it doesn't mean we have to give up on the value of being loving or being kind or being playful or whatever value it is that we're choosing to bring more into our life for that day.
And then another part of this is predicting how your mind and your body is going to make this hard for you.
What's your mind likely to say to try and talk you out of this?
And what unhooking skill are you going to use to kind of take the power and impact out of that when your mind says it?
What uncomfortable feelings are likely to show up?
When we really start living a values-based life.
That means we face up to our challenges, we face up to our difficulties.
Going back to the start of the interview, when we live a meaningful life, it's not a life that's just full of pleasant things, enjoyable feelings.
A meaningful life asks more of us, asks us to step up to our challenges and do the uncomfortable, difficult stuff, and so, of course, difficult feelings and emotions are going to arise, and that's when we want to use our opening up skills to open up and let those feelings be there and let them flow through us.
That idea of when you set a goal and it doesn't work out the way you'd hope everyone experiences that.
And I like the idea where ACT recognizes that, just as your emotions aren't in your complete control, right.
You have to give up on that and just accept you're going to have these bad emotions.
You also have to accept that outcomes that you have in life aren't under your complete control.
And the only control you have is just I just trying to live up to your values.
Like you said, like if, even if you set a goal to I don't know, lose 20 pounds.
Maybe you don't lose the 20 pounds in the time you set, but you do.
You did in the process.
Every day, try to live a healthy life, taking walks, watching what you eat.
And that's, that's a success.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's suppose the value is self-care.
The goal is to lose a certain amount of weight.
Well, if you're living the value of self-care through exercising and through eating well and so forth, even if you don't achieve the particular weight loss you want, you're improving your health and you're improving your day-to-day quality of life through being self-caring.
So yeah, you know, we've all experienced that that we don't follow through on our goals and we've all experienced how disappointing that can be.
But that doesn't mean we give up on our values.
And, you know, the goal focused life is a life of misery.
You know, it's always about achieving the goal, achieve, achieve, achieve.
And then, if you do achieve the goal, a brief glimmer of some happy feelings.
And then there's the next goal and the next one.
Whereas the values-focused life we get to kind of appreciate, living our values from moment to moment, from day to day.
So we still set goals.
They're useful for motivation.
But it's about living those values.
And if we embrace this concept, we can have instant success.
If my aim is to live the value of being loving, I can do that right now.
And I don't have to wait until the day I've achieved a particular goal.
If I want to live the value of being playful, I can do that right now.
I don't have to wait until the day that I achieve whatever goal it is.
I've set around being playful and so forth.
So again, it's very liberating.
The kind of goal-focused life can be very constraining.
Well, Russ, this has been a great conversation.
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Well, so The Happiness Trap very importantly that folks check that you're getting the second edition.
I rewrote it recently.
This has got about 50% new material compared to the first edition.
So just check.
Second edition is available in all good bookstores and even in some of the bad bookstores.
And my website, thehappinesstrap.com, there's more information there.
Fantastic.
Well, Ross Harris, thanks for your time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
It was a pleasure for me too.
My guest today was Russ Harris.
He's the author of the book, The Happiness Trap.
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
You can find more information about his work at his website, thehappinesstrap.com.
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash happiness trap.
We find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
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This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AWIN Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
Before we go, here's another episode to queue up next.
I talked with etiquette expert Thomas Farley about all the tricky stuff that crops up during the holidays.
Flying hosting regifting, tipping and how to move through the season without accidentally annoying everyone around you.
It's practical, timely, and surprisingly fun.
Listen to it at aom.is slash holiday etiquette.
That's aom.is slash holiday etiquette.
