When the Rules You Live By Start to Feel Like a Cage: Learning to Pivot
Learn how to make small but powerful behavioral pivots using ACT, so you can stop running on autopilot and start taking actions that actually lead to the life you’ve been chasing.
Download the free How Did We Get Here PDF for deeper reflection
When a person has a deep internal need—like wanting to feel loved, secure, or capable—their mind often tries to solve it by focusing on immediate relief or control. This might look like avoiding pain, chasing external validation, or trying to fix uncomfortable emotions. These strategies are based on content (what’s happening), not function (how it actually meets the need), and while they may offer short-term relief, they often lead to long-term disconnection, stress, and exhaustion.
This is what ACT refers to as psychological inflexibility. It’s not a personal failure—it’s the mind doing what it was built to do: solve problems, predict, protect. But when that problem-solving mode is applied to emotions or self-worth, it narrows our options and pulls us out of alignment with what really matters.
Maybe you already had your creative hopelessness moment—the realization that your usual strategies (hustling, fixing, numbing, perfecting) aren't delivering the calm, clarity, or connection you hoped they would.
Now comes the next part:
What Do You Do Once You’ve Stopped Believing Your Old Strategies Will Save You?
This is the moment we introduce a new skill: the flexibility pivot.
It’s not about scrapping your life or abandoning your responsibilities. It’s about gently adjusting your course—realigning your actions with what truly matters, even in the presence of stress, discomfort, or mental noise.
From Misdirected Challenges to Flexibility Pivots
Psychologist Steven C. Hayes describes how our minds develop rigid, misdirected strategies through focusing on content and sooner-smaller reinforcers to meet natural human yearnings:
Belonging → focuses on the content of maintaining a certain persona to be considered “special” and comparing yourself to others which leads to the misdirected challenge of people pleasing behaviors that can include defending, telling white lies, exaggerating. The unhealthy result is often needing to live your life in line with the content of your story.
Coherence → focuses on the content of life as a problem to be solved which leads to the misdirected challenge of overanalyzing and overexplaining to feel in control that can include living in your head more and more and needing to be right, constant mental debate. The unhealthy result is often needing to live your life in a way that supports you being right.
Feeling → focuses on the content of getting rid of pain and discomfort which leads to the misdirected challenge of avoidance of negative emotions (and after long-term avoidance eventually leads to avoidance of positive emotions too) that can include numbing and autopilot behaviors. It results in emotional struggle.
Orientation → focuses on the content of the past and future which leads to the misdirected challenge of rumination and worry, or anxiety behaviors that can include obsessing over past mistakes or future fears. The unhealthy result is mindless disconnection.
Self-Directed Meaning → focuses on the content of acquisition which leads to the misdirected challenge of “want” and “must” behaviors that can include self-gratification and aversive control. The unhealthy result is emptiness.
Competence → focuses on the content of perfection and avoidance of failure which leads to the misdirected challenge of seeking external achievement behaviors that can include procrastination, burnout, and control. The unhealthy result is inaction or pushing through just to avoid failure.
These patterns make sense.
They’re protective.
They even work—for a while.
But eventually, they stop serving us. They actually shrink our world and eventually cause unhealthy results that disconnect us from the need we were trying to meet in the first place.
That’s when it’s time for a flexibility pivot—a new direction rooted in willingness, awareness, and values.
What Is a Flexibility Pivot?
A flexibility pivot is a shift away from content focused, rigid behavior patterns and toward psychological flexibility.
Each of ACT’s six core processes serves as a “pivot” point, offering a redirection. For example, rather than avoiding discomfort, the pivot of acceptance invites you to open up to their emotions with compassion, using them as information rather than threats. Instead of trying to “fix” thoughts, defusion teaches them to observe thoughts as thoughts—not truths—creating space for what works and letting go of what doesn’t.
How to Make a Flexibility Pivot
1. Notice your Behavior
You can use the free downloadable Cost of Avoidance Worksheet as a resource to help identify some of the behavior strategies that you’ve used to try to get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings long term. These often lead towards more and more content focused, rigid behaviors that narrow your ability to live fully.
2. Name the Challenge that is being Misdirected
Use the categories from above, and see if you can find similarities within your own behaviors that relate back to a specific need you may be trying to meet. Are you chasing approval? Numbing discomfort? Trying to do things the “right” way?
Just reconnecting with your authentic desire is powerful. It strengthens yous motivation to pivot.
3. Ask: What Matters Right Now?
Pause, zoom out, and reconnect with your values.
What kind of mom, leader, partner, or friend do you want to be—even in this moment of stress?
4. Choose a Small, Values-Aligned Action
It doesn’t have to be huge, and it shouldn’t be!
Take a breath and make eye contact with your child during a tantrum at dinner.
Respond to an email with presence instead of urgency.
Step outside for one minute of sunlight instead of doomscrolling.
Try This Today
I actually find it easiest to work backwards with pivots and start with a step that often comes after the unhealthy result. This is often an unwanted feeling or an emotion.
Pause the next time you experience an unwanted feeling or an emotion.
Ask yourself if that feeling was due to an unhealthy result (i.e., being right - picking a argument with a loved one in order to “do life” a certain way, or becoming a story by pushing yourself to meet deadlines because of the story you tell yourself that “you’re a hard worker” so in order to maintain that persona, you now have to be someone who meets deadlines at all other costs). Consider each of the unhealthy results (needing to live your life in line with the content of your story, being right, emotional struggle, disconnection, emptiness, or avoiding failure) to see if you can relate your unwanted experience to one of them..
Finally, track that unhealthy result all the way to the top of the funnel, to your original desire. What need were you trying to meet before your pesky mind came in and thought you needed it’s help to solve the problem.
Remember, it’s not a personal failure, it’s the human mind doing what it was built to do!
Resources
Use this How Did We Get Here PDF for deeper reflection
Missed the post on Creative Hopelessness? Click the link below!
Ready to Build a New Relationship with Your Mind?
You don’t need to “fix” yourself to feel better.
But you can learn to pivot toward what matters—moment by moment.
If you’re ready to stop spinning in survival mode and start showing up with more clarity, connection, and calm, I’d love to help.