17 Dec 2025 · 4 min
Brian Johnson explains how ACT differs from CBT: instead of changing what you think, you change your relationship to your thoughts. Stephen Hayes developed this approach, which focuses on acting aligned with your values while accepting difficult emotions rather than fighting them.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic one. Not too long ago, we took a quick tour through Marsha Linehan's great memoir, Building a Life Worth Living, in which we discussed her thoughts on Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or dbt. DBT was her extension of cognitive behavioral therapy, or cbt, that she originally developed for people suffering from suicidal ideation and behavior. As it turns out, DBT was one of several therapies developed in the 1980s and 1990s that were part of what's known as the third wave of cognitive behavioral therapy. A few of the others include Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, or mbsr, created by Jon Kabat Zinn. Check out our notes on Wherever your Go, There youe Are. For more on that and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, or mbct, by Mark Williams and his colleagues. Check out our notes on his book called Mindfulness now. Another therapy created in that third wave is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or act, A c T pronounced ACT for short. ACT was created by Stephen Hayes about a decade ago. We featured notes on two books by the world's leading trainer in act, a guy named Russ Harris. His books the Happiness Trap and the Confidence Gap are fantastic. Check out those notes. Seriously, check them out. The wisdom in them is powerful. So after reading Marsha's book, I was fired up to get back into act. So I got a bunch of books on the subject. I started with Stephen Hayes's get out of youf Mind and Into youo Life, which is fantastic. Then I read his latest book called A Liberated Mind, which is even better. Today I want to talk about a single distinction from a liberated mind. Here it is. Steven tells us, and I quote, changing our relationship to our thoughts and emotions rather than trying to change their content is the key to healing and realizing our true potential. Note that's a really big idea. I repeat, changing our relationship to our thoughts and emotions rather than trying to change their content is the key to healing and realizing our true potential. I repeat, that's a really big idea. And that's also one of the key differentiators between ACT and cbt. Whereas cognitive behavior therapy tries to get you to see the problems with your thinking and then get you to change the faulty thinking patterns, which of course can be helpful with acceptance and commitment therapy. Steven focuses more on changing your relationship to your thoughts while worrying less about changing the content of your thoughts. I repeat, yet again, that's a really big distinction, and that's today's plus one. We'll get into all the practical ways we can go about changing our relationship to our thoughts in some future plus 1s. But for now, I want you to take a moment and simply see your thoughts for what they are thoughts. We don't need to necessarily change them to quit being driven by them. Simply observe the thoughts you have, thank them for showing up, then go do what you know needs to get done to live in integrity with your best self all day, every day, especially today.
