Principles of Rational Living 

based on Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Theory (RECBT)

Rational Living is living a fulfilling life with a meaningful lifestyle, based on core rational principles. The goal is to be able to commit to a set of principles based on rational beliefs or mental attitudes that will allow you to live a happy and productive life and be able to manage yourself and your life when stressors or negative life events occur.

The following Rational Principles are interconnected rational beliefs or mental attitudes that provide the foundation for establishing and maintaining Rational Living:

Rational Principle 1: Self-Interest

People are usually happiest when they are absorbed in pursuing activities that bring them great satisfaction, while at the same time they maintain meaningful connections with people and things outside of themselves. Everyone has a right to personal happiness and a right to strive towards achieving it.

Becoming self-interested means going after more of what you want, and less of what you don’t want, which creates the opportunity for you to offer something special and unique to others.

Setting your self-interest as a priority requires time and effort. This entails going after your genuine wants, taking risks and discovering new ones, asserting yourself against the demands of others, exhibiting the courage to experiment with novel things that you may not end up liking, and balancing between long-term fulfilling goals and short-lived gratification. All in all, striving for self-interest is a lifelong process that cannot be achieved without a cost, and it is worth it, when you think that this is the only life you have.

Rational Principle 2: Social-Interest

Personal happiness takes place in a social context. This means that individual living is intertwined with social living, to the extent that reaching the peak of your personal happiness and freedom involves genuine concern for the wellbeing of others.

This principle gravitates with the Christian scriptural instruction, love thy neighbor as you love yourself. While reaching out and interacting with others, treat others as you would want them to treat you and do for others without expecting something in return.

Research shows again and again that personal happiness requires meaningful and fulfilling relationships, which are not possible to cultivate without social interest and caring for other people. Moreover, when facing life challenges, our personal resilience is significantly promoted by a strong support network built on social interest.

Nonetheless, be mindful to remain you while doing things for others and your community. Self-interest and social interest are not mutually exclusive but complementary. It’s a matter of balancing your wishes with those of the other person. You can only give away what you have, so while taking care of others, don’t forget to take care of yourself too.

Rational Principle 3: Self-Direction

Striving for your own happiness is a lifelong task of taking responsibility for yourself without expecting others to do it for you. Pursuing your personal happiness will bring you up against strong biological constraints of human nature as well as the restrictions and conditions placed by society.

Human existence encompasses many challenges which may be difficult to tolerate and deal with but are hardly horrible and awful as life experiences. To achieve personal happiness, you need to make a conscious effort to minimize the difficulties in your life, deal with your problems efficiently without exaggerating them, and create and choose many pleasurable and fulfilling activities.

As the founder of REBT, Albert Ellis, stated – life is spelled h-a-s-s-l-e. This said life is filled with challenges that we can tolerate, with effort and determination. It is worth it to fully accept challenging and difficult endeavors while working to make them less challenging. Ultimately, we want to be able to live a life with purpose and enjoy the journey in the process.

By planning and mapping a self-directed path and working toward it consistently with force and determination, we can experience moments of self-actualization.

Rational Principle 4: Self-Acceptance

According to the REBT theory of personality, you don’t have value at all, you don’t have such a thing as intrinsic worth. In REBT we consider the question of self-worth, irrelevant: the issue of intrinsic worth is tricky because when you acknowledge an individual as worthy, you are implying that others can be worthless, with no criteria defined.

Some other theories may posit that “You are a good person because you are alive.” Instead, REBT would respond, “You are not a good or bad person, you are just a person who does good and bad things.” It is only particular aspects of yourself that can be actually defined and rated, and not the self as a whole.

It’s often difficult for people to truly grasp that and to only rate their deeds and traits and not their whole self or essence; because the strong, irrational tendency to rate yourself globally is an unfortunate part of the human and societal condition.

To illustrate this idea of self-acceptance, consider these examples:

Suppose we had a basket of fruit, with bananas and apples. Some of those bananas and apples are good and some are bad. What’s the rating of the basket? Is it a good basket or a bad basket? Or is it a basket with good and bad fruit?

Suppose you did a positive act or won a competition. Does this make you a good person or a person who did a positive act or won a competition?

Unconditional Self-Acceptance (USA) means that you always accept yourself while at the same time you are determined to change what you can. This principle resonates with the Christian idea of evaluating the sin, not the sinner.

Self-acceptance does not mean resignation nor liking the negative characteristics that interfere with you living a fulfilling, meaningful life. You can choose to discipline yourself to change what you don’t like, with realistic expectations, while always accepting yourself as a fallible, imperfect human being. Be sure to acknowledge and promote your strengths, while building your tolerance for what you don’t like and working towards changing those particular aspects of what you don’t like.

Self-rating poses an emotional hardship on you as when you behave positively, you then rate your whole self positively (elevate self: self-upping) and feel happy, whereas when you behave negatively, you then rate your whole self negatively (decrease self: self-downing) and feel depressed. When you engage in a pattern of self-rating you place yourself on an emotional roller-coaster with highs and lows, thereby being at risk for psychopathology.

Every human has a choice to rate themselves or to rate their behavior. Given that humans are unique, complex, multi-faceted, and always in a process of change, it is not possible to rate the whole human, only the parts of the human that is behaving one way or another at any given time.

Rational Principle 5: Tolerance of Others

When you engage in self-acceptance, you fully grasp the idea of unconditional acceptance, and you frequently can apply it to others too.

Thus, when you accept others, you accept them as unique, with their strengths and weaknesses, their positives and negatives, and with their different ideas or habits. Acceptance is not the same as liking.

Unconditional Other Acceptance (UOA) means that you always accept others’ personhood, and you never damn their total selves. You tolerate their human nature while disagreeing with some of their actions or ideas. Other acceptance is acknowledging that humans are fallible. You assert yourself and you ask more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. At the same time, you increase your range of tolerating what you don’t like or want, when it is worth it to do so, and when it does not pose harm to yourself or others.

This principle resonates with the golden rule to treat others as you would like to be treated. Thus, when we develop genuine care about the other person, we can bring out the best in others, tolerate what we don’t like and be determined to influence others to change what we don’t like, in an assertive but respectful manner.

Rational Principle 6: Short-term and Long-term Hedonism

Individuals who are well-adjusted strive for a balance between short-term pleasures and long-term life fulfilling goals. This principle aims to reinforce the idea that a balance between enjoying immediate, short-term pleasures and pursuing long-term goals will bring about rational, long-lasting living and satisfaction.

Setting and aligning yourself with long-term goals will increase your motivation while integrating short-term pleasures. Although there are no guarantees, life is better lived by investing in long-term pursuits while sacrificing some more immediate pleasures along the way.

Many times, especially with procrastination, we emphasize the saying: no pain, no gain. What this means is that it is wiser to do today what is your priority and in your best interest, rather than putting it off for tomorrow. Although sometimes it is hard to push yourself today, it may be harder tomorrow. In addition, the more you practice increasing your frustration tolerance for discomfort or dealing with difficult situations, the stronger your frustration mental muscle will become to enable you to increase your persistence toward your long-term goals. To maintain momentum, scheduling some “rewarding pleasure” along the way might be a good idea. Again, it’s all about balance.

Rational Principle 7: Commitment to Creative, Absorbing Activities and Pursuits

Getting involved with people and things outside yourself, with activities that you find interesting, challenging and creative is a proven source of happiness. It promotes positive feelings, is inherently rewarding, and can provide both pleasure and meaning to your life.

Individuals who don’t impel themselves towards creative pursuits are usually driven by inaction and inertia, often a source of boredom and misery in the long run.

Each one of us can try out and discover fields of interest and activities that can be challenging and fulfilling. It usually is not easy at the beginning, and you may need to push yourself at times. But if you persist, it pays off.

In most ways, this is for you and no one but you, to discover. You don’t have to discover an absorbing field spontaneously. Just absorb yourself in self-interested and self-directed activities. You may have to look around for something vital, push yourself experimentally into a chosen field and persist at it for a while before you really become absorbed in it.

Rational Principle 8: Responsible Risk-taking and Experimenting

Responsible risk-taking behavior is another indicator of emotional health and living a full and satisfying life. Experimentation can be uncomfortable but also very rewarding.

Confronting things forthrightly and not being afraid of failure are means for striving towards a personally meaningful and successful life. This attitude allows you to embrace in a powerful and non-catastrophic manner the uncertainty and ambiguity that characterize the condition of being human.

In this sense, taking the risk to experiment with and discover for yourself those things and activities that you find personally meaningful and rewarding, as well as those that you don’t, is a step in the right direction towards living a full and happy life.

Individuals that grasp this principle tend to be adventurous, take calculated risks with new ideas, activities, situations, and people without demanding control and guarantee of outcomes. Engaging in risk-taking and experimenting behavior will allow an individual to live a more fascinating and exciting life, with meaning, purpose, and freedom.

Rational Principle 9: High Frustration Tolerance and Willpower

Will alone is not enough. Willpower is will plus action. The process of striving towards human happiness and personally meaningful existence is rarely, if ever, a passive and effortless one.

Instead, working towards achieving such important life tasks is a process that requires sheer mental strength and stamina, as well as a philosophy of life that is underpinned by high frustration tolerance in the face of unavoidable hassles and struggles that are likely to be faced along the way. Frustration mastery is a skill that can be learned through practice: the more you do something hard, the easier it gets.

It is important to direct forceful effort toward your goals and continue striving for them as this willpower acts as a positive feedback loop for more motivation, persistence and ultimately success. It is like when pushing the ball by force to roll in the desired direction, it gains momentum and speed along the way.

Set your goals, go after them with willpower and determination. This will allow you to live a life worth living, as you will ultimately get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.

Rational Principle 10: Problem-Solving

Problems are an inevitable part of life. When confronted with a problem or dissatisfied with a particular behavior or the direction of a situation, make sure to check your beliefs or mental attitudes about the problem. If you have rigid beliefs and mental attitudes about it, then you now have two problems – a practical one and an emotional one.

If this is the case, first work on the emotional problem as it tends to place a shadow over the situation and negatively affect your clarity. Using the ABC framework within the RECBT model, you can identify your inflexible and rigid thinking patterns that lead to negative unhealthy emotions (e.g., shame, anxiety, depression, anger) and interfere with implementing effective problem-solving interventions.

There are many solutions to a problem and through brainstorming with problem-solving strategies and techniques, you can solve many problems. Some problems require more time and effort. As Rome was not built in a day, some problems pre-exist, and some are more complicated than others. Still, you can recognize that there are many solutions to problems and explore them. By reflecting through a cost-benefit analysis on the best short-term and long-term solutions, choose the solution that is quantitatively and qualitatively the best one for you.

Despite your problems, you can continue living your life and getting pleasure, although maybe not as much pleasure as when you did not have this particular problem. This principle is aligned with the Serenity Prayer and Me by Reinhold Niebuhr: Grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept those that I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference.

Rational Principle 11: Scientific Thinking and Flexibility

Self-actualized individuals tend to display more objective, rational and scientific thinking, as well as more experiences of emotional wellbeing and life satisfaction. These individuals are open to new experiences and new explorations. They tend to challenge their own beliefs in the face of new information and thus spot more opportunities and adapt easily to new situations.

Being able to bend or alter your own assumptions and beliefs based on valid and logical data is a different kind of openness that promotes personal growth and self-actualization. Life becomes less threatening with flexible thinking, and challenges are considered as lessons.

On the other hand, individuals with rigid, inflexible beliefs, experience more unhealthy negative emotions, and self-defeating behaviors and live with frequent setbacks. These individuals adopt a less “scientific approach”, that is they usually believe that they hold “the whole truth” and that things should go as they expect. With this attitude, they often get ruled by their own negative emotions when things don’t go as planned and make difficult situations worse for themselves.

Acquiring and cultivating a logical, flexible, and scientific mindset is not only helpful to achieving your short-term and long-term goals but will also greatly affect your overall lifestyle. Scientific thinking allows you to problem solve effectively, grow through life experiences, live more positively, and enjoy a happy and fulfilling life.

Sources:

Bernard, M. E. (2010). Rationality and the pursuit of happiness: The legacy of Albert Ellis. John Wiley & Sons.

Ellis, A. (1994). Reason and emotion in psychotherapy. New York: Carol Publishing Group.