Top 40 Steven C. Hayes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life.”

— Steven C. Hayes

2. “If you aren’t willing to have it, you will.”

— Steven C. Hayes

3. “Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It’s about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.”

— Steven C. Hayes

4. “Almost all people suffer some form of intense inner pain at some times in their lives. The suffering might be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts and it results from the battles we wage against our thoughts as we futilely try to get rid of our historie.”

— Steven C. Hayes

5. “What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought.”

— Steven C. Hayes

6. “Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.”

— Steven C. Hayes

7. “Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.”

— Steven C. Hayes

8. “Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.”

— Steven C. Hayes

9. “There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning ‘by chance’ or ‘an occurrence’, which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it – especially to avoid any sense of ‘unhappiness’. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.”

— Steven C. Hayes

10. “The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.”

— Steven C. Hayes

11. “The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.”

— Steven C. Hayes

12. “You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking “How effectual are they?”

— Steven C. Hayes

13. “We can have a large impact on the prevention and amelioration of abuse, drug problems, violence, mental health problems, and dysfunction in families.”

— Steven C. Hayes

14. “You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?”

— Steven C. Hayes

15. “The truth about mental health is that the causes of all of the mental conditions you hear about are unknown, and the idea that “hidden diseases” lurk behind human suffering is an out-and-out failure.”

— Steven C. Hayes

16. “The process of living is like taking a very long road trip. The destination may be important, but the journey experienced day to day and week to week is what is invaluable.”

— Steven C. Hayes

17. “Why willingness? Because I absolutely know how my pain works when I am unwilling, and I’m sick and tired of it. It’s time to change my whole agenda, not just the moves I make inside a control and avoidance agenda.”

— Steven C. Hayes

18. “If we are afraid of being rejected by others, we see signs of imminent rejection everywhere. We know that buying into that fear will not liberate us, but the possibility of rejection is so fear-inducing that it seems like a violation of basic logic not to focus on it.”

— Steven C. Hayes

19. “The goal is not to “fix” people but rather to empower them. What the psychological flexibility model provides is a characterization of key features that can be changed, but it does not specify how to link history to those features, nor precisely how to intervene in a step-by-step fashion.”

— Steven C. Hayes

20. “Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.”

— Steven C. Hayes

21. “Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.”

— Steven C. Hayes

22. “We are in this stew together. We are caught in the same traps. With a small twist of fate, I could be sitting across from you, and you could be sitting across from me – both of us in opposite roles. Your problems are a special opportunity for you to learn and for me to learn. We are not cut from different cloths, but rather from the same cloth.”

— Steven C. Hayes

23. “The problem is that we are not trained to discriminate when the mind is useful and when it is not, and we have not developed the skills to shift out of a fused problem-solving mode of mind into a descriptively engaged mode of mind.”

— Steven C. Hayes

24. “It is based on a pragmatic philosophy of science called functional contextualism.”

— Steven C. Hayes

25. “ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.”

— Steven C. Hayes

26. “Gedachten zijn als lenzen waardoor we naar onze wereld kijken.”

— Steven C. Hayes

27. “Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.”

— Steven C. Hayes

28. “The constructive alternative to fusion is defusion, and the preferred alternative to experiential avoidance is acceptance.”

— Steven C. Hayes

29. “If you were on a bus trying to go east in a maze of dirt roads in a large valley, you might not be able to tell your direction from moment to moment. If someone took a series of snapshots, sometimes the bus might be facing north, or south, or even west, even though all the while this is a journey to the east.”

— Steven C. Hayes

30. “The classic self-problem seen in clinical settings is fusion with the content of verbal self-knowledge – such as “I am depressed” where “depressed” has the quality of a personal identity. This aspect of self – the conceptualized self – can be “positive” or “negative” or both, but its most dominant features are that it is rigid, evaluative, and evocative.”

— Steven C. Hayes

31. “Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve.”

— Steven C. Hayes

32. “The key verbal relations in the development of perspective taking are “deictic,” which means “by demonstration.”

— Steven C. Hayes

33. “For example, the client who values education might be asked, “What if you received the education, but no one knew. Would that still be of importance?”

— Steven C. Hayes

34. “These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.”

— Steven C. Hayes

35. “Comparison and Evaluation. Listen for excessive comparison and evaluation in the client’s speech, as contrasted with description. The clinician can probe the strength of such patterns of fusion by asking the client to simply describe the troublesome situation and what it evokes without injecting evaluations. Clients with high levels of fusion may not be able respond at all or may quickly lapse, injecting personal evaluations into the ongoing narrative.”

— Steven C. Hayes

36. “Once there is a verbally stated goal, however, we can assess the degree to which analytic practices help us achieve it. This option allows successful working toward a goal to function as a useful guide for science.”

— Steven C. Hayes

37. “People whose cognitions fuse are likely to ignore direct experience and become relatively oblivious to environmental influences.”

— Steven C. Hayes

38. “To what extent does the client live in a world of “musts” and “shoulds” and “can’ts”? To what extent does the client live in a world of well-rehearsed excuses for why things are as they are – a world in which change is either impossible or for a time other than right now?”

— Steven C. Hayes

39. “Does the client experience life as merely imposed or rather as something he or she can author in a meaningful and ongoing way?”

— Steven C. Hayes

40. “Conscious content now is known in the context of a consistent locus or point of view that can integrate that knowledge. Infantile amnesia begins to drop away. Events are held in memory in a verbal temporal order. A conscious person shows up – not as the object of reflection but as a perspective from which knowing can occur.”

— Steven C. Hayes