iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Functional contextualism is the philosophical foundation of ACT. It holds that the meaning and function of any event, including a thought, a feeling, or a behavior, can only be understood in its context. Nothing means the same thing in all situations.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I want to be careful here, because this can sound abstract until it lands experientially. But there really is a sense of self that isn't made of moods or memories or stories, a stable place to stand while the mind does what it does.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What produces more durable change is a different foundation: the habit is connected to something you genuinely care about, so you can take the next step even when the enthusiasm has gone quiet.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Your self-story is the ongoing narrative your mind constructs about who you are: your strengths, your failures, your limitations, your history, and what those things mean for your future. It's not entirely wrong; it contains real experiences. But it's also not entirely right.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

We've been taught, in a thousand ways, that tolerating discomfort is just something you endure until it passes. But willingness isn't tolerance; it's an active, chosen stance that changes how you show up.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Acceptance doesn't mean you agree with what's happening or that you're done trying to build a better life. It means you stop adding unnecessary suffering on top of the pain that's already there.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Acceptance does not mean approving of what is happening, agreeing that it should be happening, or giving up the intention to change it. It means acknowledging that it is happening right now, without adding unnecessary resistance on top of the reality.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I ask people to look at this gap not with judgment, but with curiosity. Where the deviation is largest, you usually find the most suffering, and also the clearest signal about where change would actually mean something. Where does your own life show the biggest gap right now?

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One of the things we know fairly clearly is that it's often not the original event that keeps the suffering going; it's the organized effort to not think about it, not feel it, not contact it in any way. The goal isn't to relive what happened. It's to reduce the hold it has on your present life.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

My co-authors and I just published something in Clinical Psychology Review, and it's open access. It's called "One Size Fits None: A Call for an Idionomic Revolution." Read it here, for free: authors.elsevier.com/c/1nkyr~0r21...

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Defusion is not about replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. It is not about convincing yourself that things will be fine, or that you're capable, or that the fear isn't valid. It is about changing your relationship with your thoughts, not their content.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

When we get too attached to a fixed story about who we are, we start spending enormous energy protecting it. We need others to agree with it, we feel threatened when they don't, and we stop being genuinely curious about our own experience.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

In my experience, the feeling of purposelessness almost always sits right next to something a person deeply cares about but has stopped moving toward. Purpose isn't something you construct from scratch. It's something you excavate.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Deictic frames are relational frames organized around a perspective, specifically around the distinctions between I and you, here and there, now and then. They're the building blocks of perspective-taking, the ability to mentally step into someone else's point of view.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

We spend a lot of time being frustrated with our minds for doing what minds do. A mind that anticipates threats is a mind that has kept human beings alive for a very long time. The issue isn't the worry; it's where you live in relation to it.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The biggest driver of burnout isn't the volume of the work. It's the effort to manage the difficult feelings that come with it. What helps more than anything else is developing the capacity to feel those things without needing to resolve them first, and staying connected to why you chose this work.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

The Dictator Within is what I call the voice of your mind when it takes on an authoritarian character, issuing commands, issuing verdicts, and demanding compliance. It tells you what you should feel, what you must avoid, what you are, and what you're allowed to do.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Here's something I've come to believe after decades of this work: the capacity to be hurt is not a vulnerability to fix. It's evidence of a self that has been present through everything, holding all of it without being extinguished by any of it.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

You don't start by changing your life. You start by taking one small step, in the direction of something that genuinely matters to you, in the presence of whatever you're feeling right now. Not after you feel ready. Not after the circumstances improve. Now, with what you have.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Derived relations are the verbal connections we draw automatically, without being directly taught them, once we've learned a set of related facts. If I tell you that A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, you automatically know that A is bigger than C, even though I never said so.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I know the word 'acceptance' makes people uncomfortable, especially clinicians trained to produce change. But acceptance was never about rolling over; it's about redirecting your energy toward something it can actually move.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

That reaction makes complete sense, and high standards aren't usually the problem in themselves. The issue is when the standard is functioning as a shield, protecting you from the experience of imperfection, failure, or criticism.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Augmenting refers to verbal processes that change how motivating or meaningful something is, by altering how it's related to other things we care about. In plain language, it's how framing something in a particular way changes how important it feels to us.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I want to be direct about this: the internal work, the defusion, the acceptance, the values clarification, none of it counts for much if it doesn't eventually show up in what you actually do. The therapy session is preparation. Life is the practice.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The work is to gradually build enough capacity to feel what you've been fleeing, so that shutting down stops being the only option available in those moments. That capacity builds slowly, but it does build.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Tracking is behavior governed by the actual relationship between your actions and their outcomes in the real world. In other words, you do something because you've learned from direct experience, or from reliable information, that it actually produces the result you're after.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I sometimes describe this in workshops by asking people: who was it who woke up this morning? Who is reading right now? There's something there that has been continuous your entire life, through every mood, every change, every difficult chapter.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The move that helps is simple to describe and genuinely uncomfortable to do: slow down enough to ask, of everything I'm doing, what is actually connected to what I care about? And what am I doing primarily to keep moving, to feel useful, to avoid stopping?

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

A verbal rule is any statement that specifies a relationship between a behavior and its outcome, things like "if you work hard, you'll succeed," or "if you're kind, people will like you," or "if you feel this way, something is wrong."

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I've never met a serious clinician who didn't, at some point, feel like they were in over their head. That feeling is almost universal in people who care about doing good work. The question isn't how to get rid of it; it's what you do while it's present.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

The action requires feeling something difficult, uncertainty, the risk of failure or judgment, and the mind produces very convincing reasons to delay. Those reasons feel true. The question worth asking is: are they worth the life you're giving up by following them?

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Transformation of functions means that when two things are verbally related, the properties of one can transfer to the other. Whatever one thing "does to you" psychologically can be carried along relational networks to other things, even ones that have no physical connection to the original.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

This one took me a while to really land, even as I was developing ACT. Pain is inevitable; that's not a pessimistic claim, it's just an accurate one. What we do with it is where the story branches.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

This October I'm joining Robyn Walser, Miranda Morris, and Diana Hill at Cleveland State University for four days of intensive, experiential ACT training. We go deep: into the science, the skills, and the kinds of clinical moments that test what you actually know. ibh.com/events

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

What actually changes things is learning to see the voice as something your mind produces rather than as a verdict on who you are. There's a difference between "I am not good enough" and "my mind is generating the thought that I'm not good enough." That second one is true; the first one is a story.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

A relational frame is a learned pattern of relating two or more things to each other in a specific way, same as, opposite of, better than, cause of, part of, and so on. Once you learn a relation in one direction, you automatically know it in the other direction too, without needing to be taught.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

One of the things I find most moving about this work is watching someone realize, sometimes for the first time, that they are more than the sum of what has happened to them. The content of a life and the person living it are not the same thing.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Living by your values in the area that matters most requires tolerating something uncomfortable, a specific fear, a risk of failure or rejection, a difficult conversation. The avoidance of that discomfort is what's keeping the gap intact.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Pain is the natural, unavoidable hurt that comes with being a human being in the world: grief when you lose someone, fear in genuinely uncertain situations, sadness when things don't go as hoped. Suffering is the additional layer of hurt created by your struggle against pain.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Just wrapped a great conversation with Paul Austin on The Psychedelic Podcast. We explored how early experiences with consciousness and psychedelics shaped my work on psychological flexibility. You can give it a listen here: thethirdwave.co/podcast/epis...

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I find 'rigidity' doesn't quite capture what's actually happening when people are psychologically inflexible. It's more like a slow shrinking, a life that gets quietly organized around one overriding goal: not feeling this.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

What distinguishes people who navigate difficulty well isn't that they feel less. It's that they've developed a different relationship with what they feel. They can be anxious and still have the important conversation. They can feel grief and still show up for the people they love.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

In ACT, mindfulness is the practice of being in full contact with the present moment, observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment, and without either clinging to pleasant experiences or pushing away unpleasant ones. It is a set of skills rather than a state.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I love this analogy because it reframes something people often experience as a liability: the capacity to bend without breaking. In structural engineering, that's not a compromise in the design. It is the design. The same is true for us.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

You don't wait for the energy to arrive before you move. You move first, even one small step, toward something that connects to what you care about, not because you feel like it, but because it matters. Not fixing the whole day. Just one thing that points in a direction that's yours.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Psychological rigidity is what happens when your behavioral options narrow because you're organized around avoiding certain inner experiences or protecting a fixed story about yourself.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

There's a lot of unnecessary shame people carry about the content of their own minds. Dark thoughts, critical voices, catastrophic predictions: these aren't signs of pathology. They're signs of a very capable problem-solving system running in a context it wasn't originally designed for.

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

When mindfulness is taught primarily as a way to calm down or clear the mind, people often find it backfires, because the attempt to achieve a peaceful state is itself a subtle form of fighting whatever is present. .

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Steven C. Hayes @stevenchayes.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Cognitive fusion is the process of getting so caught up in the content of your thoughts that you stop noticing they are thoughts at all. When you're fused, thoughts feel like reality rather than mental events; they feel like facts, predictions, and accurate descriptions of who you are.

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