The research the Roadmap stands on
Part of every Roadmap rests on borrowed ground, and the source deserves its name: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT, one of the most researched approaches in modern psychology. Decades of work, hundreds of clinical trials, and one central idea that survived all of them.
The idea: what wrecks people isn’t the thought or the feeling. It’s how little room they have to move when it shows up.
Flexibility, in plain words
ACT calls that room psychological flexibility, and it breaks into six kinds. The Roadmap reads all six from your answers, so it’s worth knowing what they actually are.
What you do with the feeling itself. Fight it, flee it, numb it, or let it be there while you do what matters. The last option is uncomfortable, and so we tend to gravitate towards the first three options. What if emotions only want to be recognized? If genuinely felt, a feeling becomes something that simply provides information, and then loses intensity. Refused, the refusal itself feeds it.
How much imagined thoughts read as fact. “There is a chance I loose this job” and “I’m going to lose this job” will convey different meaning. Same notion, completely different approach, depending on how fused you are with the situation; how much you are allowing the situation to determine you.
Where your attention lives in time. Rehearsing last Tuesday, pre-living next Monday, or here. A pattern almost always pulls attention out of the present, because the present is where you could recognize it.
How much the issue has become who you are. “I procrastinated this week” and “I’m a procrastinator” describe the same seven days. Only one of them has an exit.
Whether what you care about is still visible. Under a running pattern, the original point (the marriage, the work, the kid) drops out of view, and the fight itself becomes the whole field of vision.
Whether decided steps actually happen. Insight that never turns into a Tuesday-afternoon action is scenery. ACT’s word for the alternative is committed action, and it’s deliberately unglamorous: small, scheduled, done.
What the Roadmap borrows
First, the readings. Your answers get scored on those six kinds of flexibility, which is why the questionnaire asks how things sit with you rather than what type you are. The scores decide how deep your Roadmap can safely go and what kind of move it hands you.
Second, the placement. ACT’s tools each work at a specific point in a pattern’s chain, the five checkpoints we call AIRIA. Defusion (getting a millimetre of distance from a thought) works where the story jams. Acceptance (letting the feeling be there without obeying it) works where the feeling jams. Committed action works where the move jams. So when your Roadmap gives you one thing to do this week, it’s often a small, unlabelled cousin of one of those tools, matched to where your loop sticks, instead of handed out at random.
Quick answers
Do I need to know ACT to use a Roadmap? No. The vocabulary stays out of it; you get the reading and one thing to do this week. This page exists so you can check the ground it stands on.
Where can I read the research? Search “psychological flexibility” together with “meta-analysis”. The literature is large and public.
What we left, and what we don’t claim
The Roadmap is not therapy, and it is not an ACT course. ACT in a clinician’s hands treats; the Roadmap measures and mirrors. It tells you where your room to move has gone narrow and hands you one first, small way to widen it. The deeper work, if you want it, belongs with a professional, and if you ever sit down with an ACT therapist, everything your Roadmap named will transfer: same map, same vocabulary, no starting over.
We also don’t claim the research proves the Roadmap works. It proves the ground the Roadmap stands on: that flexibility can be measured, that it moves, and that when it moves, life gets measurably better. What the Roadmap adds is the reading of where your own flexibility narrows, in one situation you choose, with one cue and one thing to do this week. Sample free.
→ See a sample Roadmap (free) · Get your Roadmap ($27)
Because you can’t change something you can’t see.