Life is a never-ending series of problems. Like leaves floating down a stream, as soon as one problem is behind you, it is not long before you face a new adversity. My loving mother often told me as a child, “Sometimes when it rains, it pours,” and encouraged me to accept the challenge and cultivate the skill for addressing multiple problems simultaneously without yielding to self-pity for having a heavy burden. Of course, interspersed between difficulties, there are moments of joy. Life is a fluctuating ratio of joyous to problematic moments throughout different time intervals.
Albert Ellis, the originator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, wrote that humans are natural problem-solvers. He saw psychotherapy as a problem-solving endeavor leading to action. His brainchild, REBT, aims to enhance an individual’s problem-solving skills. REBT teaches that unhealthy negative emotions undermine effective problem-solving. REBT is a powerful system of ideas that shows you how to transform your unhealthy emotional reactions into healthy ones. Healthy emotional reactions motivate you to mount creative, persistent, and effective responses to life’s most significant challenges. When you fail to solve a problem effectively, REBT teaches you to adopt what it calls the emotional solution or the philosophical solution to your problem. The emotional or philosophical solution is to accept what you cannot change, live happily despite the existence of an unchangeable circumstance, and find alternative paths to happiness despite the presence of an unalterable obstruction.
American inventor Charles Kettering said that a problem well-stated is half solved. REBT starts by helping people define their problem and evaluate whether their emotional reaction to their adversity is healthy and helpful or unhealthy and self-defeating. From the REBT theoretical perspective, we deem negative emotions like unhealthy anger, anxiety, jealousy, envy, shame, guilt, depression, and hurt to be unhealthy because they generally produce suboptimal behavioral responses to the problem at hand. There are many suboptimal responses a person may emit, which include avoiding addressing an issue, getting stuck reapplying an ineffective solution or needing to be more moderate in the application of effort to a problem. Unhealthy negative emotions also affect your ability to think creatively, diminishing the chances of devising an effective strategy to implement or leading you to prematurely abandon a plan that may ultimately work if you stay the course.
When encountering a problem, I have trained myself to think, “This is just another problem for me to solve.” This simple self-statement helps me frame my experience in a self-helping way to increase my chances of producing a healthy emotional response, setting the stage for an optimal behavioral response. If I notice any presence of an unhealthy emotion like anger, anxiety, depression, or shame, I immediately identify the rigid and extreme attitudes that might underpin my self-defeating feelings. I then use one of two questions to transform the unhealthy emotion into a healthy concern, setting the stage for optimal creative, persistent, effective responses. I use a functional question and an empirical one, as shown below:
- How is your unhealthy emotion impeding you from producing an optimal response to this problem?
- Where is the evidence that this problem must not exist or that it is unbearable or awful?
I suggest you use my simple self-instructional statement to get into a rational problem-solving mindset immediately. Have the unconditional self-acceptance to acknowledge unhealthy emotions if you are experiencing them. Acknowledge the presence of any anger, anxiety, depression, or shame and take immediate steps to transform these emotions into healthy annoyance, concern, sadness, or disappointment. If you wish to keep things simple, concern is likely the best emotion to aim to feel when facing a new problem. The healthy emotion of concern will motivate you to focus, create, persist, and test hypotheses. Self-helping concern will allow you not to deny the existence of a problem and avoid it, get stuck in reapplying a solution that has failed, get too aggressive in your response, or throw up your hands in disgust and hopelessness. Then, intentionally ask yourself the two questions I routinely use to transform my unhealthy negative emotions, which are:
- How is your unhealthy emotion impeding you from producing an optimal response to this problem?
- Where is the evidence that this problem must not exist or that it is unbearable or awful?
Then, quickly create healthy attitudes to repeat to yourself, such as:
- I wish this problem were not mine to solve, but let me face reality. It is a problem for me to acknowledge and solve. Accept its presence. Deal with it. It is just another problem to solve. It does not have to be easy, but you have what it takes to chip away at it. Keep your eye on the ball and keep testing hypotheses. Think out of the box. Assume there is a workaround. What do you need to take into account here as your tactics fail? What have you yet to try that might work? What are your assumptions? What other assumptions might you make that could lead to trying some new strategy?
- This problem is annoying and concerning but not unbearable. Keep your composure. Do not allow yourself to think you cannot bear it. Stay in the problem-solving mindset. You can do it. It is hard but well worth keeping your mind focused rather than whining about the presence of the problem. Self-pity will defeat you, as will anger.
- This problem is bad but NOT awful. It is just a hassle, an inconvenience, or perhaps a grave threat, but anxiety won’t help you effectively address it. You have experience in handling problems, and you will survive this one just like all those which you survived before. Look for the good that can come from wrestling with this problem. That which does not kill you makes you stronger. Stay disciplined in your mindset.
- Life’s most significant challenges do not have to have ideal solutions. I will pick from the existing solutions and not disturb myself that a perfect solution eludes me.
- You might not have thought of a solution yet, but that is not evidence that a solution does not exist. Rest your mind for now, but come back to it tomorrow. Keep tinkering with different potential solutions again tomorrow. Keep at it.
Humans have difficulty managing their emotions, and REBT helps you modulate emotions to make optimal efforts to solve that never-ending stream of adversities you will face until you take your final breath. If, after sufficient time and effort, you have not been able to come up with a solution to your problem, seek out the wisdom of another person. Do not define yourself as an inadequate person for being unable to solve your problem on your own. The evidence only shows that you must improve your knowledge, skill, and understanding of your problem. However, do not go beyond the facts and arbitrarily define your total personhood as deficient because the solution to this problem eludes you. Doing so would be invalid to do and demoralizing. Choose whom you consult carefully, as many people will happily render their opinions, but many views may not be worth listening to and may lead you astray.
If you and others cannot develop an adequate strategy that resolves the problem, then opt for the emotional or philosophical solution of REBT. You can remain in a mindset of disliking the state of affairs you cannot change without going beyond this psychological line and taking the self-defeating stance of demanding that the adversity you face and cannot change must not exist. Keep reminding yourself it does exist, all the conditions are right for it to continue, and while it exists, you can choose not to be miserable about its existence. You can choose not to get mired in rage, anxiety, self-pity, and despair and keep looking to find the good within the bad of those problems that persist. Assume something good can come from this challenge and extract it from the experience of facing the problem. Keep trying to find an alternate path to happiness. Finding an alternative route to happiness when one way is blocked reflects emotional health.
Keep studying REBT. It will make you a better problem-solver. The more you use REBT, the better you will get at facing life’s most significant problems and challenges. Keep at it.