Whenever certain difficulties and problems arise, we should make up our mind to reduce our mental agony. First, we must try to understand the nature of the world where we live. We can never expect everything in this world to be perfect and to run smootly. The world situation may not always be in our favour. There could be no world and no life without problems. Natural forces like sunlight, rain, wind and moonlight are favourable and useful to many, yet at times they could be a nuisance to many others. There is in fact nothing perfectly bad of perfectly good in this world because the very things that are welcomed by one group could be hated by another group. Therefore, we define good and bad according to our needs. Things are neither good nor bad by nature, According to Buddhism, the world exist on conflict to which we become part of. If we have strong selfish cravings for existence and the senses, we will have to pay the price- the mental agony of having to survive with a topsy-turvy view of the world. Wishful thinking, yearnings for eternity and clinging to feelings such as the elusive ‘l’ or ‘Me’ only warp the mind and its sense of time. Unfulfilled desires yields their crop of quarels, friction, communication failures, fear, worry, loneliness and anxiety. There are no free rides. If you are desirous of eradicating the mental agony within us, we have to subdue selfish cravings. Life’s journey has a T-junction. Either we take the right path and develop our spiritually to unwind the tensions of wordly life or you continue to indulge in sensual pleasures with their many
attendant confrontations. One way to relieve ourself of our occasional mental agony is to understand the degree of our own sufferings and difficulties compared with those experienced by others. When we are unhappy, we often feel that the world is against us. We think that everything around us is about to collapse. We feel that the end of the road is near. However, if you take a mental note of things around us and count our blessings, surprisingly, we will find that we are indeed much better off than many other people.

You might have probably heard the saying; I complained I had no shoes until I met a man who has no feet. In short, we have been unduly exaggerating our own difficulties and problems. Others are in fact worse off, and yet they do not worry themselves induly. Problems are there. We should try to solve them instead of worrying and creating mental anguish within us.