Whether we acknowledge it or not and cultivate and exploit the capability, humans can choose their emotions. You can think about your thinking, observe your internal emotional experiences, and work through your unhealthy negative feelings. However, you cannot achieve a never-ending state of emotional well-being. In Rational Emotional Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), we hold a realistic view of a human’s ability to achieve and sustain emotional well-being.
Distinguish Between Healthy Unhappiness and Unhealthy Unhappiness
It is good to distinguish between healthy unhappiness and unhealthy unhappiness. Healthy sadness allows you to adapt and make the most of life despite your loss or deprivation. Healthy unhappiness comes from acknowledging the negative state of affairs you strongly disprefer. It is also a state where you recognize that although you can prove you do not like the negative state of affairs, you cannot prove and, therefore, would be better off disavowing the notion that this challenge (absolutely) should not exist. None of us are exempt from such existential challenges, and cultivating the ability to restore your well-being regularly will maximize pleasure and minimize suffering.
Remaining in a healthy emotional state is hard to sustain. Humans have a strong inclination to create unhealthy unhappiness. We can think through these states and see that we do not have to have what we want. We can see that not having our wishes fulfilled is far from awful. We can see that life has its unfortunate and disappointing losses, failures, burdens, deprivations, and frustrations, and we can bear considerably more than we think we can. However, emotional well-being, or healthy unhappiness, sadness, sorrow, and disappointment, may not last long. Our nature as fallible humans is to return to former states of misery and depress ourselves. We easily fall back into a state of unhealthy unhappiness. Does this mean we must be miserable about our tendency to return to suffering conditions and thereby be doubly miserable? REBT firmly answers, “No!”
Accept Your Need for Daily Emotional Self-Care
REBT provides the philosophical ideas and self-care process to counter any existential challenge you may depress yourself over, but using these tools will take more effort and time than you wish it would take. Although you can learn to change some of your fundamental assumptions about life and develop increasing degrees of psychological flexibility and resourcefulness, you had better accept the idea that you must work for your emotional well-being nearly daily. Rather than think emotional well-being is a one-and-done endeavor, see emotional well-being as a process of hygiene that needs to be established and maintained on an ongoing basis. You brush your teeth daily and provide your body with nutrients daily. It stands to reason that you preferably should restore your emotional well-being daily.
Accept that You Will Need to Work Harder on Some Personal Issues
Also, expect some losses, failures, burdens, deprivations, and frustrations to be more challenging to manage and transcend than others you face. You may have to work harder over a longer period to come to terms with some matters higher on your values hierarchy. These more challenging personal issues repeatedly tempt you to make yourself miserable. Avoid demanding perfection in using REBT, as this will only lead you to devalue your total self and thereby heap misery upon misery. Demanding an ideal outcome in using REBT will lead you to stop restoring your well-being and lapse into lasting unhealthy unhappiness. Keep working at coming to terms with and restoring your state of nonsuffering with your most complex and painful challenges. Expect to make some headway even if you must exert significant effort to continue to sustain this progress over time.
What You (Preferably) Should Do Every Day
What steps must you take nearly every day to counter your nature to experience unhealthy unhappiness? Counter your rigid, unrealistic, immature attitude that you must get what you want with questions like,
- What makes me so special that I must get what I want when billions of others suffer deprivations, losses, injustices, and frustrations as bad or worse than the one my current misery is rooted in?
- Where is the evidence I cannot have any happiness even if I never have what I so strongly desire?
- How are my day-to-day functioning and problem-solving diminished by sustaining the rigid demand that things must be as I (absolutely) think they should be or that I must achieve what I want quickly and easily?
- What would be a healthier attitude about this loss, deprivation, injustice, or frustration to experience healthy unhappiness that reflects adaptation to reality and leaves room for happiness in some other way?
- Why must my life be perfect and my happiness ideal?
Albert Ellis, the originator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, encouraged people to question their self-defeating ideas regularly. He advocated this penetrating examination daily as a way of coping with our inherent human tendency to return to states of misery or unhealthy unhappiness. You can significantly progress and mature emotionally over the years, but you must keep at it! Drive yourself sane by embracing the challenge of restoring your emotional well-being daily.