What You Value and Why

Core Concepts

Values vs. Goals: A Fundamental Distinction

Most self-help frameworks conflate values and goals, treating them as points on the same spectrum. They are not. Understanding why they differ is the foundation of everything else in this module.

ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) draws a functional distinction based on completion properties. Goals are concrete outcomes with definable endpoints — they can be reached, finished, checked off. A goal can be obtained. Values, by contrast, cannot be completed. They are continuously pursuable directions, not destinations.

The difference is not just semantic. Consider:

• "Get married" is a goal. It has an endpoint.
• "Be a loving partner" is a value. The moment you wake up after the wedding, it still applies. It will still apply in thirty years.

Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson define values as "freely chosen, verbally constructed consequences of ongoing, dynamic, evolving patterns of activity" that provide meaning and coordinate behavior over extended time frames. Values are "adverb-like" — they describe how you engage with the world, not what you achieve in it.

This distinction matters practically. The same value can be pursued through multiple behavioral pathways: a person who values physical health might run, swim, cycle, or practice martial arts. If one route closes — injury, circumstance, cost — the value remains intact and can be expressed another way. Rigid goal pursuit doesn't allow for this kind of adaptability.

Values Must Be Freely Chosen

Not all "values" are genuinely yours. ACT distinguishes between authentic values and introjected values — rules that were absorbed from social pressure, family expectations, or cultural messaging and now operate as if they were your own.

Cognitive fusion — treating thoughts as literal truths rather than as mental events — can create values that are not freely chosen. When someone is fused with "I should value financial success," they pursue financial success not because it connects to something meaningful, but to avoid the discomfort of a fused rule. This is values-by-compliance, not values-by-choice.

Defusion exercises — recognizing thoughts as transient mental events rather than facts — are often necessary before authentic values clarification can happen. The question "what do you actually care about?" can only be answered clearly once the "what you're supposed to care about" noise is quieted.

The question is not "what are your values?" but "which of the things you call values did you actually choose?"

Self-Determination Theory: Three Needs, One Continuum

Where ACT asks what you pursue, Self-Determination Theory (SDT) asks why you pursue it.

SDT posits that human motivation is grounded in three innate psychological needs:

• Autonomy — a sense of volition and self-direction; acting because you chose to, not because you were told to
• Competence — feeling effective and capable in your pursuits; the experience of mastery
• Relatedness — feeling connected to and valued by others; belonging without performance

When these three needs are satisfied, intrinsic motivation flourishes and psychological well-being improves. SDT researchers call this "the bright path." When the needs are frustrated — by controlling environments, constant evaluation, or isolation — motivation withers even for activities a person nominally cares about.

SDT doesn't present motivation as binary (intrinsic or extrinsic). It describes a continuum from amotivation through several forms of extrinsic motivation to full intrinsic motivation:

Fig 1

The most relevant point for self-understanding: integrated regulation is the point at which externally-originated behaviors have been fully absorbed into your sense of self. You might not be intrinsically delighted by a task, but if it aligns with your values and identity, you pursue it autonomously. This is where values and motivation intersect directly.

Meaning-Making: Beyond Pleasure

Psychological well-being has two flavors that are easily confused:

• Hedonic well-being: feeling good; pleasure; absence of discomfort
• Eudaimonic well-being: flourishing through engagement with what is meaningful, challenging, and aligned with your values

Eudaimonic well-being — the ancient Greek concept of living according to one's nature — is more strongly associated with lasting satisfaction, purpose, and health than hedonic pleasure. Chasing good feelings alone tends to produce the opposite of what it promises.

Viktor Frankl developed this intuition into a clinical framework. Logotherapy posits that the search for meaning is a primary human motivation, not a secondary need that emerges once comfort is secured. Frankl identified three pathways through which meaning can be found:

1. Creative values — what you contribute through creation or action
2. Experiential values — what you receive through encounters and relationships, especially love
3. Attitudinal values — the stance you choose toward unavoidable suffering

The third category is distinctive and radical: even when you cannot change your circumstances, you can find meaning in how you face them. This is not toxic positivity. It is the recognition that attitude itself is a domain of values-based action.

The existential vacuum — Frankl's term for pervasive emptiness, boredom, and apathy — is not a mental illness in the traditional sense. It is what happens when meaning-seeking goes unmet. Frankl considered it a noögenic disorder: a spiritual or existential problem requiring existential rather than purely medical remedies.

Contemporary research supports Frankl's core claim: strong purpose and meaning in life is associated with reduced risk of depression, suicide, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and overall mortality. Meaning is a protective health factor with measurable biological correlates.

Procrastination: An Emotion Problem, Not a Laziness Problem

Procrastination is defined as a purposeful and self-defeating delay of an intended course of action, despite anticipated negative consequences. The key word is "self-defeating": the person knows the delay makes things worse, and delays anyway.

Why? The Sirois and Pychyl framework explains it as a hedonic shift: when facing an aversive task, the brain prioritizes short-term mood relief over long-term goal achievement. Avoiding the task feels better right now. The future self bears the cost.

Task aversiveness — how unpleasant, boring, or anxiety-provoking a task feels — is one of the strongest predictors of whether it gets delayed. This is not a failure of willpower. It is avoidance coping operating as designed.

The guilt-procrastination paradox makes this worse: guilt about procrastinating paradoxically reinforces the cycle. Initial negative emotions trigger avoidance. Avoidance generates additional guilt. More guilt generates more avoidance. The emotional escape hatch becomes a trap.

Temporal Motivation Theory

Temporal Motivation Theory (TMT), developed by Piers Steel, provides a formal framework for understanding what makes tasks feel worth starting. TMT expresses motivation as:

Motivation = (Expectancy × Value) / (1 + Impulsiveness × Delay)

• Expectancy: your confidence that you can do the task successfully
• Value: how rewarding or important the task is to you
• Delay: how far away the outcome or deadline is
• Impulsiveness: your sensitivity to delay (how quickly you discount future rewards)

The structure is telling: value and expectancy sit in the numerator — they push motivation up. Delay and impulsiveness sit in the denominator — they drag motivation down. As a deadline recedes into the future, motivation drops steeply. This is not irrational — it is hyperbolic discounting, a well-documented feature of human reward systems.

For people with ADHD, the impulsiveness parameter in the TMT equation is typically elevated. Steeper temporal discounting means that distant rewards lose their motivational pull much faster, which is why urgency and immediacy are such powerful activators for ADHD brains. This is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature of how certain nervous systems process time.

---

Compare & Contrast

Values vs. Goals vs. Wishes

	Values	Goals	Wishes
Endpoint?	Never complete	Definable endpoint	Undefined / hoped for
Agent of change	You (active)	You (active)	Often external
When achieved	Still ongoing	Finished	May or may not happen
Example	Being a present parent	Take my kid to the beach this summer	I hope my relationship improves
Function	Coordinates behavior over time	Achieves specific outcomes	No behavioral commitment

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

A common misreading of SDT is that intrinsic motivation is good and extrinsic is bad. The continuum is more useful than the binary:

	External regulation	Introjected	Identified	Integrated	Intrinsic
Why you act	To avoid punishment / get reward	To avoid guilt / self-blame	Because it matters to you	It aligns with who you are	It is inherently enjoyable
Feels like	"I have to"	"I should"	"I want to"	"This is me"	"I love this"
Sustainable?	Fragile	Fragile	More stable	Stable	Most stable

Most adult life involves a mixture of these, often on the same task at the same time. The goal is not to achieve 100% intrinsic motivation for everything — that is neither possible nor necessary. Integrated regulation — behaving in alignment with your identity and values even when not intrinsically delighted — is often the realistic and sufficient target.

Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Well-Being

	Hedonic	Eudaimonic
Core question	Am I feeling good?	Am I living well?
Time horizon	Present state	Longer arc
Examples	Pleasure, comfort, fun	Meaning, growth, connection
Health correlation	Weaker for long-term health	Stronger for long-term health
Risk	Adaptation: pleasure fades	Requires confronting difficulty

Neither is wrong. Both contribute. The problem is when hedonic satisfaction is the only target — pleasure adapts quickly, leaving a treadmill of escalating stimulation. Eudaimonic engagement involves difficulty and discomfort, but produces the kind of well-being that sustains.

---

Worked Example

From Vague Restlessness to Structured Clarity

Consider Alex, 34, who describes a persistent sense that "something is missing" but can't name what it is. Alex is professionally successful, socially connected, physically healthy. The vague dissatisfaction persists anyway.

Step 1: Distinguish symptoms from causes

Alex's experience maps onto what Frankl called the existential vacuum — not a mental illness, but a meaningful response to an unmet meaning-seeking drive. The problem is not pleasure deficit. The problem is values-action discrepancy.

Step 2: Check the motivation source

Alex examines the SDT framework. Most of Alex's current activities score high on external and introjected regulation: working hard to avoid feeling like a failure ("I should"), maintaining relationships because disconnecting would cause guilt ("I have to"), pursuing fitness because not doing so feels irresponsible ("I ought to"). Very little aligns with autonomous choice.

Using the motivation continuum, Alex realizes that very few daily activities feel like "this is me" or "I chose this."

Step 3: Distinguish values from introjected rules

Alex notices a pattern: many of the things called "my values" can't survive the question "would I still do this if nobody was watching and nobody would know?" Several collapse under the question. Those are introjected rules, not values.

What survives the question: a genuine pull toward creative work (building things, making things that didn't exist before), and care for specific people. These are candidates for authentic values.

Step 4: Apply the Bullseye assessment

Alex uses the Bull's Eye Values Survey across four domains (relationships, health/personal growth, work/education, leisure). The exercise uses a visual target: being near the center means living consistently with your values in that domain. Alex marks positions based on honest reflection.

The result: close to center on health and some friendships; far from center on creative work and meaningful contribution. The gap is visible for the first time.

Step 5: Connect procrastination to emotion, not time

Alex also notices that the creative projects — the ones most aligned with genuine values — are the ones most reliably avoided. Not from lack of time. Applying the TMT lens: value is high (genuinely wants to create), but so is delay (no deadline), and expectancy is low (afraid of not being good enough). The formula predicts low motivation regardless of importance. The avoidance is an emotion regulation move: not starting protects against the possibility of failure.

Step 6: What changes

Understanding that avoidance of meaningful work is driven by anticipated threat — not laziness, not lack of time — shifts the intervention. The target is the fear, not the schedule.

---

Active Exercise

Values Archaeology

This exercise works best done in two passes — first quickly, then slowly with scrutiny.

Pass 1 — First draft (10 minutes)

List 10 things you care about. Do not overthink. Include anything that comes up: relationships, activities, qualities you want to embody, causes, ways of working, ways of being with people.

Pass 2 — The scrutiny (20 minutes)

For each item on your list, apply these three questions:

1. Completion test: Is this completable? If yes, it may be a goal rather than a value. Rephrase it as a direction. ("Finish my novel" → "creative expression and craft")

2. Origin test: Who taught you to want this? If the answer is primarily "society," "my parents," or "what successful people do" — that is a signal of introjection, not necessarily a disqualifier, but worth noting. Would you still want it in private?

3. Obstacle test: If pursuing this value reliably brought difficulty, discomfort, or social friction — would you still orient toward it? Authentic values tend to survive this. Introjected rules often don't, because their function is to reduce social anxiety, not provide meaning.

Pass 3 — The gap (10 minutes)

For each surviving value, score from 1–10:

• How important is this to you? (importance)
• How consistently have you acted in alignment with this over the past week? (consistency)

Large gaps between importance and consistency are not reasons for self-criticism. They are information about where your attention might usefully go.

---

Quiz

1. According to ACT, what is the fundamental difference between a value and a goal?

• A) Values are more important than goals
• B) Goals can be completed; values cannot
• C) Values come from within; goals come from others
• D) Goals are measurable; values are not

Answer: B. The defining distinction is completion. Goals have endpoints. Values are ongoing directions that can be instantiated continuously but never finished.

---

2. In Self-Determination Theory, which of the following correctly describes "integrated regulation"?

• A) Doing something purely for enjoyment with no external origin
• B) Doing something only because of external reward or punishment
• C) Doing something because it aligns with your identity and values, even if externally originated
• D) Doing something to avoid guilt or shame

Answer: C. Integrated regulation is the most autonomous form of extrinsic motivation. It feels like "this is who I am," not "I have to" or "I should."

---

3. In the Temporal Motivation Theory equation, what happens to motivation as the deadline moves further away?

• A) It increases because there is more time to prepare
• B) It stays the same because the value of the task doesn't change
• C) It decreases because delay is in the denominator
• D) It depends entirely on impulsiveness

Answer: C. Delay is in the denominator. Greater delay reduces the overall motivation value, independent of how important the task is. This explains why remote deadlines generate so little urgency.

---

4. According to the Sirois-Pychyl framework, why does procrastination persist despite producing worse outcomes?

• A) People underestimate how much time tasks will take
• B) Short-term mood relief reinforces avoidance behavior
• C) People do not actually care about the tasks they avoid
• D) Procrastination allows for better ideas to develop

Answer: B. Procrastination persists because it works in the short term. Avoiding an aversive task provides immediate mood relief. That relief is a reinforcer — it makes avoidance more likely to recur, regardless of the long-term cost.

---

5. Viktor Frankl's "existential vacuum" refers to:

• A) A clinical depression requiring pharmacological treatment
• B) A spiritual or existential condition of pervasive emptiness and boredom
• C) The gap between what you want and what you have achieved
• D) Anxiety caused by awareness of mortality

Answer: B. Frankl classified the existential vacuum as a noögenic disorder — not a psychological pathology in the conventional sense, but an existential condition arising from unmet meaning-seeking. It manifests through boredom and apathy, not primarily through clinical depression.