One of the mind’s functions is to alert us to potential or actual problems and threats. In principle, this has a beneficial role - to direct our attention to the problem, so that we become aware of it and then solve it, to resume a normal course of life.
However, in practice, there is an inherent flaw in how the mind operates, as explained here:
Although mindfulness meditation, as well as SSRIs, may help to mitigate the effects of the mind's alerting mechanism (of fight-or-flight, stress, anxiety), I think that a more powerful approach is to handle the essential problem: The attitude towards life's inherent problems and threats that cannot be solved, or are extremely difficult to solve.
While animals have very little, if any, sense of the future, and hence their fight-or-flight mechanism simply calms down within a few minutes when there is no longer any immediate danger, the human mind's ability to keep thinking about the problem and getting stuck in it is a destructive problem.
Talking about "acceptance" (as in ACT) and about spiritual perspectives (e.g. finding meaning in suffering) might help somewhat, but in practice, in order for the mind to function well daily, I think the only effective way (at least for me) is "healthy conscious pretending", by which I mean: being able to hold two contradictory viewpoints, and compartmentalizing between them:
It turns out that the mind has “psychological flexibility”. The mind is a tool, which I, the Entity, can direct as I see fit (after learning that it’s possible, and practicing this skill).
It is well known that some people live in delusions, when they hold a certain belief, and keep holding it even in the face of evidence that contradicts this belief. Similarly, sometimes our mind thinks about a potential bad thing that might happen (but won’t definitely happen), and by thinking about it, it is actually “living it” and experiencing it emotionally, so it’s suffering, even thought the bad thing might never happen.
By the way, sometimes, even if a bad thing does happen, living with it feels much less worse than fearing it before it actually happens. This is because the fear mechanism causes suffering, while experiencing the bad thing might cause some emotional pain for a period of time, but there’s nothing to do about the thing that happened so there’s no point in thinking about it, and importantly - there is no more fear that the bad thing might happen - as it has already happened.
We can utilize the mind’s mechanism of visualization and focus to our advantage - not in an extreme way of living in a delusion about facts that already happened, but in a beneficial “delusion” about the future, whereby we feel that the future is 100% safe, to allow for a proper operation of the mind, even though there is some very small chance that the bad things might happen.
Of course, it’s not merely enough to say that, because whenever a thought about the potential threat sneaks into the mind, and especially when I need to actively think about the problem in order to decide on some relevant action, the mind might activate a full-fledged fight-or-flight response, stress, and anxiety. The way to avoid this disaster is the following: