This book is about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or ACT, pronounced like the word act), which is a form of psychotherapy aimed at helping people deal with anxiety, depression, and other psychological suffering. The techniques are simple and can be applied by oneself or with the help of a therapist.
My "Awakening"
Isn’t it interesting how we can intellectually understand a piece of wisdom but not practice it in our daily lives?
I’d like to tell you about a hard-won truth I recently internalized after many years.
I’ll sum it up in a sentence and then tell you more about my experience:
The willingness to face uncomfortable emotions is the path to inner peace…
How the Story Goes
For the past couple weeks, I haven’t been feeling like myself. I’ve been physically exhausted, emotionally burnt out, creatively stagnant, and psychologically depressed. I’ve been feeling like I’ve been battling an invisible monster.
On top of it all, I’ve also been feeling like a fraud: Even though I know many strategies to help me deal with these kinds of obstacles, I haven’t been using them. This has caused me to question my very credibility as a teacher, which has taken me down several dark rabbit holes.
Then, a couple days ago, I had an insight that stabilized my mood and gave me some hope and motivation. It was something I already knew but had forgotten…
6 Strategies for Dealing with Overthinking
In this article, I look at overthinking (and its cousin, anxiety) from an evolutionary perspective and offer some practical strategies that have helped me deal with them more effectively.
As far as I can tell, overthinking is largely a modern problem. In evolutionary time, it’s only been a blink of an eye since we’ve mastered our environment to the extent that we have. Although there are many people who still face survival-related problems on a daily basis, most of us live in relative comfort compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
One of the many unintended consequences of our massive ecological success as a species is that because it happened so quickly, our brains haven’t had a chance to adapt accordingly. As a result, we’re no longer certain what to worry about.
Our brains are still running the same “survival software” that helped keep us alive for millions of years. That software continues to look for problems, even when there are none…