Name: Who is the Dictator Within?
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T22:48:20.000Z
Duration: 19 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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We're going to be talking a lot about pivots today in this, the second episode of Simon's book club, where every month we'll be reading some of the best books on psychology, the science of wellbeing, neuroscience and consciousness, and then discussing them here in this video and in the book club.

I'm posting the first part of it here on Ichikimchi and the rest of it will be on my new channel, Simon's book club.

In this episode, I'll be talking about a liberated mind, how to pivot towards what matters.

It's written by Stephen Hayes, the founder of both acceptance commitment therapy known as ACT and relational frame theory known as RFT.

For those of you who know a bit about therapy, you might've heard of CBT cognitive behavior therapy, which is the gold standard in psychology for now.

ACT is right up there with it, but it's not as popular yet.

A good part of this book focuses on the shortcomings of CBT and how, while CBT is part of the second wave of psychotherapy, ACT is at the forefront of the third wave.

If you're interested in mental health and wellbeing, then ACT is where you need to be looking.

ACT is one of the most well-researched forms of behavioral intervention with hundreds of randomized control trials and a bunch of meta-analysis as well, meaning it's not some new fandangled trend.

This stuff is solid science and many therapists have taken on ACT.

From the resume I'm about to read you, it seems like ACT can do it all.

It can reduce chocolate cravings, improve overall diet and exercise, manage stress, improve sleep, improve mental health better than medication, help with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders, psychosis, can change your genes, and I don't mean denim, greatly help with autism, and there's a really touching story on that, improve your relationships with your children and romantic partners, overcome prejudice, improve performance, learning, and creativity, reduce procrastination, improve your spirituality, cultivate forgiveness, cope with illness and disease, reduce sick days at work, help with chronic pain, diabetes, cancer, tinnitus, which I've heard called tinnitus, which doesn't make sense.

And it can even help fight the spread of Ebola and Sierra Leone.

I could be wrong here, but based on what I'm getting from this book and based on all those studies and trials, ACT is a miracle cure that can help you in every aspect of your life.

Want to be better at leaving YouTube comments?

Ain't no comments popping up in this video.

So in this episode, I'll be talking a lot about psychological flexibility, how avoiding suffering is causing more suffering.

I'll be talking about the voice in your head known as the dictator within how it was born, how it keeps on growing and how to free yourself from it.

I'm also covering the six points from inflexibility to flexibility, growth mindsets, why CBT isn't as effective and how you can build your own toolkit to incorporate ACT into your life.

For this video though, I'll just be speaking about the voice inside your head, the dictator within the voice that only you can hear the one that narrates your life for you and takes you down many different tangents like, Oh, it's raining outside.

I should take the plants out so they could get watered.

Matter of fact, when's the last time I drank water?

I should be drinking eight glasses a day.

I heard something about drinking too much water and how you should only drink when you're thirsty and I'm not thirsty or am I?

This is the voice that keeps you up at night.

This is the voice that tells you to be shamed of yourself for that bad joke.

This is the voice that makes you doubt yourself, that tells you stories to worry about, that tells you that you're not good enough, that others aren't good enough.

The one that gets us out of the present moment of I, here, now, and either rehearses the future or rehashes the past.

This is the voice that gives you your sense of self, your ego in the most literal terms, this is the voice that people identify with or as Hayes puts it.

Whether the voice is positive or negative is not as important as whether it dominates us.

What is so potentially dangerous about the power this voice can have over us is that we lose contact with the fact that we are even listening to a voice.

This here is a very important observation.

One that I don't think a lot of people are aware of yet.

Very often we are hijacked by our thoughts, but our thoughts are not who we are.

Who we are is a later part of this discussion.

I'm going to put on my namaste voice for this one.

Right now, give your full awareness to what you're seeing.

Everything that's popping up in front of your eyes right now, the awkward stock footage on your screen, the stuff out of focus behind your screen, the fuzzy items at the edge of your peripheral vision, you can be aware of all that.

Now, unhook your awareness from what you're seeing and direct your full awareness to what you're hearing.

What music and words are happening in front of you?

What sound is your building making, coming at either your left or your right ear?

Now, just for a bit, unhook your awareness from what you're hearing and direct your full awareness to your thoughts.

Whatever is arising, whatever words, be aware of them.

So now you are aware of what you saw, but you weren't what you saw, right?

You weren't the screen that you were looking at, and then you were aware of what you were hearing, but you weren't what you were hearing, right?

So in the same way, you can be aware of your thoughts, but you are not aware as your thoughts.

You have your consciousness, and then you have the contents of your consciousness, be they sights, sounds, or thoughts, or whatever other sensation you're feeling.

They all pop up randomly without your control, and you can either fuse with them and identify with them.

Or you could just be aware of them, observe them and let them go.

Thanks for, thanks for doing that with me.

And I know this might sound like mystical woosh, but this awareness of thoughts and distancing from thoughts, isn't some kind of useless trick.

It's a big part of not only act, but also a part of CBT and other forms of therapy.

And it's central to Buddhism and mindfulness as well.

So this awareness of our thoughts and awareness that we are not our thoughts is just the first step though.

It's not like once you've seen how a magic trick is done, then you won't ever be suckered again.

Oh no, you can be aware of the tricks of the mind and still get lured back in over and over again.

It's not like the voice says, aha, you got me fine.

I wish it was that easy, but it takes a lot of training, a lifetime of training to constantly bring your awareness back to awareness, unless you were taught from a young age to be mindful of your thoughts, then you have a lifetime of training of being caught up in your thoughts, if you've been smoking for 20 years and you think that's a hard habit to quit, quitting, identifying with your thoughts is possibly the hardest habit to break, or you could put in the words of Mark Twain, who said quitting was the easiest thing he's ever done.

You've been getting wrapped up in your thoughts since you were four years old.

And you have laid out quite the thorough story of your life, of your experiences in this journey that you call your life.

So why do we identify with these thoughts?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Who is the Dictator Within?

perspective

anxiety

episode

cognitive