ADD/ADHD

ACT tends to be a good fit if you've spent a lot of energy trying to control, suppress, or eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings — and found that the harder you fight them, the stronger they seem to get. Rather than trying to reduce distress directly, ACT teaches you to change your relationship to it, making room for difficult experiences while still moving toward what matters most to you. It's particularly well-suited to people dealing with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, or burnout, and it's a strong option for anyone who finds that understanding a problem intellectually doesn't seem to shift how they feel about it.

It is. This type of therapy is well-suited for virtual sessions using secure video platforms. The effectiveness of online therapy has been consistently demonstrated, with results matching those of in-person care for a broad range of mental health issues. If you're looking for this type of therapy online, you can use this link to find an ACT therapist who takes your insurance.

Whether ACT is covered for you depends on your individual insurance plan. Most major insurance plans cover therapy when it's provided by a licensed mental health professional, regardless of the type of therapy you choose. What matters more is whether therapy is considered medically necessary given your diagnosis. The best way to find out what you'll pay is to check your plan's explanation of benefits, call the member services number on your insurance card, or use Alma's free cost estimator tool before booking.

Both ACT and CBT work with thoughts — but they approach them very differently. CBT typically asks whether a thought is accurate and helps you replace it with a more balanced one. ACT doesn't focus on changing the content of thoughts at all. Instead, it uses a technique called "cognitive defusion" to help you observe your thoughts as mental events rather than facts, reducing their power without needing to argue with them. ACT also has a stronger emphasis on values-based action: rather than working primarily to reduce symptoms, it asks what kind of life you want to be living and helps you build toward that, even in the presence of discomfort.

ACT is built around six interconnected processes that together build what the approach calls psychological flexibility — the ability to stay present and act in line with your values, even when life is painful. Those processes are: acceptance (making room for difficult experiences rather than fighting them), cognitive defusion (creating distance from unhelpful thoughts), present-moment awareness, self-as-context (developing a stable sense of self that isn't defined by passing thoughts or feelings), values clarification, and committed action. In practice, sessions often involve experiential exercises and metaphors alongside conversation, making ACT feel quite different from traditional talk therapy.

Yes. ACT has a particularly strong evidence base for anxiety disorders, and it's one of the most thoroughly researched approaches for this area. The key insight ACT brings to anxiety is that the effort to avoid or suppress anxious feelings often makes them more persistent — a phenomenon researchers call "experiential avoidance." Rather than teaching you to manage anxiety by reducing it, ACT helps you relate to anxiety differently, so it no longer controls your behavior. People who go through ACT often report that they still experience anxiety, but it has less power over what they do.