Values compass

For several years, an Australian woman named Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care, looking after people in the last weeks of their lives. She listened as they looked back, and in 2009 she wrote about the regrets she heard most often.

The most common, she said, was this: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Her post spread around the world, perhaps because so many readers recognized the risk in their own lives. Her observations are one person's, not a study, but they point at something ACT takes seriously.

In ACT, values are the qualities you want your life to stand for: being caring, honest, curious, brave. They work like a compass direction. You never arrive at "being a loving parent", but you can always take a step that way, today.

Worry and values are closely linked. Anxiety about a friendship usually means the friendship matters. So underneath a worry there's often a value, and finding it changes the question from "how do I stop worrying?" to "what do I want to do about the thing I care about?"

Nora keeps worrying that she has drifted from her old college roommate, Bea. They used to talk every week; now it's a birthday message. Nora tells herself that Bea is probably busy with her new baby, that reaching out would be awkward after so long, and that she should stop dwelling on it.