One of the essential skills to learn for effective living is learning how to maintain emotional and mental calm in your day to day life. If you look at things realistically there are many challenges that the average human is faced with. Rent, mortgage, job security, peer pressure, social pressure, etc etc and in spite of all of this we still want to find our happiness, freedom and meaning etc. When the going is good it’s all fine and dandy, but when the going gets tough or when you can foresee a storm up ahead, it’s handy to have a couple of tools at your disposal. Emotional and mental calm is one of them.
In order to develop emotional and mental calm one must develop self discipline. Some people don’t really like the idea of self discipline. I wasn’t completely naturally inclined to it myself. I was more inclined to just being free. But over time I realized, the more you embrace liberation, the more you gotta embrace self discipline.
As I’ve mentioned physical discipline is a great way to start. The more you train and complete your workouts the more your system starts to understand that when you set out to do something, it gets done. And so then when you tell yourself to maintain emotional and mental calm in a stressfull situation you’ll have an increased capacity to do so.
The main thing about emotional calm is learning and training yourself not to react to things. And if you do react, learning and training yourself to calm yourself down back to a point of neutrality and then maintaining that calmness in the now. Mental calmness is about learning and training to keep a quiet and calm mind, focussed in the now and to not get sucked into its thoughts when it spikes into a flurry of activity.
Some benefits of maintaining emotional and mental calm:
- increased levels of energy
- increased self empowerment
- increased sense of well being
- increased clarity and better decision making
It’s also pretty much the answer to getting you through any situation, that and handling things with virtue.
So develop self discipline. Develop emotional and mental calm. It’ll hold you in good stead.
