Published Works

A woman with curly hair sitting by a window, reading a book titled "What you feel is not all there is" in black and white.

Books & publications related to psychology, mental health, wellbeing, behavior change and choice-making by Dr. West.

Book cover titled "What You Feel Is Not All There Is" by Dr. Aprilia West with a digital matrix background and quotes from Rick Hanson and Jane McGonigal at the top.

What You Feel Is Not All There Is

Free your choices and your life from the default world of the emotional matrix.

You make around 35,000 choices every day. But many of those choices are driven by automatic emotional reactions that prioritize survival over growth, keeping you stuck in patterns that don't serve you.

This book shows you how to unplug from the "emotional matrix" and become more skillful with your emotions and choices. Through evidence-based practices rooted in contextual behavioral science, emotion science, positive psychology, and neuroscience, you'll learn to decode emotional triggers, design actions aligned with what matters, and rewire unhelpful patterns. The result: better choices, greater psychological agility, and the ability to show up as your best self—even under pressure.

“Compelling & potent.”

– Jane McGonigal, PhD, NYT Bestselling Author, Imaginable

“Transformative.”

– Rick Hanson, PhD, NYT Bestselling Author, Buddha’s Brain

“Enhance your life.”

– Todd Kashdan, PhD, Bestselling Author, The Art of Insubordination

  • “This compelling and potent book illuminates exactly how emotions shape your choices for better and for worse and also helps you tap the power of infinite games to play your way to being the best version of yourself. Dr. West takes the reader through a state-of-the-art evidence-based skills training to harness choice points by decoding emotions, overriding unhelpful defaults, rewiring unhelpful patterns and making values-based moves—even in the face of intense stress, challenge and pain. By increasing your emotional efficacy you'll learn to become the hero of your own story, transforming what's possible for you and the future you're living into”

    – Jane McGonigal, PhD, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of SuperBetter, Reality Is Broken and Imaginable, and Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future

  • “A must-read. Dr. West offers a brief, structured, highly practical emotion efficacy skills training, integrating the latest evidence-based practices of mindfulness, acceptance, and emotion processing strategies in a masterful way. The examples, reflections, and client dialogues really make the concepts come alive, and the experiential practice will help people learn and retain these important skills for wellbeing and performance.”

    – Kirk Stroshal, PhD, Co-Founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Co-Author of Brief Interventions for Radical Change

  • “A trove of practical tips. Dr. Aprilia West writes in a way that seamlessly blends pop culture and evidence-based practice. Dr. West guides readers on a journey that helps nurture flexible relationships with their emotions, empowering them to act upon what matters most. She provides entertaining and informative case examples, applied exercises, and experiential scripts. This book provides a trove of practical tips for regulation and resilience building; I highly recommend it.”

    – Amy R. Murrell, PhD, Licensed Psychologist and Author of The Becca Epps Series

  • “This delightful and brilliant book is guaranteed to make you RETHINK what you know about emotions, your choices and what’s possible for your life. With her signature playfulness and eloquence, Dr. West artfully weaves together storytelling, examples and evidence-based skills into a highly accessible format to help us unplug from unhelpful default reactions and bravely stretch for the best possible version of ourselves.”

    – Victoria Lemle Beckner, PhD, Associate Clinical Professor at University of California, San Francisco, and Co-Author of Conquering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

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Book titled '154 Simple and Powerful Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Practices for Navigating Stress, Anxiety & Burnout' by Aprilia West, PsyD, MT, PCC. The cover features a mountain and sunrise with colorful sky and cloud illustrations.

Act For Your Best Life

Navigate life’s ups and downs with flexibility & resilience.

This card deck offers 54 evidence-based prompts and practices to help you increase your psychological flexibility—a skill proven across 1,000+ research trials to enhance both wellbeing and performance.

The deck guides you to anchor in the present moment, sit with difficult emotions, unhook from unhelpful thoughts, gain perspective, clarify what matters, and show up as your best self, even in the face of stress, challenge or pain.

“A fabulous way to practice living well & with meaning.”

– Robyn D. Walser, PhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Author of Heart of ACT

“Creative and interactive.”

– Janina Scarlett, PhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist And Author of Superhero Therapy Psychologist

  • “Highly recommended! The ACT For Your Best Life card deck is like having an ACT therapist or coach in your back pocket. This is a great resource for anyone who wants to tap into their full potential by increasing their psychological flexibility.”

    – Rob Archer, PhD, Executive Coach & Consultant, Director at Cognacity, and Founder of The Career Psychologist

  • “The ACT For Your Best Life card deck is a fabulous way to regularly practice living well and living with meaning. With annotations and exercises, each card supplies the opportunity to tune into life and values, bringing awareness to experience and presence to what it means to be alive…and connected. I look forward to offering this deck to clients, friends, and family.”

    – Robyn D. Walser, PhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Author of Heart of ACT

  • “A wonderful tool that makes ACT come alive! As a therapist I can imagine using the ACT for your Best Life Card Deck in multiple ways: drawing a card in session and discussing what it might be like to live with that quality or asking clients to take a card for home practice. Or, as self-guided practice. The deck is also a great learning asset for practitioners.”

    – Louise Hayes, PhD, Clinical Psychologist and Co-Author of What Makes You Stronger

  • “I highly recommend this tool! The ACT For Your Best Life cards have clear and novel prompts to help people pause, get curious, and show up to what matters most to them.”

    – Amy R. Murrell, PhD, Licensed Psychologist and Author of The Becca Epps Series

  • “Dr. West has done a great job of distilling ACT concepts into these beautiful cards. The cards can deepen coaching conversations and help clients increase their psychological flexibility and can also be used outside of session as reflections, journaling opportunities or practice challenges.”

    – Rachel Collis, Executive Coach, Sessional Academic, Graduate School of Business at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, and Author of Applying ACT to Workplace Coaching

  • “The ACT For Your Best Life card deck makes the processes that lead to psychological flexibility accessible and affordable for everyone. She has transformed the core tenets of ACT into simple, easy to implement practices that also inspire powerful and lasting change. Whether you’re a therapist or coach who wants to incorporate ACT practices into your client work, or you’re someone who seeks deeper meaning and purpose in life, this card deck is a must-have resource.”

    – Lee Chaix McDonough, MSW, MSPH, PCC, BCC, Founder, Coach with Clarity and Author of ACT On Your Business

  • “ACT for Your Best Life is a creative and interactive deck that can function in many capacities to teach clients the key elements of acceptance and commitment therapy in a fun, playful manner.”

    – Janina Scarlett, PhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist And Author of Superhero Therapy Psychologist

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Book titled 'Emotion Efficacy Therapy' with a blue and water background, subtitle about emotion regulation treatment, authors Matthew McKay and Aprilia West.

Emotion Efficacy Therapy

Free your choices and your life from the default world of the emotional matrix.

Emotion Efficacy Therapy (EET) is an 8-session, process-based protocol that blends Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and exposure therapy. Multiple studies show it significantly increases emotion regulation and distress tolerance while reducing relapse rates among people struggling with chemical dependency.

The protocol is highly experiential, helping clients learn not just what to do differently, but how. It can be delivered in individual or group formats across clinical and organizational settings.

This professional guide includes evidence-based psychoeducation, handouts, worksheets, clinician scripts, and client examples.

Learn more about EET >

“A must-read!”

– Stefan G. Hofmann, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Boston University, and Author of Emotion in Therapy

“A gift to me and my patients.”

– Jacqueline B. Persons, PhD, Director of the CBT  and Science Center in Oakland, CA; and Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley

  • “This is a must-read. Emotion Efficacy Therapy (EET) is a well-crafted treatment protocol that combines techniques from effective, emotion-focused, and transdiagnostic treatments. The well-written program gives concrete guidelines for the therapist to help their clients enhance their emotional awareness, utilize mindful acceptance and coping strategies to regulate emotions, and choose adaptive and value-based actions. This valuable book will provide clinicians with a powerful and much-needed clinical tool and will help countless clients suffering from emotional distress.”

    – Stefan G. Hofmann, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Boston University, and Author of Emotion in Therapy

  • “This book is a must read for any therapist who wants to work with emotionally dysregulated clients in a time-effective fashion. The brief, structured, highly practical emotion efficacy therapy (EET) approach is clearly described—step by step—and integrates mindfulness, acceptance, and emotion processing strategies drawn from different therapy models in a masterful way. Each facet of EET is demonstrated via therapist-client dialogues, which make the concept come alive clinically.”

    – Kirk Strosahl, PhD, cofounder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Co-Author of Inside This Moment

  • “Highly recommend. Emotion Efficacy Therapy (EET) is a brief, practical, and penetrating therapy that helps clients become more skillful with their critically important emotions. On a foundation of scientific evidence, they offer a structured program rich with useful tools, handouts for clients, clinical examples, and guidance for specific issues. This is an extremely well-considered, conceptualized, and thorough book—useful for clinicians at any level.”

    – Rick Hanson, PhD, Author of Buddha’s Brain and Hardwiring Happiness

  • “This book is a gift to me—and to my patients. Written by truly brilliant clinicians, it provides an easy-to-use set of concepts and tools. We often tell our patients to ‘sit with’ their painful emotions. I’ve frequently wondered what that meant and how to do that exactly. This book’s description of the skills of emotion surfing gives me the information I’ve been seeking.”

    – Jacqueline B. Persons, PhD, Director of the Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Science Center in Oakland, CA; and Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley

  • “This is the book that clinicians have been waiting for. Instructive handouts and sample therapist-client dialogues bring treatment components to life. Clinicians now have a resource that strategically guides them when helping clients increase awareness and acceptance of emotions, choose value-based actions, and practice distress tolerance skills, all within an exposure-based model.”

    Joan Davidson, PhD, Co-Director of the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy; Assistant Clinical Professor in the Clinical Science Program at the University of California, Berkeley; Co-Author of The Transdiagnostic Road Map to Case Formulation and Treatment Planning; and Author of Daring to Challenge OCD

  • “The strategies laid out in this well-written, accessible, and practical guide will show clients how to experience a full range of emotions while reducing their pain and suffering. Each chapter is filled with illustrative case examples and practical worksheets that make it easy to deliver the program.”

    – Martin M. Antony, PhD, ABPP, professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto, ON, Canada; and Co-Author of The Shyness and Social Anxiety Workbook and The Anti-Anxiety Workbook

  • “A ‘must’ for therapists, supervisors, and trainees attempting to treat multiple problems simultaneously using a transdiagnostic approach. This highly practical and timely treatment offers therapists a clear, step-by-step guide to helping clients improve their awareness of and ability to cope with strong emotions. The illustrative dialogues and accompanying worksheets reflect the authors’ expertise in translating techniques into practice with actual clients, which is supported by the robust initial outcome data”

    – Rochelle I. Frank, PhD, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley

  • “I highly recommend this book. Based on sound, evidence-based principles, this book presents a straightforward approach to helping individuals who struggle with intense emotions with few resources or skills to manage them.”

    – Michael A. Tompkins, PhD, Licensed Psychologist; Co-Director of the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy; Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Diplomat and Founding Fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy; and Author of Anxiety and Avoidance

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Book titled 'Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace', edited by Wendy-Ann Smith, Ilona Boniwell, and Suzy Green, published by Springer.

Positive Pyschology Coaching in the Workplace

This academic text edited by Ilona Boniwell, Wendy-Ann Smith and Suzy Green, explores how positive psychology coaching can enhance workplace thriving, integrating perspectives from organizational psychology, coaching psychology, and related fields. It covers resilience, wellbeing, leadership, psychological flexibility, ethical practices, and the convergence of clinical interventions with workplace strategies.

Dr. West coauthored the chapter "Acceptance and Commitment Coaching in the Workplace," which introduces the theory and processes underlying psychological flexibility. The chapter includes practical applications and case studies demonstrating how to use these approaches to increase wellbeing and performance in today's volatile, uncertain, complex workplace.

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