There sure is a lot to worry about right now, isn’t there? The economy, the flu, conflicts raging in our world … and the list goes on.

The problem with fear and discouragement is they just keep us from doing anything but feeling sorry for ourselves, which only guarantees we will continue to feel fear and discouragement. Have we thought about this carefully?

The more we listen to doom and gloom voices the more discouraged we feel. The more discouraged we feel, the more certain we are that there is no other choice but to feel that way. And the more convinced we are that we have no choice but to feel the way we do, the less choice we have. And feeling that we have less choice, we feel more and more discouraged and fearful! It’s a never-ending circle and grows in its intensity unless we break that chain of thinking.

This brief column cannot address all the helpful ways available to us to deal with this discouragement cycle. MAX President and CEO David Wine lists one thought that has been helpful to him through the years. It comes from Guy Finley, author of “The Essential Laws of Fearless Living.”

“In any given moment, there is always something higher you can do with your life than sit there and suffer over what you think you can’t have, or do, or be. Why wallow when a small amount of interior work will act to change your reality?”

Wine adds that much of the interior work is simply realizing that we would be much happier and less gloomy if we didn’t insist that life be a certain way and conform to our demands.

“It is the resistance to the way things are that is the real source of our fear and discouragement,” Wine says.