ERIC WENNINGER

Tag: choice

Flex Your Thought Muscle

April 25, 2025

Local artwork featured at Whitewater Music Hall in Wausau, Wisconsin

Who doesn’t face difficulty in life? Difficult decisions, for starters, are part of being human. Each day presents us with countless choices—some big, some small.

But what about difficult internal experiences? At some point, we all have experienced things like negative emotions, unwanted thoughts, or intrusive memories. We may even be engaged in an ongoing battle with depression or anxiety, or avoid situations that would lead to a more fulfilling life because of an unspoken fear holding us back.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced like the word “act”) is an evidence-based tool that can help you accept your difficult internal experiences and commit to taking action that brings you fulfillment in life. In other words, it’s a way of choosing to act according to your values rather than allowing your difficult internal experiences to dictate how you live.

One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

ACT takes a similarly empowering view of choice in response to human suffering. In Reclaim Your Life: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy in 7 Weeks, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes how the mindfulness components of ACT help you make the choice to live out your values despite the difficult experiences you may face. She writes:

They allow you to pay attention to difficult experiences like thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, and urges without immediately reacting to them. Instead, you make a conscious decision as to how you want to respond to any given situation based on your values.

Many of our internal struggles are the result of the storytelling mind, something that makes us uniquely human. While our ability to tell stories allows us to do many wonderful things, it can also lead us to believe things about ourselves and our world that are untrue or unhelpful. In fact, oftentimes the stories we tell ourselves make our internal suffering worse. ACT helps us overcome this trouble through gaining psychological flexibility. Just like performing exercises to increase our body’s flexibility, we can also use strategies to increase our mind’s flexibility.

There are six core processes of ACT that can be used to increase psychological flexibility. In his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dr. Steven C. Hayes calls them “the ACT hexaflex.”

The ACT hexaflex (via Rising Sun Counseling)

Let’s break it down:

1. Acceptance

Essentially, the “acceptance” part of ACT entails welcoming any experience, whether positive or negative, into your life without judgement. In his poem “The Guest House,” 13th-century Persian poet Rumi encourages us to welcome every kind of guest into our home. “Entertain them all!” he says.

The negative spaces are part of life and we should accept them too. I like how Henry Miller describes acceptance in The Wisdom of the Heart:

The act of living is based on rhythm—on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are content with, is converted into a dance, “the dance of life,” metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy.

It’s through acceptance that we give up the fight to control the uncontrollable, and can begin to take action toward what we value.

2. Cognitive defusion

You are not your thoughts. This idea is central to the process of cognitive defusion. We sometimes get “fused,” or attached to a negative thought, which can end up clouding our view of reality and dictating how we experience life. But if we can get some distance from the thought, or separate ourselves from it, then we gain the clarity needed to understand that it’s just a thought, and our thoughts don’t define us. It’s our choices and our actions that define us.

Cognitive defusion (via Reclaim Your Life)

In his book The Creative Act, Rick Rubin describes the act of noticing the culture without feeling obligated to be a part of it:

It’s helpful to view currents in the culture without feeling obligated to follow the direction of their flow. Instead, notice them in the same connected, detached way you might notice a warm wind. Let yourself move within it, yet not be of it.

The same could be said for noticing thoughts or emotions. If we imagine them floating by us like the currents of a river, we can more easily see that they are fleeting and they are not really part of who we are. This is the power of cognitive defusion.

3. Being present

The present moment is all we have. ACT incorporates many mindfulness strategies, but perhaps none as direct as those focused on being present in the moment. In “The Haunted Mind,” Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:

Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space.

It’s in this intermediate space that we have the power to act. Or, take Jamie xx’s song “Breather,” which features audio of a yoga teacher speaking calming words over the DJ’s backing rhythms:

Breathe
Be grateful for this present moment
The only moment that truly exists
‘Cause the past is gone
And the future is uncertain
But what we know right now is this moment

Making contact with your present-moment experience—whether it’s your external environment or your internal condition—rather than resisting it, is an essential component of ACT. Again, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes it like this:

The point is not simply to be present, but to help increase your ability to attend to your present-moment experience so that you can respond rather than react reflexively through old habits that may not be serving you.

The only place that change can happen, after all, is in the present.

4. Self as context

This process is also referred to as the “observer self.” When our storytelling mind is in high gear we are locked into the “thinking self.” Similar to cognitive defusion, shifting into the observer self helps us gain some distance from our thoughts, or our thinking self. It’s basically the ability to view what you’re experiencing from an outside perspective instead of an inside one. We can do this through the simple act of noticing our own experience. If we can direct our attention to what we’re experiencing and name it, then we become aware of it, and it’s through that awareness that we’re able to confront it in service of living out our values.

5. Values

Once we unhinge ourselves from all the things holding us back, we become empowered to move in the direction of our values. But in order to do that, we need to know what we value. In ACT’s terms, values differ from goals, which are things that can be accomplished. Values, on the other hand, are more ongoing and provide us with direction in life.

6. Commitment

This process is also known as committed ACTion. Clever, huh? Once we’ve identified our values, the logical next step is to commit to living them out. Taken together with the other processes of ACT, we are freed to live according to our values instead of our unwanted thoughts and fears. Living like this may very well mean entering uncomfortable situations, but we do so willingly, knowing that they represent something we value. Isn’t that a much better and fulfilling way to live?

So, if you ever find yourself struggling internally with difficult thoughts or unwanted emotions, remember ACT’s hexaflex. Go ahead and flex that thought muscle! Get out of your head and move toward living out your values.

Image via the Mind Muscle Project
Branching Realities

December 13, 2024

A Purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum – Image via The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Last week’s newsletter was about branching realities.

It started out like this:

Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and professor at UW-Madison who teaches a class called The Unthinkable Mind. In the class, Barry combines neuroscience, psychology, and drawing to help students build the skill of creativity and apply it to their life’s work. Last week I saw this Instagram post by Barry and it reminded me of the incredible link between art and science. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, widely considered to be the father of neuroscience, also understood this connection. Cajal’s work drew inspiration from both the sciences and the arts, and his drawings of the brain beautifully communicate its complexities.

In addition to his work on circle visualizations, Manuel Lima has also worked with branching. In The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, Lima documents the use of tree diagrams from throughout history to categorize a wide variety of information:

I like how this work is both artistic and scientific. Referencing visuals and producing them ourselves has always helped us understand the world better. Branching in particular is helpful, I think in part, because it’s all around us. Its reproductions and reflections are seemingly endless, as Barry’s lesson plan highlights.

I’ve enjoyed watching Angie study medicine these past few months. To me, her notes look like works of art to and I’ll often ask her to send me pictures of them, like this one, which of course reveals some branching:

Angie’s notes

As we wrap up 2024, thinking about branching has me thinking a lot about the big decisions we make in life. Looking into our past, we might envision a fork in the road that was created in the moment of deciding—one path branching off to the left and another off to the right, each leading to a separate reality that was created by our choice.

Or maybe we can envision a separate reality that was created simply by circumstance, as is the case in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character experiences two alternate realities based on whether or not she successfully catches a subway train. Throughout the rest of the movie we see her life play out along these two separate paths.

The idea of alternate realities has always fascinated me. Even more fascinating is the theory suggesting they may actually be real. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own. Physicist Aaron O’Connell talks about the feasibility of this idea in his 2011 TED Talk.

Alternate realities have long been the subject of some of the best science fiction. If you love speculating about these branching realities as much as I do, here are some great stories to check out:

Ted Chiang has a short story entitled “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, that looks at this idea. It’s somewhat of a redemption story in which characters use a device called a prism that allows them to communicate with versions of themselves from alternate realities—realities that stem from divergent past decisions the characters have made. You may already be familiar with Chiang’s work from the movie Arrival, which was based on his short story “Story of Your Life,” from Stories of Your Life and Others. It dawned on me that one of my family’s favorite holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, also deals with alternate realities. Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter (recently made into an Apple+ series) was first described to me as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 21st century. And then, of course, there’s a wealth of amazing works by the Spanish-speaking world that dive into choice and the alternate realities it produces. Check out Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (also see this TED Ed video on his mind-bending work) and the Spotify podcast Case 63 (based on the Chilean Caso 63).

You can read the whole newsletter here.
On Making Difficult Decisions

December 5, 2024

“Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” by Ted Chiang – Image via Jinhwa Jang

Choice is powerful. One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

The realization that we always have a choice as to how we will respond to those things going on around us, even if we can’t control them, is an empowering one. Frankl should know. As a Holocaust survivor, he faced unimaginable horrors, yet never forgot his power to choose. When everything was stripped away from him, he held to that power closely.

Frankl addresses choice in terms of how we respond to circumstances beyond our control, when our freedom has been reduced to a minimum. But what about choice in terms of the many circumstances within our power to control, when freedom abounds? I think we tend to view a choice like this:

As in the old Robert Frost poem, we consider the two roads diverging before us in the woods, and try our best to choose which one we’ll travel upon. In her book Transformative Experiences, philosopher LA Paul suggests a different way of looking at choice. She asks us to imagine having to choose whether or not we’d like to become a vampire, gaining immortality with the caveat of not having to hurt anyone. It’s a thought experiment that gets to the heart of Plato’s question, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” She writes:

When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it—by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

So our choice might be better viewed in the following way:

“A” represents the space that is completely familiar to us, while “B” represents the space that is completely foreign to us. It’s the known versus the unknown. We only know ourselves on the “A” side of a decision. There’s no real way of knowing who we’d become if we made the choice to leave “A” behind, cross through the doorway, and enter into “B.”

This is the problem we face when making big decisions. We are biased toward our current experience in life. Going through that door and entering the unknown is often very scary, because both our experiences and who we will become are unknown. In her contemplation of the vampire problem, Maria Popova writes:

We are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.

When we choose to enter these unknown spaces, in a way, we choose to let our former self die in order for a transformed self to emerge. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit describes the value of such transformation and the process by which we can obtain it:

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

Extending the boundaries of self and becoming someone else is a difficult process. It’s far easier to stay within our comfort zone. Stepping into the great unknown is exhilarating, but it has its costs. Viktor Frankl looked at the problem of restricted freedom—when the door to possibility is closed. Unlimited freedom to open whichever door one chooses can also be problematic. There’s a reason Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” Looking through that open door into the abyss of the unknown can be destabilizing.

But in life, moving into the unknown is often what’s required of us, and it’s often where we should go. In The Meaning of Anxiety, psychologist Rollo May expands on Kierkegaard’s thoughts about anxiety:

Because it is possible to create—creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process)—one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself.

In any big decision, the choice we make leads us toward gaining something and losing something else. I think that much is a given. And it’s something I can accept. For me, the important thing is to keep choosing to grow. Growing is how I can create hope in a world that often seems at the brink of losing itself. It’s like what Emerson once wrote: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” I think it’s also important to remember that making small choices can also be unsettling, and if made consistently over time, can lead to big changes in a person’s character and experience of the world. Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, dives into this idea beautifully.

But even though we can’t know what’s on the other side of a big decision, I like Walt Whitman’s take in “Song of Myself” (43), on how we can enter those unknown spaces with confidence:

I do not know what is untried and afterward,
But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

It helps to look back into your past as you enter those untried future spaces. The past can provide some finite concreteness that stabilizes you from the infinite possibilities of the future. You’ve faced trials before and prevailed. You will prevail again.