Want to be less stressed? Accept the bad days, too and stop beating yourself up

Ready to gain a secret to reducing your daily stress levels?

This powerful and ancient secret is actually quite simple, just as the best truths usually are.

This secret to reducing daily stress, as the title alludes to, is:

To accept the cyclical nature of life, without creating mental resistance to it.

The cyclical nature of life refers to the eternal dichotomies throughout the universe. It can be expressed in innumerable different spectrums, such as what goes up eventually comes down, what is hot ultimately becomes cold, or what is seen as “good” will ultimately be recognized as “bad.”

The evidence of the eternal cyclical nature of life is all around us, too, all throughout history. Assembled stars eventually decay into black holes or explode into supernovas, which give rise to new stars. The most powerful civilizations eventually die, decay, or contract, leaving space for new civilizations to expand. Every living thing eventually dies and decays into the world, and new living things are constantly born. Both your joyful and upset feelings have a shelf life, just as eventually the sun is uncovered again from behind the clouds.

The way the cyclical nature of life factors into creating your stress has to do with your mental reactions to how you feel, day in, day out. On some days, you — or rather your Ego Mind — will feel fantastic and congratulate yourself for being witty, talented, or popular. On some days, you will feel awful and that’s when your Ego Mind will mentally beat yourself up, telling you that you’re worthless, good-for-nothing, or a loser. We can’t help but have emotional reactions, but we can help our subsequent thought-based reactions to those emotions. So, the secret to reducing your life stress is simply to accept this universal truth of the cycles of life, and to not beat yourself up when you are having a bad day.

When we are feeling off, down, or bad, our immediate desire is to reject those feelings and look for a way to instantly feel better, upbeat, or good; that is, to mentally resist the natural cycles of life. However, it is of vital importance to contemplate the reasons to continue giving into this knee-jerk…