- From natural stress response to chronic reactivity
- How anxiety about anxiety leads to a restricted life
- Conceptualizing GAD, panic, OCD, health anxiety, and PTSD from an ACT frame
- Toward process-focused treatment versus techniques
Don’t Let Anxiety “Drive the Bus”
- Use “the voice” of anxiety to discern values
- Define a life worth living alongside anxiety
- Design exposures to coincide with values
- Exercise: Bus metaphor
Let Go of What Is Not Working
- Myths and truths of thought suppression
- Dig deeper into the control pit
- Increase psychological flexibility in the face of anxiety
- Metaphor Exercise: Creative helplessness to get rid of anxiety
How to Expand the Sense of Self
- Explain over-identification with anxiety
- Shift from self-as-content to self-as-context with the anxious client
- Metaphor Exercise: Expand the sense of self to put anxiety in context
Break Free from The Battle with Anxious Thinking
- How internal representations develop in the human mind
- How thoughts are conditioned with meaning and emotion
- Reification of thoughts – why arguing with thoughts can make them worse
- Brain programming – why clients cannot control or suppress thoughts long-term
- Defusion – break the pattern of anxious spirals
- Metaphor Exercise: Shift from being lost in the drama to aware of thoughts as they are
Break Free from the Battle with Anxious Feelings
- The nature, purpose, and psychophysiology of anxious feelings
- Diving into feelings to uncouple them from thoughts and misinterpretations
- Metaphor exercise for exposure therapy
- Metaphor exercise for self-compassion
- Metaphor exercise for shifting old feelings through memory reconsolidation
Break free from Future Worries and Past Regrets
- Why our brains get lost in the past and the future
- Help clients start from where they are
- Eternity in this moment – the illusion of time
- Mindfulness – experiencing reality through the senses versus mental representation
- Explore anxiety with curiosity – math problem versus sunset
- Exercise: Three minute mindfulness
Take Committed Action
- How to build momentum toward what really matters
- Develop a realistic and workable action plan
- Teach clients to act with anxiety
- Why we cannot “try” - making the leap





