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

People react in predictable ways when things they perceive to be negative happen. They either blame someone else, or they beat themselves up emotionally. Because of that lack of control over events, many are frustrated by their feelings of helplessness. Focus instead on how you respond to what’s taking place right now in your life.

Look closely at those behaviors you feel unable to resist when emotionally overwhelmed, and you’ll likely learn something about your escape patterns.

The first is that if you delay the worry, you often don’t want to do it later anyway. The second is that even when you do permit yourself some worry time, you’ll often notice that your anxiety levels are exactly the same before the worry and after. Meaning, the worry time did precisely zero to help.

But the only way to stop anxiety at its source is to confront and face uncertainty and feeling out of control without experiencing it as something bad and unbearable—something that you need to run away from or protect against. You cannot avoid uncertainty, and you don’t need to.

The first important tenet of Stoicism that will seek to promote emotional resilience is that everything that happens in the world is neutral—every event and consequence thereof. Every event has a different effect on everyone, but the events themselves are neutral, without intent, and play no favorites. There is no bad or good; it is all subjective.

The second tenet of Stoicism is to always temper your expectations and expect difficulty and challenge. This isn’t necessarily about being pessimistic; it’s more about being realistic and steeling yourself for the hardships you’ll encounter.

The simple act of slowing down and being intentional with their actions improved how they felt about, well, everything.

You can make projections and predictions about the future, and you might be right. But you can’t affect them until they happen. The best way to be prepared is to work on what’s before you right now.

Step 1: Identify Your Triggers