The Little ACT Workbook by Dr Michael Sinclair & Dr Matthew Beadman

Author:Dr Michael Sinclair & Dr Matthew Beadman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crimson Publishing
Published: 2016-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

Hitting the feel-good button

Before we take a look at how we can loosen up, let’s first recap and remind ourselves of the struggles that we tend to get ourselves into and why it can be helpful to develop an alternative way of responding.

As we discussed in Chapter 2, we often assume that if we experience distressing thoughts, emotions and sensations, we need to change those thoughts and feelings if life is going to get better. We explored how this ‘fix it’ approach to psychological ‘problems’ reflects most people’s understanding of what healthcare should aim to achieve, and often leads us to try to reduce, control or get rid of the unwanted thoughts and feelings we experience.

Most of us spend a lot of our time ‘hitting the feel-good button’ in life and then trying our best to keep it firmly pressed down. In Chapter 2, we asked you to consider the ways you have tried to do this. We strongly encourage you to return to your answers to Exercise 2.2 at this point (page 34), where we asked you to consider anything you have ever tried to do to avoid or get rid of unpleasant emotions, thoughts and physical sensations. This is a fundamental point in understanding how we can all become stuck in life, so, before reading on, please do take a moment or two to remind yourself of your experience of using these strategies and the consequences of doing so.

As you may have noticed from your own experience, these ‘fix it’ strategies can sometimes have costs. Avoiding certain anxiety–provoking people or situations can lead to life becoming narrower. Distraction can be difficult and reduces our ability to focus on what we’re doing. Doing things to feel better can sometimes bring unwanted consequences, with drug or alcohol misuse being a sad example of this. So, although these control strategies can sometimes reduce unwanted emotions in the short term, they can often increase suffering in the longer term. As we saw with the ‘don’t think about chocolate’ exercise in Chapter 2, when we try not to think about a worry this often evokes the worry. When we don’t want to feel anxious, not feeling anxious in itself becomes something to feel anxious about. If we try to avoid feeling depressed by staying in bed all day we can end up feeling even more depressed and hopeless by the evening.

Often, this understandable but problematic tendency to avoid negative thoughts and emotions can leave people with more of the thoughts and emotions they were initially struggling with, AND a lot of extra suffering, too. As we suggested in Chapter 2, perhaps it’s the case that if you’re not willing to have these difficult thoughts and feelings, then you’ve probably already got them. Let’s consider this in more detail by returning to John, who we first met in Chapter 3.

John had been out of work for a couple of months and was beginning to worry about ever finding another job. Quite understandably, every time he attended a job interview he became anxious.

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