Summary: Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), developed by psychologist Steven Hayes, contains two exercises that work as journaling: writing about your values (directions, not goals) and writing to defuse a difficult thought ("I am having the thought that..."). ACT as a full therapy has real trial evidence, contested at the edges. The two writing exercises specifically have almost no direct trial evidence of their own; what exists nearby is self-affirmation research for values writing and one honest null result for the classic defusion exercise.
What is ACT?
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT, said as one word, "act") is a therapy model Steven Hayes began developing in the 1980s, built on a broader theory of language and cognition called relational frame theory. ACT's central target is psychological flexibility: the ability to stay in contact with the present moment and act according to your values even while difficult thoughts and feelings are present, rather than fighting them or being controlled by them.
ACT organizes around six core processes, usually drawn as a hexagon: acceptance, cognitive defusion, being present, self-as-context, values, and committed action. Most of ACT is delivered as talk therapy across multiple sessions, using experiential exercises, metaphors, and structured conversation. Two of those processes, though, translate directly into something you can do alone with a pen or a voice recorder: values and cognitive defusion. Those two are the subject of this page.
Exercise one: values writing
Values are directions, not goals
This is the distinction the exercise turns on, and it is worth getting precise about, because collapsing it back into goal-setting defeats the point.
A goal is a finish line. "Run a marathon." "Get promoted." "Read 20 books this year." You either hit it or you don't, and once you hit it, it's done. It closes.
A value is a direction. "Being someone who follows through on physical commitments to myself." "Being a present, attentive parent." "Contributing work I'd stand behind." A direction never closes. You can walk toward it your whole life and never arrive, the same way you can walk north forever and never reach North.
The practical consequence: you can hit a goal while moving away from a value (get the promotion by cutting corners that violate what you actually care about), and you can miss a goal while living fully by a value (train for the marathon, get injured before race day, and still have spent six months acting like someone who follows through). ACT treats this distinction as central because goals give you brief satisfaction and then a void; values give you something to return to indefinitely, including on days nothing gets finished.
The exercise
Values writing, as taught in ACT, usually works through a small number of life domains: relationships, work or career, health, personal growth, community, or however you want to divide it. For each domain, you write not what you want to achieve there, but what kind of person you want to be there, in an ongoing sense.
A useful prompt structure: "In the domain of [work], I want to be the kind of person who ___." Fill in a direction, not an outcome. "Who does careful work and says so plainly when something's wrong" is a value. "Gets promoted to senior" is a goal hiding in values clothing.
Exercise two: defusion writing
What cognitive defusion means
Cognitive defusion is ACT's term for creating distance between yourself and a thought, so you experience the thought as a mental event passing through your mind, rather than as a literal fact or a command you have to obey. Its opposite is fusion: being so merged with a thought that "I'm a failure" and the fact of being a failure feel like the same thing.
The classic defusion move is linguistic. Instead of writing "I'm a failure," you write "I am having the thought that I'm a failure." That extra frame, I am having the thought that, does not change the content of the thought. It changes your relationship to it: a thought you're having is something you can notice, examine, and set down. A fact about who you are is not.
The exercise
When a difficult, sticky, or repetitive thought shows up, write it down using the frame:
- "I am having the thought that ___."
- "I notice I'm having the thought that ___."
- "My mind is telling me ___."
Write the full thought inside the frame, not a summary of it. "I am having the thought that I'm going to mess up this presentation and everyone will notice" does more than "I'm having the thought that I'm anxious." Some ACT practitioners add a further step: label the thought once written ("that's the failure story again") or repeat it back in a strange voice or context, to further loosen its grip. On paper, simply writing it inside the frame and reading it back once is usually the exercise.
Who this is for
ACT is a clinical therapy model, and values and defusion writing are components of it, not a public practice with well-known non-clinical adopters. Unlike morning pages or gratitude journaling, there is no dataset entry of a public figure describing values writing or defusion writing by name, and this page does not manufacture one. Keeping this section absent, rather than reaching for a loose fit, is the honest choice here.
What the evidence actually says
ACT as a whole treatment. Öst's 2014 meta-analysis reviewed 60 randomized controlled trials (4,234 participants) across psychiatric disorders, somatic conditions, and workplace stress. The overall effect size was small, 0.42, and had actually fallen from 0.68 in Öst's earlier 2008 analysis, with no improvement in methodological quality in between. When ACT was compared directly against other cognitive or behavioral treatments rather than against no treatment or waitlist, the effect dropped further, to a small and non-significant 0.16. Öst's conclusion: ACT was not yet well-established as a treatment for any single disorder, though probably efficacious for chronic pain and tinnitus specifically, and possibly efficacious for several others. That analysis drew a published critique, which Öst rebutted, so treat this as a contested, not settled, read of the field, not as either "ACT is proven" or "ACT doesn't work."
Values writing specifically. No trial isolates values writing as a standalone intervention and tests it the way a drug trial tests a drug. The nearest evidence is a different but related literature: self-affirmation research, where a person writes about values, attributes, or relationships that matter to them before receiving a stressful or threatening message. Epton and colleagues' 2015 meta-analysis pooled 144 experimental tests and found small but reliable positive effects on message acceptance (d=.17), behavioral intentions (d=.14), and actual behavior (d=.32). That is not a test of ACT's values exercise, and it is not therapy, it is a brief pre-message writing manipulation in health psychology. But the mechanism overlaps: writing about what you value, before something hard, changes how you respond to what's hard. Treat it as adjacent support, not confirmation.
Defusion writing specifically. Here the most direct evidence available is a null result. López de Uralde-Selva and Valero-Aguayo (2021) ran two experiments (30 and 78 participants) testing the classic defusion exercise, in this case a spoken word-repetition version, against a control condition, measuring change in thought believability, emotional regulation, experiential avoidance, and emotional reactivity to images. Neither experiment found the effect ACT theory predicts; the only difference between conditions was in reaction-time latency. The authors frame this explicitly as a failure to replicate the defusion process. That is one study, on a spoken repetition variant rather than the "I am having the thought that" writing frame specifically, and mixed results exist elsewhere in the defusion literature. But it is honest to say plainly: when someone has actually tried to isolate and test defusion as its own mechanism, the clearest recent result did not find it working as described.
Put together: ACT the therapy has a real, contested trial base. The two exercises this page teaches, values writing and defusion writing, have almost no direct evidence of their own. What is adjacent (self-affirmation for values, one experimental defusion study) points in different directions, mild support for one, a null for the other. That is the honest state of the evidence, not a reason to avoid the exercises, but a reason not to oversell them.
The protocol
Values writing (10-15 minutes, weekly or monthly, not nightly):
- Pick one life domain: work, a relationship, health, personal growth, or your own.
- Write: "In this domain, I want to be someone who ___." Fill in a direction, not an outcome.
- Check your answer: does it close (a finish line) or stay open (a direction)? If it closes, it's a goal. Rewrite it as a direction.
- Write one small, concrete action this week that moves toward that direction. It does not need to be large or complete anything.
- Repeat for another domain, or stop here for today.
Defusion writing (2-5 minutes, as needed, whenever a sticky thought shows up):
- Notice the thought bothering you. Write it down exactly as it occurs to you.
- Rewrite it prefaced with "I am having the thought that ___" or "I notice I'm having the thought that ___."
- Read the reframed sentence back once.
- Optionally, note what you'd do differently if this were a thought passing through, rather than a fact.
The voice adaptation
Both exercises translate to speech with almost nothing lost, because neither depends on handwriting's slowness or a page's physical layout the way morning pages does.
Values writing by voice. Speak the domain, the direction, and the one small action, in a single tagged entry. "Work values. I want to be someone who does careful work and says so plainly when something's wrong. This week: I'll flag the timeline risk in tomorrow's standup instead of hoping it resolves itself." Tag it [values] so you can pull every values entry later and check whether your stated directions and your actual weeks are pointing the same way.
Defusion writing by voice. Say the sticky thought out loud, prefaced with the frame: "I am having the thought that I'm going to mess up this presentation." Speaking the frame out loud arguably makes the distancing more physical than writing it, since you hear yourself narrate the thought rather than just seeing it on a page, though nobody has tested spoken defusion against written defusion directly.
What you might lose: rereading your own values entries over months, on paper, in your own handwriting, is a specific kind of confrontation with your past self's intentions that a searchable transcript flattens slightly. A written journal you flip through physically surfaces old entries by accident in a way a search bar does not.
Try it by voice: Brain Dump: speak a values entry once a week, tag it, then search [values] after a hard month to check whether your actions matched the direction you named.
Common mistakes
Writing goals and calling them values. "I want to be someone who runs a marathon this year" is a goal wearing a value's clothes. The test: does it close? If yes, it's a goal. Rewrite it as the ongoing quality behind the goal ("someone who follows through on physical commitments").
Using defusion to argue the thought is false. Defusion is not "that thought is wrong, here's why." It's "that's a thought, not a fact, regardless of whether it's true." Arguing with the content keeps you fused to it. The frame is meant to create distance, not win a debate.
Doing values writing once and expecting it to stick. Values are directions you return to, not decisions you make once. A values entry from January that never gets revisited is not doing what the exercise is for.
Treating either exercise as validated therapy. Both are pulled from a therapy model with contested overall trial evidence, and neither has direct trial evidence of its own. Doing them is reasonable self-work. Describing them as clinically proven interventions is not accurate.
When not to do this
If you are in significant psychological distress, especially involving self-harm or a diagnosed condition, these two exercises are not a substitute for working with a therapist trained in ACT or another evidence-based model. ACT as a full treatment is delivered by a clinician across sessions with structured exercises and feedback; a solo writing habit borrowed from two of its six processes is a fraction of that, done without anyone checking whether it's landing. If a defusion exercise starts surfacing material that feels too large to sit with alone, that is a signal to bring it to a therapist, not to keep pushing through it solo.
Related:
- the DBT diary card: another therapy-rooted tracking tool, from dialectical behavior therapy rather than ACT
- what 146 randomised studies of expressive writing actually found: the nearest general research tradition on structured emotional writing
- how high performers journal: for comparison, journaling practices with public, non-clinical adopters