"Psychological Flexibility" sounds amazing. Shouldn't we all want that? After all, psychological flexibility has been significantly positively associated with wellness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and negatively associated with anxiety, depression, and COVID-29-related distress and worry.
(But what
is it, anyway?!)
Psychological Flexibility is about being fully in touch with the present moment and, based on the situation, either continuing or changing your behavior to live in better alignment with your values.
Let's break that down a bit:
Being fully in touch with the present moment: We spend a good chunk of our lives not fully present. And there are times when it makes sense - we don't necessarily need to be fully present for every moment of a long drive. As long as we're present enough to drive safely, we don't need to observe the exact quality of red in the tail light of the driver in front of you.
But when we spend most of our lives zoned out on our phones, or rushing from one activity to the next (probably partly so we don't have to sit down and just
be), we aren't truly present.
Better alignment with your values: We all have values, although perhaps some of us haven't fully articulated them. We might value raising an independent child, but then step in every time they struggle. We might value emotional closeness but struggle to actually do it because our parents didn't model it for us. When we articulate our values, we define what we're working toward.
Based on the situation, either continuing or changing your behavior: One of my favorite parts of ACT is the Choice Point: the point at which something doesn't feel right to you. At this point you get to decide: Am I going to keep doing the same thing I've always done? Or am I going to do something that brings me into better alignment with my values?
Want to know more? Dr. Diana Hill, co-author with Dr. Debbie Sorensen, joins me on this episode to discuss their new book
ACT Daily Journal: Get Unstuck and Live Fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (this is an affiliate link, so I will earn a small commission through your purchase which does not affect the price you pay). The book walks readers through a series of exercises to help them become more psychologically flexible, through the practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). The concepts in ACT are ones that I've found to be enormously useful both personally and in working with clients, so I'm excited to tell you about them here!
Dr. Diana Hill's Book:
Jump to highlights:
- (01:26) What is ACT or acceptance and Commitment Therapy
- (02:07) What is this thing psychological flexibility?
- (03:48) What are the components of psychological flexibility?
- (08:07) Cognitive diffusion
- (11:38) The idea that we could believe that our thoughts are not true is mind boggling to a lot of people
- (16:36) Values and parenting in particular is such a good one to discuss
- (18:20) Values are something that are deep within you, that you can pull upon, when you've got nothing left
- (19:10:) The idea of the choice point
- (23:36) Perspective taking is probably one of the most important skills we can do for ourselves
- (27:01) How do we live out committed action
- (33:55) Our children are naturally beginner's mind
- (35:18:) One of the things that actually sets humans apart from robots, is our ability to think outside the box
- (39:58) We can start to teach our children, that it's not about the answer. That there's many ways to solve problems
- (41:51) The IKEA effect
- (45:33) Another thing that's really important with embodiment is modeling
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Jen Lumanlan 00:03
Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head on over to your YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us
Jen Lumanlan 00:48
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a guest here today to talk with us about a tool that I actually discovered through her show and I found it to be incredibly helpful both personally and professionally. So our guest is Dr. Diana Hill, and she's co host with three of her colleagues of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, and one of her co hosts is Dr. Yael Schonbrun, who we had on the show to discuss work life balance. And then Dr. Hill actually hosted me on Psychologists Off the Clock and we talked about homeschooling and social justice and parenting and stuff like that. And now she's here with us today to discuss one of her favorite topics, which is acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is shortened to act. So Dr. Hill has just published a book with her colleague and Psychologists Off the Clock at co-host Debbie Sorensen, called Acts Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which isn't geared specifically toward parents, but there's so much in it that's going to help parents. So welcome Dr. Hill. It's great to have you here.
Diana Hill 01:45
Thank you, Jen, it's so good to be here with you and my interview with you is one of my favorites. So it's time to have the table's turned here and talk about ACT and and specifically around parenting because it turns out if you're more psychologically flexible as a person, it rubs off on to your parenting, and then that rubs off on to your kids too. So I love to talk more about it.
Jen Lumanlan 02:05
Yeah, awesome. So maybe we can start there with Firstly, what is this thing psychological flexibility? And why does it matter? Why does it make a difference? How does it make a difference in our lives?
Diana Hill 02:14
Well, a psychological flexibility is a construct that's been researched for decades now. And some of the research is actually starting to get into the general public. And what it is, is, it's your ability to stay present, open up to your full life experience, not get hooked by your thoughts, and orient your actions towards your values towards what really matters to you, even when life gets difficult. So you can see how even just that term could be helpful as a parent, right? And
Jen Lumanlan 02:43
keep going. I'm not saying it.
Diana Hill 02:47
And what the research has shown is that there's really these Six Core Processes, ways in which you engage with the world that help you become more psychologically flexible. And when you're psychologically flexible. Not only do you have less chances of developing things like anxiety and depression, but specifically with parenting, some of the meta analyses that are showing up with parenting is that psychologically flexible parents engage in more positive parenting practices, they're less harsh, as well as not super overly permissive, you see less spillover effects of stress onto kids. So they did some studies looking at psychological flexibility during COVID with parents and parents that were more psychologically flexible during COVID. Not only did they have less conflict in their relationship with their partners, there was less impact of the stress of COVID on their kids. This set of processes is turning out to be in the research one of the key factors in human flourishing and functioning in lots of different domains of our lives.
Jen Lumanlan 03:47
Okay, I'm convinced. So what are the components of psychological flexibility?
Diana Hill 03:52
Well, there's six of them and you can kind of think of them Steven Hayes, who's one of the cofounders of ACT or Acceptance a Commitment Therapy talks about like sides of a box. So six sides of the box, that together build your psychological flexibility. And some of them are fairly familiar to folks we've all heard about being present. That's one of them, being able to stay present in the moment sort of mindfulness, but it's a little different in ACT being present has more to do with being present where it matters, because you can't be mindful all of the time. But in that moment, when your kid is showing, like pulling out stuff from the backpack, and they're showing you a piece of artwork and you're on your phone, this is a time to be present because they're bidding for attention. They're bidding for connection, right? So being present when it matters to you as a parent. A second process is about acceptance. And in Act, acceptance isn't sometimes that can be a term that people don't like. It's like I don't want to accept that.
Jen Lumanlan 04:52
I don't want to just roll over and let things happen.
Diana Hill 04:55
Yeah, so acceptance is not about being passive, actually acceptance is not about approval or liking something, but it's really allowing it to be, right. So for me with my youngest child, he had colic. And for the first four months of his life, he screamed, non stop. And so I did all sorts of stuff to try and make him to stop crying I, I bounced, and I walked in, I played music, and I sing. And then I remember one day, when I was so exhausted, and burned out, and just really tired of getting him to stop crying, I decided I was going to stop trying to get him to stop crying. And instead, I was going to accept that this is how he is expressing himself. He's working it out, neurologically, whatever was going on. And what I chose to do is to love him, and bond with him while he was crying, instead of trying to get him to stop. So that's an example of acceptance and Act, which is really opening up and allowing for our full inner experience.
Jen Lumanlan 05:53
Yeah. And just a pause on that for a second, how did your experience shift after that happened? Because I think that's the profound part, right? What was different for you, after you decided that you were just going to accept that?
Diana Hill 06:04
Well, I think for many of us, as parents, we've all had that experience of wanting to fix our kids. And when we're engaging and fixing, there's actually something in motivational interviewing called the fixing reflex, which is our tendency to fix things that we don't like, what it does is it actually can derail us from engaging the very values that we care about. So for me, when I was trying to get him to stop crying, I was walking around in circles of my dinner of my dinner table, and my other child was watching, like, His head was circling back and I was not engaged with him, because I was so focused on getting my child to stop crying, right. I'm not saying that we shouldn't sued or, you know, care for our crying babies. But when it becomes that you are trying to fix something, some kind of internal experience inside of yourself as a parent, and you're trying to make it go away, at the cost of you engaging in the world parenting in the way that you want to be, then it's called something called experiential avoidance, which is actually the opposite of acceptance. So for me, it was liberating my child did not he didn't cry less by me doing that I just related to the whole experience lesson, it freed me up a little bit to be there with him be present with him, which is ultimately, what he probably really needed most from me.
Jen Lumanlan 07:21
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Okay, so what are some of the other components of it?
Diana Hill 07:26
Okay, so there's six and you can see why Debbie, and I wrote a book on this? I'll break it down. And in the act, daily journal, we take each one of these processes, and we really do break them down into little tiny nuggets that you try out in your life day by day. So the two that we've mentioned, are more acceptance based processes. And there's another one that's really kind of fun, because it's unique to act or to these new modern approaches to psychology, so act as sort of research based approach to psychology that has taken a different approach to thoughts than what a lot of people maybe even know about, like cognitive behavioral therapy. And in Act, we do something called cognitive diffusion. And I could do a little, it's actually I think, this is best demonstrated not necessarily described, so I'm going to have you imagine or maybe if you wouldn't mind being fully my, my guinea pig. A thought that you struggle with as a parent. It could be a self critical thought, it could be some, so some of the ones that you know, are common are like, I'm not doing enough, or, you know, even as I'm talking people are listening to these psychological flexibility skills. And they're like, Oh, that's I'm not flexible. I'm not good enough.
Jen Lumanlan 08:47
Alright, let's go with, there isn't enough of me to go around that my husband and my daughter will often talk over each other at the same time asking me for things, and I feel pulled in different directions.
Diana Hill 09:00
Okay, so one of those is I feel pulled in different directions, which I would say isn't a thought that's just an experience, like that. We've all had that feeling of like, Oh, I feel pulled, I want to be in many places at once and that probably points, we'll talk a little bit more about values that probably points to some of your values, things that you care about. But there isn't enough of me to be around. What I hear in there is that that could be a sticky thought it could get in the way of you being able to be present when when your husband and child are talking over you. So I want you to imagine that thought were written across your hand, Jen, there isn't enough of me to go around. And imagine you're at the dinner table with your partner and your child. And that thought were just like really close up to your face. So imagine it's waiting on your hand and put your hand right up to your face like the thought.
Jen Lumanlan 09:48
Covering my eyes?
Diana Hill 09:49
Aha, covering your eyes. Okay. Now, if that thought were written across your hand and your hand was in the spot, how well could you see the thought for what it is? So close up to your eyes.
Jen Lumanlan 10:02
WelI, I mean, it's blocking my view, although it's blurry.
Diana Hill 10:05
It's blurry. Yeah. And if it's really close up, actually, the thought itself is blurry, you wouldn't necessarily be able to read it and how well would you be able to see your partner and your child?
Jen Lumanlan 10:17
Hmm, very little.
Diana Hill 10:18
Very little. This is what we call cognitive fusion. We're so stuck on our thoughts. We can't even see what's around us. Now, what I want you to do is slowly move your hand away from your face. Imagining that that thought is still written on your hand? And can you look down and and read the thought if it were written on your hand? Okay. And then could you look around the dinner table, engage with your partner? Have a conversation with your child? Right? Okay. And notice that I didn't cut off your hand, I didn't ask you to write a new thought on your hand.
Jen Lumanlan 10:53
Yeah, you didn't change anything about at all?
Diana Hill 10:57
Yeah, I didn't tie your hand around your back. And in fact, if I tied your hand around your back, you'd have one less hand at the dinner table to work with. Right, what we did is we did something called cognitive diffusion, which is getting a little bit of space from your thoughts. And as parents, as humans, we all have thoughts all the time running through our heads. What can get in the way of us being effective parents sometimes is when we believe those thoughts to be true. And those thoughts dictate our behavior, or they cloud us so much that we can't see what's really happening in the present.
Jen Lumanlan 11:32
Yeah, I just want to pause there on what you said, we believe our thoughts to be true. And I talked about this concept with a lot of parents over the years. And the idea that we could believe that our thoughts are not true is mind boggling to a lot of people. And I've talked to some people who have said, You know, I was grew up in a religious commune. And I was trained to believe that my thoughts were a direct channel from God, and so they must be true, they are true. So there's sort of that perspective coming through sometimes. But even if you don't have that perspective, this idea that I think things and they might not be true is absolutely mind blowing to a lot of people. What do we do with our thoughts? If they are potentially not all true? Like, how could the thing we're thinking not be true?
Diana Hill 12:16
Well, that's just that the human mind does is it produces all sorts of thoughts. And actually, when you look at some of the psychological disorders out there. Some of them have more to do with trying to stop yourself from thinking or change your thoughts than they do with just allowing the thoughts to come and go. So you know, a really good example, Insomnia. Right?. One of the things about insomnia that's really interesting is that it's this paradoxical thing that the more you try and make yourself fall asleep, the less likely you're going to sleep, right. And when you have thoughts, as you're going to bed, oftentimes, I call it the, you know, the middle of the night, sort of crisis moment where everything seems so intense and real and true. And we have to figure this out now. And it's so important that I solved this problem at 2am, which I have no way of solving, right. And then the next morning, we wake up, and we're like, oh, yeah, that wasn't, it's not as big a deal. Right? So if your thoughts were true, then you would have the same feeling at 2am, as you do at two o'clock in the afternoon.
Jen Lumanlan 13:18
It still be a big deal. Right?
Diana Hill 13:19
It would still be a big deal. Right? So the nature of our thoughts. And what's interesting about the human mind, and sort of what neuroscience is showing is that evolutionarily, our...
