Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Why Combine Them

In the field of psychotherapy and mental health care resources, it is very common for strategies to emerge that, despite having been developed in parallel and aiming at different objectives, reinforce each other. This occurs because, in the same way that psychopathologies overlap in many aspects or can even favor the appearance of others, forms of psychotherapy can also establish affinities between them.

An example of this is the combined effect of Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, two forms of intervention that are included within what is known as Third Generation Therapies and that have several things in common. Let’s see why it is a good option to combine them in clinical practice in the context of psychological therapy.

What is Mindfulness?

Full attention, or Mindfulness, is a practice with therapeutic potential that is inspired by vipassana meditation associated with certain variants of Buddhism and Hinduism. Although it branches into different types of exercises, many of which are relatively simple and can be applied in a few minutes, its “core” version was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 70s in the context of his MBSR (Mindfulness- based stress reduction), which was designed to help people who suffer from stress problems, as its name indicates.

Kabat-Zinn emphasized the need to create a “secular” version of meditation based on scientific evidence, so that it was detached from any religious element and was perfected based on its objective effects on people’s well-being.

And what is Mindfulness? Fundamentally, it proposes a series of exercises to regulate one’s own attention focus, making the consciousness of the person who practices Mindfulness remain fixed in the present moment, and observe and feel the sensations that come from the here and now without judging or evaluating them in moral terms. Thus, the experience of Mindfulness consists of paying full attention to what is happening in the moment, without letting ourselves be carried away by our concerns linked to what is in our past or what could come in the future.

What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?

On the other hand, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of psychotherapy that gives up the goal of completely eliminating discomfort or pain (physical or emotional) and focuses on Help people accept the elements of life associated with unpleasure so as not to give them more power than they really have.

And one of the ideas on which ACT is based is that trying to eliminate what makes us feel bad makes it return again and again to our mind, so learning to live with it, especially when we do not have a Total control over what makes us feel that way is the most advisable way to limit its debilitating effect on mental health.

The therapeutic potential of Mindfulness and ACT

As we have seen, both ACT and Mindfulness have in common that they lead us to an experience based on acceptance and the possibility of seeing our problems with perspective, to stop trying to “put out fires” and put those at the center of our priorities. solutions that really contribute to our mental health in the medium and long term, instead of trying to feel perfectly fine immediately. That is why the combination of these two elements is so advantageous in psychotherapy. In both cases, a change of mentality is encouraged when managing emotions and experiences linked to discomfort something that allows us to fall into behavioral dynamics of self-sabotage.