Over our lifetimes, as years of experiences accumulate, we can begin to formulate a universal lesson: No matter how many bad things you went through in the past, you were still alive when they were over. This isn’t really something that you consciously decide. It’s something you teach a deeper part of your brain through practice. You have to know it, not just know the words for it. 

As this settles in, it begins to alter both stages of the stress appraisal process. You’re more likely to accurately understand the scope of what is happening, and you’ll know that no matter how it plays out, you’ll have the capacity to handle it, even if things go badly.

This shifts your sense of control away from needing external events to occur in a certain way to knowing that regardless of how those events go you can still dictate your own response to them. Once you know that even the worst-case scenario is manageable, you gain freedom.

By letting go of your need for things to happen in a particular way, you gain the ability to accept and work with them as they are. You’ll know that it doesn’t matter what the world throws at you because you’ve got what it takes to handle it, even if it hurts.