Brandon Gimbel (00:00)

In my learning about mindfulness meditation, I learned about the importance of meditation itself, the exercise of focusing on an anchor, typically one's breath, to pay attention to what one was doing, with intention. In this case, paying attention to your breath, and then noticing the experience of our brain throwing these thoughts at us, relentlessly. How does that fit into ACT?

Tory Krone (00:13)

It's a big part of it. The anchor for your attention in ACT is the same thing. It could be anything that you want to attend to in the moment that supports your values, but you you don't have to constantly be thinking about the values. It can also just be "I want to be present in this moment. And so when a thought or a feeling tries to pull me away, I'm going to come back" and that's my commitment over and over. And the goal is not to eliminate any of this distress. We're not trying to get rid of painful thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, because we can't. In ACT, we call those internal distractions, internal experiences, thoughts, memories, feelings, and sensations. And they're always going to try and pull us away, but we have the choice to come back over and over. And that's really the only choice we have. We don't have the choice to just eliminate a feeling.