45 WELLNESS

Wellness and the Use of Acceptance Commitment Training in the Workplace

Abstract

Work-life balance and burnout are buzzwords in current work culture with serious consequences if ignored. Those who are in helping fields, such as behavior analysis, are often spending their days putting others ahead of themselves, making them especially susceptible to burnout. This chapter reviews the statistics of workplace stress and burnout, common organizational misalignments and employee behavior patterns, and the business ramifications for ignoring employee well-being. Behavior analysts have a unique skill set to be able to identify, measure, and modify socially significant behavior and should prioritize well-being behaviors within themselves and amongst their teams to become and remain successful. Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACTr) offers a supplemental skillset to behavior analysts willing to study private behaviors that can be applied to workplace well-being. This chapter offers one simple tool for employees to begin immediately targeting work-life balance and well-being for themselves and their teams.

Keywords

workplace stress

work-life imbalance

six-core misalignments

Acceptance and Commitment Training

psychological flexibility

matrix

values

committed actions

cognitive defusion

self as context

present moment awareness

workload

feedback

stress

exhaustion

turnover

well-being

climate crisis

absenteeism

presenteeism

boundaries

private events

climate change

environmental sustainability

About

Kate Elizabeth Harrison

M.Ed., BCBA