Why We Need to Learn How to Adapt

There is a direct relationship between our ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions and the level of satisfaction we feel about our lives. To adapt to the changes occurring in the outside environment implies that we are changing ourselves as we learn more and more of what the environment has to offer in terms of distinctions about its nature. The more distinctions we can make between the various components of the environment and how they act as a force on one another, the more information becomes available to us through our perception. As we expand our perception of information available, we will gain a deeper level of understanding and insight into the cause-and-effect relationship that we have with the outside environment, that is, how the environment has the potential to act as a force on us and how the environment will react to the force of our behavior.
The deeper the level of our understanding and insight, the more effectively we can interact with the environment to fulfill our needs and achieve our goals. Fulfilling our needs and achieving our goals create within us a feeling of well-being, confidence, and satisfaction about our lives that would otherwise be characterized by feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment, and deterioration when we can't fulfill ourselves. Success, confidence, and satisfaction are all synonymous. They breed from one another to create and perpetuate a positive cycle of expansion and mental growth. And, by the same token, disappointment, dissatisfaction, and deterioration also feed on one another to create negative cycles of emotional pain, anxiety, and depression.

To fulfill our needs and achieve our goals, there has to be some level of correspondence or balance between the inner mental environment and the outer physical environment.
What I mean by "correspondence" is some level of understanding of how the outer environment works. Our needs, intents, goals, and desires—all— exist first in the mental environment.

To fulfill ourselves, we need to interact with the outside environmental forces. The extent to which we fulfill ourselves is a function of knowing the most appropriate set of steps to take in relationship to the outer conditions and to what extent we can act on what we know. Knowing the most appropriate set of steps to take in relationship to the prevailing conditions is a function of how much or little we have learned in relationship to what is available to be learned.

I am defining behavior as the outward physical expression of mental energy acting as a force on the outside environment.

Obviously, none of us possesses this kind of perfect correspondence with the environment, and, as a result, it is probably safe to say that none of us lives our lives in a complete state of satisfaction. However, the more we understand and know about the interacting forces behind our own behavior and the interacting environmental forces outside of us, the easier it is to fulfill our needs and achieve our goals, resulting in greater levels of satisfaction that we will experience in our lives. Conversely, if we don't understand our own behavior, we certainly can't begin to understand or anticipate anyone else's, and the less we understand and know about the rest of the environmental components that have a potential to act as a force on us, then it would stand to reason that the less potential we have to fulfill our needs and achieve our goals, resulting in feelings of disappointment, stress, anxiety, unhappiness, and fear.