What Is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?
Over the years, one of the questions I've been asked most often is, "What exactly is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?"
The question usually comes after I've suggested that the answer to insomnia may not be trying harder to sleep. And that's really where ACT begins.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a modern behavioural therapy that helps people develop a different relationship with difficult thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Notice I didn't say it helps people get rid of them. That was one of the things that first drew me to ACT.
Earlier in my career, I found myself questioning approaches that focused primarily on reducing symptoms. The assumption often seemed to be that if we could eliminate anxiety, stop difficult thoughts, or improve sleep, everything else would fall into place. But life doesn't work like that. Anxiety comes and goes. Stress comes and goes. Difficult emotions come and go. And sleep, as anyone with chronic insomnia knows, can be wonderfully unpredictable.
What fascinated me about ACT was that it asked a completely different question. Instead of asking, "How do I get rid of this?" it asks, "How can I make room for this experience while continuing to live the life I want to live?"
At first, that idea can sound surprising. If you're exhausted and desperate to sleep, the last thing you probably want to do is "accept" being awake. But acceptance in ACT doesn't mean liking insomnia, giving up, or resigning yourself to poor sleep forever. It means acknowledging what is happening in this moment, rather than becoming trapped in an exhausting battle to make it disappear.
Over the years, I've noticed that the struggle itself often becomes part of the problem. People struggle to sleep, struggle to stop thinking, struggle to control anxiety, and struggle to control something that simply can't be forced.
ACT offers a different path. Through mindfulness, self-compassion, values, and psychological flexibility, it helps people respond differently to difficult experiences instead of automatically reacting to them. As that struggle softens, the nervous system often begins to settle, creating the conditions in which natural sleep can return.
This is why ACT became such an important part of my work. Not because it teaches people how to force sleep, but because it helps them rediscover something insomnia often takes away: a sense of safety, freedom, and trust in their own ability to sleep.
Sometimes the path out of insomnia isn't about controlling what we experience. It's about changing how we relate to it.
