ACT for your wellbeing
How can we support other’s healthy behavioral changes if we can’t make those changes ourselves?
How can we guide others to a meaningful life if ours isn’t?
To genuinely guide our fellow travelers (patients and clients) into a vital life requires skills. Skills are not gained theoretically or understood intellectually, skills require ACTing. Like sports, we can only coach if we ourselves are pretty good at it.
Here I share some studies and opinions about ACT for us, health care professionals.
“Integrating ACT training in the own self-care increases the therapist skills- development and personal benefits.”
A 1-day ACT workshop for reducing psychological distress among health care workers had beneficial effects on their and mindfulness skills (Waters et al., 2017), self-compassion, and ultimately their health (Rudaz et al., 2017).
Also among trainees, were the stress level and emotional symptoms are common ACT helped them to regulate emotions and to focus on what was important for them (Dereix-Calonge et al., 2019).
ACT of the therapist
“To experience it [ACT] yourself is actually a really good way of then being able to go on and make it meaningful for other people. “
Informant Nadine in ‘Feel the Feeling’: Psychological practitioners’ experience of acceptance and commitment therapy well-being training in the workplace Wardley et al., 2014
