Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT for short, is a therapy that focuses on helping people live a life consistent with what matters most to them and removing any barriers that get in the way of doing that. But wait…isn’t that essentially what all therapy is trying to do? In some ways, yes, but in others ACT takes a unique perspective on what makes for a psychologically healthy person.

Rather than focus on reducing the symptoms (mental or physical) that people experience, ACT is designed to help you take actions that instead move your life towards what’s most important, even if that move feels a bit uncomfortable in the process. The idea here is that sometimes prioritizing “feeling better” means that you’ll actually not be all that fulfilled.

A few analogies that I find helpful. Imagine that you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy exercise but has diabetes and high cholesterol. Staying sedentary will feel better in the moment, but if it’s very important for you to live a long enough life for you to travel around the globe, feeling better in the moment may get you away from what’s most important to you. Second example: imagine that you’re a parent, and your child is in elementary school band. Those kiddos are trying very hard, but the experience of listening is certainly not Carnegie Hall. Moreover, bringing them to practice means that you’re missing out on small windows to relax after a long day at work. Encouraging them to spend their time elsewhere would certainly be less challenging in the short term. But seeing their smiling face at their recital and being the sort of parent who encourages their interests means so much to you.

In these situations, doing the more difficult thing in the moment would be consistent with your values, even if it felt worse immediately to do it. Moreover, you don’t want to be doing those “harder” things and thinking exclusively about how terrible of an experience that is – it’s going to make the hard thing even harder and make it more challenging to feel fulfilled.

To that end, ACT helps you change your relationship to your experiences. It can help make your experience of difficult thoughts less painful, help you accept and manage difficult emotions, and assist you to be present and in the here-and-now so you can both appreciate, and better grapple with, the moment. ACT can be applied to many mood and anxiety related issues and can help folks get to a better place with chronic stress coming from medical issues.