Happiness of your life depends upon the the quality of your thoughts
“The happiness of your life depends upon the the quality of your thoughts.” ~Marcus Aurelius
Right on Marcus! Those stoics were really on to something! We have a limited control over what happens to us. In many cases we have no control whatsoever. We didn’t choose our genes or our parents or the environment into which we were born. However, thankfully, we have considerable control (with training) of how we think about and interpret the events of our lives. To the extent that our thinking is irrational, distorted, self-sabotaging, we will feel inflamed and disturbed, which will provoke use to make bad decisions which will lead us to behave in self-defeating ways that get us less of what we want and more of what we do not want.
| Albert Ellis often acknowledged the significant influence he took from Stoic Philosophy as well as General Semantics in developing REBT. |
From the REBT perspective, we would add to Marcus’s idea that happiness depends not just upon thinking, but rather upon quality thinking, emoting and behaving, and we note that those three are intimately related, and far from being mutually exclusive.
| Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. While Stoic physics are largely drawn from the teachings of the philosopher Heraclitus, they are heavily influenced by certain teachings of Socrates. Stoicism is predominantly a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world. According to its teachings, as social beings, the path to happiness for humans is found in accepting the moment as it presents itself, by not allowing oneself to be controlled by the desire for pleasure or fear of pain, by using one’s mind to understand the world and to do one’s part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others fairly and justly. Continue reading on Wikipedia |
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Do you still think that it is events “out there” that disturb you and cause you to be unhappy? REBT has a way out of that trap.
Originally posted 2016-04-11 07:31:06.
Contact: Rex@REBTinfo.com
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