You reach for the mug and knock it over. Hot coffee washes over your laptop.

You arrive home and realize you’ve left your bag, with all your IDs, on the subway.

Your doctor reads your EKG and says, “Hmm. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Life dishes out disasters, big and small. How we react to them says much about our character and our ability to enjoy a happy, successful life.

If I can’t find my wallet, I’m prone to think it’s been swiped by someone who’s going to steal my identity and empty my bank accounts.

Waiting for the results of any sort of medical test, I imagine the worst.

That, for some reason, is how I’m wired.

My wife, K, is the opposite. She’s a natural optimist. And when people like me have a worst-case scenario in our head, optimists like K will tell us not to worry about it. They’ll remind us, quite correctly, that there’s a good chance something less than the worst will occur.

But such advice is useless. For us, life is a very scary movie. Not thinking about the worst that can happen is not an option.

However, it is possible to develop mental habits that’ll help us overcome our fears and respond to crises – real or imagined – in a positive way.

Recently, my nephew got into some trouble at school and told me it had really messed him up. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study, could barely eat, etc.

Knowing what I knew about the situation, I believed he was overreacting. But I knew that telling him not to worry would be useless – even counter-productive because fear and anxiety are deeply planted emotions that can’t be commanded away.

It would also have been useless for me to try to convince him that his worst fears are imaginary. They are real to him and there is always a possibility that they will come true.

So I told him to do what I do whenever I am extremely anxious. I do what I call making friends with the devil.