All our emotions are self-justified. If we’re angry, it’s someone else’s fault. If we worry, well, we should! If we’re happy, it’s because we deserve it. Emotions are the first stop on the highway to lifelong blame-shifting.
Panic is self-induced—always. Same goes for calm. When the unthinkable happens, which it eventually does, it’s all because we weren’t thinking of it. By training ourselves to count on the world being as we presume it is—then making our emotional stability dependent on that world rather than personal choice—we set ourselves up. Counting on ourselves for emotions might be better.