The gap between what you value and what you do: ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy doesn't start with your behaviour. It starts with a question that most therapeutic approaches never ask directly: what do you actually value?
Not what you should value. Not what a healthy person values. What you value , the things that matter to you, that you'd be gutted to look back on having compromised, that you'd describe if someone asked you what kind of person you want to be.
Most people can answer this fairly quickly. Health. Relationships. Work that matters. Being present for the people who depend on them. Financial stability. Energy. Clarity of mind.
The second question is the confronting one: what does your current behaviour actually serve?
What ACT is
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy was developed by Steven Hayes in the 1980s and has since accumulated an extensive evidence base across anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and , increasingly , substance use disorders. It differs from CBT in emphasis: where CBT focuses on changing the content of thoughts, ACT focuses on changing the relationship between thoughts and actions.
The core model has three components that are particularly relevant to substance use:
Acceptance , the willingness to experience difficult internal states (cravings, anxiety, discomfort, boredom) without either fighting them or obeying them. Not resignation. Not approval. Willingness to feel what's there without the feeling automatically directing behaviour.
Defusion , creating distance between thoughts/urges and the self. "I am noticing a craving for alcohol" rather than "I need a drink." The thought or urge is observed as a mental event rather than fused with as a fact or command. The craving is not you. It's something that's happening in you, and you can observe it without obeying it.
Committed action toward values , identifying what genuinely matters and taking deliberate, consistent action in that direction. Not because an external authority has told you to. Because the actions serve things you've identified as genuinely important to you.
The research on ACT for alcohol use is substantial and growing. A 2017 meta-analysis found medium-to-large effect sizes for ACT-based interventions in substance use specifically, with effects maintained at follow-up.
The values-behaviour gap
The values clarification exercise in ACT , identifying what genuinely matters to you , is, in isolation, not very therapeutic. Most people already know roughly what they value. What they haven't done is hold it alongside an accurate picture of their current behaviour and look at the gap.
This is where self-monitoring data becomes the ACT tool.
Consider a person who values physical health, energy, and being present with their partner. They believe they drink moderately and that it doesn't particularly affect any of these things. They're managing fine.
Their ayodee data after six weeks shows: average consumption of 22 standard drinks per week; sleep quality rating of 4.1 on days following more than four drinks, compared to 6.8 on alcohol-free days; mood rating of 4.4 on the day following heavy use, compared to 6.2 on other days; urges peaking between 5pm and 7pm on weekdays.
The gap between "I value energy and being present" and "my data shows I'm running consistently lower mood and sleep quality than I would be without the current drinking pattern" is the ACT values-behaviour gap. Not a moral judgment. Not a diagnosis. A factual comparison between stated values and observed consequences.
ACT practitioners call this workability: not "is this behaviour wrong?" but "is this behaviour working , in the sense of serving the things you've said matter to you?" The data answers the workability question directly, without requiring the person to agree in advance that they have a problem.
Defusion and the urge log
The defusion component of ACT , creating distance between urges and self , maps directly onto what the urge log does.
The experience of a craving, from the inside, is often fused: I want a drink. The "I" and the "want" are merged. The craving presents itself as a fact about what I need, rather than as a passing state that's happening in my nervous system.
Logging the urge creates defusion in real time. When you open ayodee and type or tap "urge present, intensity 7, 6.15pm, home after work" , you have moved from being the craving to describing it. You have, literally, placed it at a slight remove. You've made it an object of observation rather than a state you're inside.
This is not a metaphor. It's a perceptual shift that ACT considers one of its primary mechanisms. The craving is now something you're noticing, not something you are.
The psychological flexibility ACT is building
What ACT is actually developing, across these techniques, is what it calls psychological flexibility: the ability to experience difficult internal states , cravings, anxiety, discomfort , without those states automatically directing behaviour. The flexibility to make choices based on values rather than reactions.
This is the opposite of what habitual substance use involves. Habitual use is psychological rigidity: the craving arises, the behaviour follows, automatically, because that's the established pattern. Flexibility means the craving can arise and the behaviour doesn't have to follow.
Self-monitoring builds flexibility through the accumulation of observations. Each logged urge that wasn't acted on is a data point demonstrating that flexibility exists. Each mood score that follows a different choice is evidence that the choice had a different consequence. The data doesn't change values. It shows what serving those values actually looks like in practice.
Using the data as your values exercise
A simple ACT-informed way to use your ayodee data:
Write down three things you value. Be specific , not "health" but "waking up with energy and being able to exercise in the mornings." Not "relationships" but "being actually present when I'm with my partner, not fuzzy and distracted."
Then open your data. Look at sleep quality on mornings following heavier nights. Look at mood on the days after. Look at the correlation between urge intensity and whatever emotional state preceded it.
Ask Marlatt's workability question: is what I'm doing serving the things I've said matter to me?
You don't need to answer it aloud. The data has already answered it.
ayodee tracks mood, sleep, substance use, and urges , and lets you see the relationships between them. The values-behaviour gap becomes visible when the data is accurate. Anonymous, no account needed.
References Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D., & Wilson, K.G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. Guilford Press.
Lee, E.B., An, W., Levin, M.E., & Twohig, M.P. (2015). An initial meta-analysis of acceptance and commitment therapy for treating substance use disorders. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 155, 1–7.
Luoma, J.B., Kohlenberg, B.S., Hayes, S.C., & Fletcher, L. (2012). Slow and steady wins the race: a randomized clinical trial of acceptance and commitment therapy targeting shame in substance use disorders. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 80(1), 43.