How To Not Be Controlled By Fear, Failure, Turmoil & Unhappiness

How To Not Be Controlled By Fear, Failure, Turmoil & Unhappiness
By
Bill Cottringer

“A life of all positives would be very negative and probably very boring.” ~The author.

A true but unpopular reality is that you really can’t live a life free of fear, failure, turmoil and unhappiness no matter how skilled you become at practicing positive psychology. Fear, failure, turmoil and unhappiness are an equal part of the whole equation of life along with their counterparts of courage, success, peace and happiness. And often, you have to experience extremes of the negative side of life’s yang and yin equation, before the experience of the positive side is deep enough to make a lasting impression as to help you understand the “why” and “how” of this war of “opposites.”

We all want more courage, success, peace and happiness and some are actually more successful in getting these things than others are. Regardless these unwanted negative counterparts are still in everybody’s lives. Accepting that these negative things won’t go away no matter how much we would like that to happen, the question of the day becomes—What can we do to decrease the negative perceptions and the misery they bring and increase the positive perceptions and the happiness they can bring?

Our minds often lead us to make matters worse than they need to be. For instance you can feel unpleasant and hurtful pain and suffering at one level, but that feeling can be worsened by thinking certain things about that pain and suffering. When you have thoughts like—what did I do to deserve this pain and suffering, it won’t ever go away, it is ruining everything and nobody else has it this bad—then the pain and suffering feel worse. And then the vicious circle starts in which physical or emotional pain and suffering produce mental pain and suffering which in turn produce more physical and emotional pain and suffering, until there is no way out or the energy to get out.

Realizing the interactions between our physical, emotional and mental parts (you often can’t tell where or when one ends and the other starts) and the reality that they can make inevitable fear, failure, turmoil and unhappiness much worse than they need to be, is the doorway to relaxing the grip that these negative things have over your life. The more this realization takes hold, these negative things start seeming to decrease, allowing their positive counterparts to increase. At this point you are headed in the right direction of being more optimistic about being more courageous, successful, peaceful and happy. But, at the same time it becomes a real challenge to maintain that direction, knowing the negative side is just waiting in the wind to cause problems.

The success of AA is in accepting reality and taking one day at a time. Each week, one of the following affirmations can be spoken out loud each day to have a dramatic impact in improving the quality of your life:

1. What I feel about what happens to me is one thing, but what I choose to think about that feeling is quite another thing that fortunately, I have much more control over.

2. There will be fear, failure, turmoil and unhappiness coming my way if it is not here already; but I can choose how to respond to those things a little more positively to keep them from holding me in a vice grip and taking over my life.

3. I need to savor and thoroughly enjoy each moment of courage, success, peace and happiness that I do have and make them last longer, without wasting time worrying about the inevitable negatives out there waiting to happen.

4. When the inevitable negatives happen in my life, it is better to see what positive things they are trying to teach me and what positive ways I can respond to them, because this takes their sting away and they don’t feel quite so bad; plus this is the best way to start decreasing the negative things to allow the positives to return and grow stronger.

5. It doesn’t do a bit of good to notice the good things that are happening to others when they aren’t happing to me because that just makes me feel worse than I need to feel. The focus is on me and what is happening to me and how I am responding to that (and possibly making others feel in the process).

6. What I see from where I am standing at any given point in time and place, depends mostly on what I feel and what I think I see; when in a dark tunnel, it is hard to see light. But, if I can exercise more patience, time will always take me to a better place and the light at the end of the tunnel will come. And even if it is a freight train, I can always hop aboard and ride it out of the tunnel instead of getting run over.

7. I should be most appreciative of the opportunity to experience both the positive and negative side of life; the opposite of that opportunity is what is really negative!

Follow this sensible one minute prescription each day and watch the other 10,000 minutes each week be filled with more positive experiences to feel and thing positively about. At the very least, you can have 400,000 minutes of enjoyable experiences to think and feel good about each year.