The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Move Through Depression and Create a Life Worth Living

What if depression could lead to positive change? Written by acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) cofounder Kirk Strosahl and Patricia Robinson, this revised edition of the best-selling classic, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression includes updated research on self-compassion, mindfulness, and neuroscience to help you live a more meaningful life.

If you suffer from depression, you may feel like you are living under a perpetual rain cloud, even when it's sunny outside. If left untreated, clinical depression can damage relationships, cause problems at work, lead to substance abuse, and even make it more difficult to overcome physical illnesses. You may feel too tired and scared to reach out for help, or you may try to avoid your feelings altogether. But you should know that there are little, effective ways you can overcome your depression, one day at a time.

This fully revised and updated second edition of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression shows how changing daily behaviours and practising new mindfulness skills can literally reshape your brain. Rather than fruitlessly trying to avoid your depression, you'll learn to focus on living a productive life by accepting your feelings.

There are hundreds of books that will try to help you overcome or put an end to depression. But what if you could use your depression to change your life for the better? Your symptoms may be signals that something in your life needs to change. Learning to understand and interpret these signals is much more important than ignoring or avoiding them: approaches that only make the situation worse. This workbook uses techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to offer a new treatment plan for depression that will help accept your feelings instead of fruitlessly trying to avoid them. This new edition will include skills based on new research and contributions from mindfulness, self-compassion, and neuroscience.

Using the skills outlined in this book, you'll be able to work through your depression, experience greater peace and well-being, and go on to create a better life.

"This well-written and user-friendly workbook presents new ways of understanding and overcoming depression. Based on mindfulness, acceptance, self-compassion, positive psychology, and neuroscience, it combines solid research foundations with practical methods for climbing out of helplessness and self-blame, and building a satisfying life."
- Ruth Baer, PhD, author of The Practicing Happiness Workbook

"This book is a godsend for anyone struggling with depression. It is incredibly rich in terms of theoretical and scientific scope and depth, yet provides many practical, easy-to-do exercises for readers so they can start changing how they relate to themselves and their lives right away. I couldn't recommend this book more highly."
- Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor of educational psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, and author of Self-Compassion

"In this second edition of their classic self-help manual, Kirk Strosahl and Patricia Robinson bring two professional lifetimes' worth of wisdom and experience to help us better understand depression, and work with it both skillfully and compassionately. This well-written book presents us with cutting-edge strategies drawn from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness, self-compassion, and neuroscience traditions in the service of building a life worth living. Perhaps what I like most about this book is that it isn't just about helping us cope with depression-- it's a pragmatic guide to cultivating a life filled with meaning and purpose. Rarely does a self-help resource so skillfully capture so much of the best that psychology has to offer. Highly recommended!"
- Russell L. Kolts, PhD, professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University, and author of CFT Made Simple and The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger