 If we're engaging in experiential avoidance and we're avoiding discomfort because we're numbing out or we're striving or we're working too hard or we're bracing with our bodies or we're checked out, then we miss out on the opportunities for growth that come from our suffering. Often our suffering is a big arrow that points to what we care about most. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Hello Diana and welcome to the show. We're happy to have you here and I know we've had some false starts but today is going to be the day. So why don't you do us the pleasure and let our audience know who you are and how you have come to find act and what we'll be discussing today. Sure, I'm a clinical psychologist. I like to think of myself as a psychological flexibility guide that helps people live lives that are more aligned with their values and pursue meaningful goals. And I do that through my individual work with folks. I also do that as a mom in my life but also on psychologist off the clock podcast as well as an author to a book called Act Daily Journal that I co-wrote with Debbie Sorenson. So I really believe in integrative psychology and flourishing in our daily lives. Okay, so for our audience, there are many terms that we are going to have to parse out and define and discuss there. There was that one last bit and I wanna set that aside because I wanna first get into psychological flexibility because that's going to need to be defined first and why it's so important. But there was, oh, and you said integrative, what was the last thing? Psychology. So let's get into that as well but let's start with psychological flexibility. Okay, so as a psychologically flexible psychologist, I'm gonna use some props and my first prop to help folks for the visual learners is Rubik's Cube. And one way to think about psychological flexibility is that it's six sides of a Rubik's Cube. So there's six processes that are involved in psychological flexibility and the goal of psychological flexibility, when you are psychologically flexible, you are better able to stay open, present, and aligned with what you care about when challenges arise. Now the six processes that you teach in Act help you do that and we can unpack those but it's about process, not outcome. And just like a Rubik's Cube, if you solve a Rubik's Cube, that you put it on your counter and nobody wants to touch the thing because it's solved, right? It's more about how you are in your daily life, these processes that you engage in. Am I out of a line with my values? How do I use some of these processes to get more aligned in the important domains to you, whether that's work or parenting or health behaviors or relationships. And why is it process versus outcome? Because so many in our audience want the well-defined outcomes and many are striving to reach those outcomes but yet psychological flexibility is about the process and getting comfortable with the process. Well, outcomes aren't bad. You know, I'm a runner, I'm a achiever, I've achieved a lot of things in my life. There's nothing bad about reaching outcomes but where process comes up is that actually when you engage in the process and in particular when you engage in things that are intrinsically rewarding and by intrinsically rewarding it means while you're doing them, they create motivation, right? It helps you with sustaining behaviors in the long run and it leads to a more satisfying life. So for many of us, we have been trained in a culture and an environment where we're trying to hit goals. So whether that's good girls or gold stars or A pluses or when you get older it's about like financial goals. What you actually find is that there's some neuroscience that's showing that when you're striving for an outcome, dopamine increases along the way and then when you actually hit that outcome you see a decrease in dopamine and a lot of people feel dissatisfied. They feel like they've achieved this thing. It's like, wow, I got that partner or I got that job that I was striving for but already the goalpost has moved. When you attend to process you're more an intrinsic values-based reinforcements. You're more likely to stick with it even when those extrinsic rewards aren't there. So on the days, say you're working on health behavior goals on the days where the scale doesn't go the way you want the scale to go you still engage in your health behavior goal, right? Not because that extrinsic outcome hasn't showed up for you. And I think when it comes to parenting, when it comes to work, when it comes to making change in the world it's the process that matters, not the outcome. This intrigues me. And then so for psychological flexibility we understand its importance and why we need to be psychologically flexible. However, my question then is what in life or what is it in our DNA that makes us psychologically rigid? And I will also state that in our work and for as long as we've been doing this we have certainly met some people who are incredibly psychologically rigid and it's odd to me how they have gotten to this place. Now I'm not sure whether that is something in their genetics that predisposition them to become that rigid or is it life in general or is it a little bit of both? Sure, I mean, I think in most psychologists would say it's a little bit of both. Evolutionarily our minds were designed to avoid pain and seek out pleasure and that works well when you're talking about things outside of ourselves but it doesn't work so well when you're talking about our inner experiences. So for example, one of the places that I get really psychologically inflexible is when I'm fighting with my partner. When I'm fighting with my partner it becomes about my point of view, how I'm right and I stop hearing him and I also block myself from feeling the feelings maybe underneath the anger is really sadness or hurt or anxiety, right? And so what happens is those feelings show up difficult stuff shows up. Say you're in a conflict with someone and how it becomes psychologically rigid bridges in a few ways and actually links to these processes. So one of the sides of psychological flexibility the opposite of psychological flexibilities inflexibility is about acceptance. When you're in a fight with somebody how are you practicing non-acceptance and maybe you're practicing non-acceptance by bracing with your body maybe you're practicing non-acceptance by not listening or maybe you're trying to prove a point so that you don't have to feel that inner discrepancy of that, gosh, I may not be fully right here, right? So that can lead to rigidity. Another area that we become really rigid in is our thoughts when we believe our thoughts to be true and we take our thoughts as the truth. And so when you are believing your mind we're all just sort of like these walking, chattering heads, right? When we believe our minds to be true it can actually lead us to rule following should, believing in shoulds, believing in self judgments and judgments of others those are all psychologically rigid ways of being. Another way that we can be psychologically rigid is believing self stories. So for many of us we develop stories about ourselves when we are children maybe someone told you along the way or you believe that you're not good at math or you believe that you're not a runner or you believe that relationships always fail for you and you take it on and you use that as the lens through which you operate in the world. And that leads to self fulfilling prophecy and blocking out, dis confirming evidence. So you can go around, we can go around the six core processes of psychological flexibility but the opposite of those processes is inflexibility and there's lots of different ways in which we just humans block the potential for adaptation and growth. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I think what you're sharing is so relatable to many of us we've been in those situations of conflict where we're shutting down, we're not hearing, we're becoming rigid and we don't wanna be that. And when Johnny and I talk act principles on the show and we've had a lot of guests talk about it as well because we're such huge fans of acceptance treatment therapy we talk about these intrinsic values and the question that always comes up from our audience is how do we find and define those for ourselves? And I think it's overwhelming for many of us to think about those values because we tend to be outcome focused, right? If I get the house, I'll be happy. If I get the job, I'll be happy and we lose sight of our values or no one frankly taught us how to find those values. So what advice do you have for our audience members who are struggling to find those intrinsic values in their own life and define them? Well, I really believe that it's a tuning in process. So I see values as personal and chosen and much like if you were tuning a guitar you play the guitar and you listen in and a musician was interesting about musicians and you probably know this, Johnny is that we give musicians time to tune up before they play with if the musician's gonna play we're like take your time it's gonna be better if you tune up whatever time you need, right? So if you think about the strings of the guitar those can be represent the domains of your life, right? And when you're a guitarist I learned this from my son, he plays guitar you play it all and then you go string by string and you tune, so the domains of your life may be your health, your relationships, your work your spirituality, your community, right? Your parenting, your friendships, right? You play and then you go string by string and you listen to hear if it's out of tune and only you know, some people will give you some feedback like that was a little out of tune there sometimes I get that from my kids, right? But only you really know what is in tune for you and what's interesting is oftentimes we know that we're out of tune with our values but all these other processes get in the way non-acceptance beliefs about ourself thoughts and I know I'll give a personal example for me of times when I've been out of tune and actually one of the ways that I came to act was by being out of tune. So I found my way to a PhD program in graduate school I was studying Eden Disorders with one of the leaders in the field of Eden Disorders and when I had a history of anorexia and an Eden Disorder and when I went into the field I was really, really clear that my commitment to my recovery was the number one thing for me. If I'm gonna go work with people in this area and research this, I'm gonna commit to that. And in my first year of graduate school, I got out of tune. The pressure, the competition, the program that really didn't integrate a lot of sort of more I guess would say feminist sort of the art, the spirituality of recovery. And I actually left my program. I was willing to say I'm going to leave this thing that I've worked so hard for because I'm so committed to my values around taking care of my recovery. And I went to a yoga ashram and I studied yoga and I was so clear, okay, I'm gonna be a yoga instructor and actually in that ashram I got really clear about wait a minute, no, I can go back and I can integrate these principles of acceptance, these principles of tuning in into this hardcore research division, one research university. And I ended up researching, I found a psychiatrist at Stanford at the time, Deborah Safer, she was really the only one that was working with Eden Disorders and mindfulness-based approaches. I sought her out and we did a study together. And all of a sudden here I am back in tune because there's also a part of me that really believes in the science. And with ACT, that's really the thing that I really appreciate about this methodology and this really modern approach to psychology is that there's an integration here. And when you ask about integration and an integrative psychologist, what does that mean, Johnny? I believe that means both balancing the science of psychology with the wisdom. Like there's deep wisdom in Jungian psychology, there's deep wisdom in Eastern and Buddhist psychology, and there's deep wisdom in embodiment and listening into our bodies that really there's a balance of all of that. So tuning in is really, I think, the first part of values. I think the second part of it is that sometimes what points us to our values is what's most painful to us. And if we're engaging in experiential avoidance and we're avoiding discomfort because we're numbing out or we're striving or we're working too hard or we're bracing with our bodies or we're checked out, then we miss out on the opportunities for growth that come from our suffering. Often our suffering is a big arrow that points to what we care about most. Is this idea of integrative psychology the same as the Jungian idea of integration or is this a play on it or is it slightly different? For me, when I say integrative psychology, I'm saying I bring in concepts from neuroscience, I bring in concepts from Eastern and contemplative practice, I bring in concepts from behavioral psychology. So that's more nutritional psychology is also another deep interest of mine of what we eat and how we move impacts our behavior and our mental health. So that's what I mean by integrative psychology that there's many different disciplines that we can learn from and for a long time and I think in the field and research, people are very much in silos. So it's like you study your one little, say you study the foot, you just look at the foot and you don't think about how the foot is linked to the posture of the spine or how even just how we eat influences our mental health and our microbiome, right? So all of these more integrative approaches to living well and wellness. I think that's very important where in today's world it seems like everyone can zero in on a certain part or a certain discipline or a certain idea. It begins to be that the parable or the meme of the elephant and each person is on a different place than the elephant. And so one person's grabbing the trunk, he's like, I think it's a snake and somebody's grabbing his foot. He's like, I think it's a tree but if you zoom out for all of them, right? The system is going to be the elephant rather than the parts. Yes, but you also need to know the difference between a snake and snake oil. And so there has to be some degree of organization and for me, that's evidence-based approaches but flexible ones. Now you bring up a very interesting point around striving and it's linked to experiential avoidance. Many of us think striving is the way is exactly what we need or should be doing to get ahead. And again, going back to those outcomes that we all have in our lives that we care so much about, how does striving lead to experiential avoidance and what are the downsides of striving that many in our audience may be facing and not realizing? Yeah, so maybe I'll define experiential avoidance first because there's lots of terms and act that we get really termy. And experiential avoidance is when you are engaging in a behavior that is meant to avoid some inner experience that you're having and that also moves you away from your values. So for me, striving as experiential avoidance is when I don't feel good enough, then maybe I do more so that I don't have to feel that feeling of not good enough, right? When I am comparing myself to another person and saying, ooh, I don't measure up or maybe we're experientially avoiding just the discomfort of our lives. Like my relationships are kind of not doing so well or my relationship with my mom isn't so great. So therefore I'm gonna go strive and do in this other area so that I can almost not have to experience the discomfort of living, which is just part of being human, the first noble truth is life is uncomfortable. It's what we do with that discomfort that matters. And so for me, just because I've worked with eating disorders for a long time and now work with executives, I see that the dark sides of striving, I see that, for me with anorexia that I was like an Olympian of striving. I did everything that a young woman was supposed to do to be successful in the world to the nth degree and you end up with anorexia, right? It could kill you. It's actually the most lethal of the mental health disorders that you can have. The flip side of that is what was interesting is this summer I was prepping for an interview on psychologist off the clock with the Radical Healing Collective, who are a group of individuals that work on racial trauma and healing racial trauma. And in prepping for that, I started reading through the APA guidelines on race and ethnicity. And so for a long time I've had this association with striving is like bad. I need to not strive. I need to stop striving. I need to like tame my inner striver, right? Cause it makes me sick. And I read through those guidelines and every single one of them started with the words psychologist strive. Psychologist strive to blah, blah, blah, blah. And I started realizing that there's other ways that we can strive and actually what we can engage in is values based striving. That you can take all that energy that actually leads you in samsara, the modern day samsara of just being on the cycle of achievement and you can use it and pivot it to a cycle that is about what you care about and what can make a difference in the world. And you can write a book and you can do all sorts of great things, but now you're striving for something that's bigger than you, that's bigger than the ego. And when you engage in that, then all of a sudden you get those intrinsic rewards and you're not only feeding yourself in a positive way, but you're feeding the world around you because you're striving towards really being like having your authentic offerings and out in the world.