Rebooting your mind: The ACE Method Explained
Many years ago, I worked with a skilled ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy) therapist while I was struggling with anxiety.
I still find myself returning to the lessons she taught me.
You can think of ACT as the mindfulness-informed successor to CBT. It’s effective in therapy but is even more useful as a day-to-day means of mental hygiene. It’s also backed by a huge body of research: over 1,000 RCTs and hundreds of meta-analyses.
ACT says we often get stuck in:
obeying thoughts
struggling against them
When we obey, we take our thoughts and emotions as absolute truths—if we feel anxious, we avoid situations; if we think “I’m not good enough,” we shrink back.
When we struggle, we fight, suppress, or argue with our inner experience—trying to “get rid” of anxiety or denying difficult emotions.
Both approaches keep us trapped. Obeying means we believe any old tape loop running through our heads and struggle ties us up in an inner war we cannot win.
There is a third way.
Russ Harris, in his ACT book The Happiness Trap, lays out the ACE method.
The next time you find yourself struggling, try this:
Acknowledge. Notice and name your thoughts and feelings without judgement: “there is anxiety, there is doubt, there is discomfort, there is some curiosity, there is fear.” You can do this silently in your head. Take your time to accurately describe the weather.
Connect. Move your body slightly; straighten your spine, sense your outline and feel your contact with a chair or the floor. Feel what it’s like to feel. See what it’s like to see. Notice thoughts come and go. Fully inhabit your body. See that all these thoughts and feelings are arising and passing in this body.
Engage. From this anchored awareness, notice the room around you. Remember that you are one person in one place, despite the dizzying amount of imaginary situations you seem to be in. Take in what’s around you. In this pause, you are at the nexus of change. You can do something different, instead of getting caught up in the same old.
I’ve used this technique hundreds of times and find it remarkably effective. Instead of struggling and obeying, you have the freedom to listen without acting, to feel without fighting.
It echoes Stoicism—Epictetus said “It’s not things that disturb us, but our judgments about them”—whilst also bringing the clarity of Buddhist mindfulness.
The fruit is in the doing. It takes practice. With each repetition, you are unhooking your default responses and creating potential in their place.
Next time you find yourself obeying or struggling, remember: ACE.
Follow the steps and see if your world doesn’t feel a whole lot different at the end.
—Dan
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