The Third Week But The First 'Act' - Introducing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

If this is your first time here, you've caught us part way through a six week journey of a therapist (that's me) self-administering therapeutic exercises to explore my own recent mental health decline — because therapists are not exempt from stressful experiences. You can start here and get to know a bit more about ACT, which is the third therapy style used and third week of the journey, or you can go to the first instalment at week zero to get the full picture.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced as one word: “act”) emerged in the late 1980s, developed by psychologist Steven C. Hayes and colleagues. It grew out of behavioural psychology, but with a crucial shift away from trying to control or eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings.

Rather than asking “How do I stop feeling this?”, ACT asks “How can I live well, even when this is present?”

ACT is a therapy that helps people to stop fighting their internal experiences and reduce the power of unhelpful thoughts. It's intended to help people to reconnect with what actually matters to them and take meaningful action with discomfort present.

This therapy works to increase psychological flexibility, which is the ability to notice thoughts and feelings without being dominated by them, staying connected to values and choosing actions that align with the kind of person you want to be.

The intention isn't to make you feel better in the first instance. It helps you live better, and often feeling better follows. It is not about eliminating painful thoughts, fixing difficult emotions, replacing negative thinking with positive thinking or finding certainty.

It recognises a few simple truths:

1. Pain is inevitable.
2. Struggle with pain is optional.
3. Avoidance of pain often creates more suffering.

What Is It Good For?

ACT helps people stop organising their lives around avoiding feelings associated with anxiety, guilt, rejection, failure or uncertainty, and instead start organising their lives around meaning, integrity, direction and their chosen identity.

There has been strong evidence that this is a great therapy for supporting people with:

• Chronic stress and burnout

• Anxiety and rumination

• Low mood and depression

• Anger and irritability

• Identity confusion or 'stuck' feelings

• Long-term dissatisfaction where change feels complicated

ACT is incredibly versatile because it doesn’t target a specific symptom, it targets avoidance patterns, which means it can be great for situations like:

🔹Relationship Dilemmas

• Ending or staying in relationships

• Navigating guilt

• Fear of hurting others

• Boundary setting

• Avoiding difficult conversations

🔹 Career & Life Direction

• Feeling stuck

• Fear of change

• Imposter syndrome

• Burnout

• Major life transitions

• Avoiding decisions due to uncertainty

🔹 Anxiety & Overthinking

• Social anxiety

• Health anxiety

• Rumination

• Panic

• Fear of future outcomes

🔹 Depression & Low Motivation

• Loss of meaning

• Waiting to “feel better” before acting

• Withdrawal from life

🔹 Perfectionism & Self-Criticism

• Fear of mistakes

• Overworking

• People-pleasing

• Identity tied to achievement

🔹 Grief & Loss

• Learning to live alongside sadness

• Accepting permanent change

🔹 Chronic Illness & Pain

• Living meaningfully despite limitations

• Reducing suffering from resistance

🔹 Identity & Authenticity

• Coming out

• Changing roles

• Rebuilding after transitions

• Leaving communities that no longer align

It’s especially helpful when insight alone hasn’t led to change, control strategies are exhausted and pressure, avoidance, or over-effort are part of the problem.

How Does It Work in Practice?

ACT works through six interconnected processes:

1. Defusion – Stepping back from thoughts (Starting sentences with “I am having the thought that…”)

2. Acceptance – Allowing feelings rather than fighting them

3. Contact with the present moment – Grounding in now

4. Self-as-context – Noticing that you are not your thoughts

5. Values clarification – Identifying what matters

6. Committed action – Taking value-aligned steps

Most therapies ask “How do we reduce this feeling?”,  ACT asks “If this feeling stayed, how would you want to behave anyway?”

It’s a radical shift.

You don’t wait for courage, you act while afraid. You don’t wait for guilt to disappear, you act while guilty. You don’t wait for clarity to feel 100%, you act with willingness.

Why ACT Is The Right Week-Three Therapy For My Journey

Let’s look at the process so far:

• Week 1 (CFT) helped soften self-attack and threat

• Week 2 (NLP) revealed the internal rules driving urgency, irritation, and over-effort

I now understand why the pressure exists.
I’ve identified the rules I've been living by.
I’ve named the energy I'm actually moving toward.

What ACT does next is help me to live from that understanding, without needing certainty, a final decision, a perfect plan or the absence of discomfort. It's the ideal therapy to place here because it doesn’t require that I resolve every existential question immediately. It doesn’t ask me to “feel warm inside” all the time, but it helps me to act in small, values-aligned ways even when the system is uneasy.

In the past week, this has helped me to stop organising my life around the removal of discomfort, and start organising it around meaning. I have started to recognise that the decision I needed to make had nothing to do with logic, but an unwillingness to accept the outcomes without certainty. I worried that a decision finalised would cause me to feel guilty, but guilt is not proof of wrongdoing and fear is not always a stop sign. 

I did not avoid pain, but I chose which pain aligned with my values, and perhaps most importantly, I didn't make a choice between happiness vs suffering, the choice was between integrity and avoidance.

ACT helps you stop organising your life around avoiding discomfort and start organising it around who you want to be. So this week, I did just that. I didn’t feel relief or triumph. I felt sadness — but stayed aligned to my values anyway.

I was able to use this process to act in service of my values while allowing grief to travel with me. Because neither outcome was a 'happy' option, otherwise the decision would never have been difficult in the first place.

How Can You Use This Too?

As with the previous weeks, where I created an AI virtual therapist, fully trained in each specific therapeutic technique, there is now an ACT version of Zenny, the Happy Citta Virtual Therapist.

The difference between the three versions of the tool are:

Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) → Soothes the threat system

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) → Reveals hidden rules you've been living by

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) → Moves you toward action despite discomfort

The ACT agent is steady and tolerates emotional intensity more than the others. It will not rush decisions, give advice, push action, solve emotions or moralise. It purely increases psychological flexibility so that you can recognise who you want to be and how to make your way in your situations according to that ideal future version of yourself.

You can sign up to follow along on this journey, and access all future blogs and free Happy Citta Tools, here: