Calm Your Thoughts: Stop Overthinking, Battle Stress, Stop Spiraling, and Start Living (The Path to Calm Book 2)

The first thing you need to remember is a mantra called the four A’s of stress management. These are avoid, alter, accept, and adapt.

When we adapt to stress, we find ways to make ourselves stronger. We build a worldview for ourselves that empowers us.

In the longer term, we do our best in the face of stress if we can adapt. Adapting means making more lasting changes to our worldview, our goals, our perception, and our expectations.

Regrets and wishing how things could have, should have, might have been are a big recipe for anxiety. But acceptance diffuses and softens that anxiety and allows you to realize that it cannot be changed.

Acceptance doesn’t mean we agree with what happened or that we like it and shouldn’t try to change it. It only means we gracefully come to terms with what we can’t realistically change so we can focus on what we can.

Acceptance may also be about the subtle shifts in the way we frame events. We can’t change the events themselves, but we can watch how we talk about them inwardly and the language we use. For

Sometimes the material reality of our lives is not what we want it to be, but no amount of logical argument, sulking, wishing, demanding, or condemning will change it.

In meditation, we watch stressful and anxious thoughts as they arise and consciously choose our response to them. But with careful avoidance and management, we can actually step in and tweak our lives so that stressful thoughts don’t get as much chance to appear

How do you accept a situation you dislike? First, if you dislike it, then you dislike it. That’s okay. Acceptance doesn’t mean pretending you don’t feel how you feel; it’s an acknowledgment that it’s okay to feel that way. Validate your own emotions and own them.