Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is a philosophy that encourages personal growth throughout the lifespan. REBT gives you the tools to stay youthful and enjoy life fully as you age. REBT teaches it is better to see life as an opportunity to enjoy yourself rather than as a prideful test to meet the expectations of others and prove yourself. REBT helps you be yourself and do what makes you happy at different points in life’s journey.
Self-Discipline for Self-Care
Staying youthful enables you to participate in life fully, but it involves taking care of your body and mind. It is more challenging to make life an adventure and enjoy life fully without good physical health. REBT’s emphasis on long-term goal setting and self-discipline through high discomfort tolerance will help you maintain your body. Attitudes that enable you to make time to walk regularly, get sufficient sleep, and eat nutritiously to maintain a healthy weight will increase the probability that you will keep your physical health.
Transforming Anxiety into Concern to Take Risks
REBT is an anti-anxiety philosophy of living. REBT emphasizes the importance of calculated risk-taking, also known as adventuring. To maximize pleasure and satisfaction, you need the ability to take calculated risks in life and tolerate uncertainty. Anxiety blocks you from calculated risk-taking. Calculated risk-taking keeps you young at heart because you pursue new experiences, derive unknown pleasures, and learn a great deal through your adventures. REBT does not encourage foolhardy risk-taking, which would undermine survival and lead to pain. A healthy feeling of concern will help prevent careless risks which will endanger your long-term well-being. The healthy, flexible, and non-extreme attitudes of REBT will lead to healthy feelings of concern. The concern you generate by holding flexible and non-extreme attitudes will motivate you to do your homework and think things through before you act, which will then help you tolerate uncertainty and risk failure. Striving for new experiences, having new goals, and experimenting keeps life from getting stale but requires the ability to tolerate the possibility of failure. Experiments allow you to discover new ways to have fun, grow, and enjoy life.
Unconditional Self-Acceptance is Essential to Risk Taking
REBT encourages you to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance. When you unconditionally accept yourself, you are free to try new paths, and you can tolerate failure. When you accept yourself regardless of whether you succeed or fail, you do not experience unhealthy anxiety that holds you back from changing the direction of your life and trying new ways to add to it. Note that calculated risk-taking may cause you to fall flat on your face. With unconditional self-acceptance, you live shamelessly and can tolerate failure. You do not need the approval of others to take your calculated risks, and you do not feel the need to hide your failures from public view. You can live with your loss without downing yourself and thinking of yourself as a total failure. You rate the failed adventure, but you do not go beyond that and rate yourself.
Calculated risk-taking, tolerating uncertainty and discomfort, and unconditionally accepting yourself are core concepts of REBT that interact to allow you to stay youthful and keep experimenting in life. Whether leaving a job, a relationship, where you live, or making another major life change, these core concepts of REBT can free you to adventure. A psychological synergy is created by cultivating attitudes for each core concept. Let’s examine pairs of attitudes that either undermine or support calculated risk-taking (i.e., adventuring), uncertainty tolerance, and unconditional self-acceptance.
Self-inhibiting attitude: I have to know the calculated risk I am taking will produce satisfying results.
Self-liberating attitude: I want to know if my calculated risk will produce satisfying results, but I do not (absolutely) need to know in advance this will occur. All I have is the probability of success, and by carefully weighing the pros and cons, I have concluded that I could very well achieve my goal.
Self-inhibiting attitude: It would be unbearable to regret my decision and acknowledge I failed to get the satisfying results I set out to achieve.
Self-liberating attitude: It is uncomfortable to think I could regret taking this risk and not be satisfied with my results, but it is not unbearable. Tolerating the discomfort of preparing myself and weighing the pros and cons is worth it because I do not want to take a foolhardy risk. I can handle uncertainty. I can also tolerate the discomfort I would feel if I failed to get the desired results. I can transcend failure. I will do the homework required to succeed, but if I fail, I fail. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Self-inhibiting attitude: If I took this calculated risk to seek adventure and achieve greater satisfaction in life and failed, I would be a fool for disrupting my life as I did.
Self-liberating attitude: If I took this calculated risk to seek adventure and achieve greater satisfaction in life and failed, it would prove that I am a fallible human who failed this time. Although I would have to face the uncomfortable consequences of failure, those would not be unbearable. Tolerating those undesirable consequences would be worth doing because they would be the cost of the opportunity to improve my life satisfaction. The negative repercussions I brought upon myself would not reduce my self-worth, even if I caused them by taking this calculated risk. The critical thing to keep in mind is that I would not be a failure for disrupting my life as I did. It will be easier to tolerate the uncomfortable practical consequences of failure if I do not add to those consequences the emotional pain that comes from self-rating and self-devaluation.
Bottom Line: REBT is a philosophy that liberates you through the core concepts of unconditional self-acceptance, uncertainty tolerance, and calculated risk-taking. These resources enable you to maximize your long-term pleasure. You can never have a guarantee that a calculated risk will yield the results you desire, but with REBT, you can always choose to unconditionally accept yourself even when you fall flat on your face. Strive to stay youthful and enjoy the journey.