How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything-yes, Anything!,: Revised And Updated

If I continue to strongly hold the belief (and to have the feelings and do the acts it often creates), will I perform well, get the results I want to get, and lead a happier life? Or will holding it tend to make me less happy?

Whenever you feel seriously upset (anxious, depressed, enraged, self-hating, or self-pitying), or are probably behaving against your own basic interest (avoiding what you had better do or addicted to acts that you’d better not do),

The concept of deservingness for one’s “sins” implies that certain acts are unquestionably under all conditions “sinful.” And this is impossible to prove.

Answer: By taking your emotional upsets, and the irrational Beliefs (iBs) that you mainly use to create them, and by using the scientific method to rip them up. By scientifically thinking, feeling, and acting against them.

Assume that most times when you feel anxious, depressed, or angry you are not only strongly desiring but also commanding that something go well and that you get what you want.

To challenge your misery, try science. Give it a real chance. Work at thinking rationally, sticking to reality, checking your hypotheses about yourself, about other people, and about the world. Check them against the best observations and facts that you can find. Stop being a Pollyanna. Give up pie-in-the-sky. Uproot your easy-to-come-by wishful th

But neurosis still comes mainly from you. You consciously or unconsciously choose to victimize yourself by it. And you can choose to stop your nonsense and to stubbornly refuse to make yourself neurotic about virtually anything.

Not all emotional disturbance stems from arrogant thinking. But much of it does. And when you demand that you must not have failings, you can also demand that you must not be neurotic. Stevie, for example, clearly saw that he was neurotic—and then put himself down for being disturbed and hence made himself more neurotic.

But the usual kinds of emotional disturbances or neuroses (such as most feelings of anxiety and rage) largely come from grandiose thinking. Even when you have great feelings of inadequacy? Yes, your inferiority feelings are, ironically, the result of your godlike demands.