Have You Done This? | 13 Stoic Strategies For Conquering Your Anxiety

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

0:37Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Can I make my sight softer? Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that. Cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your Sleep Number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. It's the final days of our Black Friday sale. Recharge this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort. Now only$17.99 for our C2 mattress and bays, plus free premium delivery.

1:11Prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today.

1:18Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:44Have you done this? It was a lovely afternoon at his home in Cape Cod. He was with his wife. They had nowhere to be and nothing to do. They were enjoying the stillness of the Massachusetts summer. They were enjoying each other. They did not know, they could not know that death was in the room with them. Sebastian Younger, who's appeared on the Daily Stoic podcast, absolute must listen episodes, had ruptured an undiagnosed aneurysm in his pancreatic artery. He was bleeding to death internally, not even aware something was wrong until it was nearly too late. But this is not a memento mori lesson, although his amazing book, In My Time of Dying, is filled with an extended meditation on this idea, because Sebastian Younger lived.

2:31He was saved by 10 units of blood at a Cape Cod hospital. In other words, he writes, 10 anonymous blood donors saved my life. As a result, Younger now donates blood as often as possible, roughly three to four times a year. I myself donated last month, and I have my appointment to donate next month, exactly two months later. Please donate at your nearest blood bank, he pleads. You may well save the life of a child or a parent, and one day you may need blood yourself. There aren't many ways to be part of something greater than yourself, he writes, and donating blood is one of the easiest and finest.

3:10The virtue of justice is not about law courts and judges and juries, as I explain in Right Thing right now. It's about things like this, finding ways to be of service, finding ways to pay forward the acts of charity and grace that we would not be here without, finding ways to be part of something bigger than yourself, finding ways to pull those rings from Hierocles' circles, Pull them inward to help people you have never met and will never know. I started giving blood, I think, two years ago. I don't know why I'd never done it before. And it's now one of the things I'm most proudest of having sort of built into my life.

3:51I'll link to where to find your local blood bank in today's show notes. But just Google giving blood near you and go do it. Go do it. You never know whose person you're going to help. And as we said, it's about justice. and charity and grace.

4:14Almost none of the things we worry about day to day are actually new. Humans have been worried about them, stressed about them, anxious about them for as long as there have been people. Marcus Aurelius lived through a plague. He lived through a series of historic floods. There were wars happening in distant parts of the empire. Seneca lived under political tyranny. So did Socrates. Zeno lost everything in a shipwreck and ended up basically bankrupt and destitute and had to rebuild his life. For all of human history, people have been dealing with disruptive technology. They've worried about their kids.

4:57They've worried about their own health. They've worried about whether they were going to get promoted or not. These aspects of the human condition are timeless and relentless. This is why the Stoics talked so much about anxiety, about stress, about managing our emotions and not being ruled by them. I'm the same way. I have anxiety. I have stress. No amount of philosophy is just going to eliminate this, but there are tools and strategies that the Stoics can teach us about being less anxious, about not being ruled by our fears and not being made miserable because we don't control what's going to happen next.

5:36And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode, some stoic strategies for conquering your anxiety.

5:48No amount of philosophy, Seneca says, takes away our natural feelings or inclinations. I still get nervous before almost any talk i have anxiety i have nerves one of the things i've been doing lately i have this cool stoic coin and that it's kind of a fidget and i just spin it i like to touch it's got a hole in the middle and just touch it like this it has this quote from epictetus on the front is this in my control or is this not in my control is this up to me or not up to me that's the essence of stoic philosophy and i just kind of remember marx really says that you have to remember the thing is not causing us anxiety we are causing the anxiety in ourselves it's within us which means that we can let it go we don't have to give ourselves over to it and so that's just one of the little things i remind myself you have to remember stoic philosophy isn't this magical thing that removes all the flaws and problems and urges and temptations we have inside of us no it's framework for working through them it's a set of tools for dealing with them that's how i think about anxiety and that's why i carry this with me there's a tension in stoicism so on the one hand Seneca says we should imagine all the things that could possibly happen.

6:56This is premeditatio malorum. It says the unexpected blow lands heaviest. If you're just naively going through the world expecting everything to be wonderful, never considering that this might happen or that might happen, you're going to be caught off guard and it's going to rattle you and hurt you worse than if you had some ability to anticipate this. At the same time, he says he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. He was talking about the way that we can sort of spiral and catastrophize. So it's important when we think about this premeditatio malorum, the stoic idea of anticipating and considering might happen, it's not to torture ourselves.

7:25It's not just to go down this spiral of negativity and dumerism. It's to think proactively. I'll give you an example. Napoleon said that three times a day, a general should say to themselves, what if the enemy appeared over here? What if the enemy appeared over here? What if the enemy appeared over here? He wasn't saying that he just wanted his generals to be really anxious and worried all the time. He was having them run through thought exercises. If this happens, I'll do this. If this happens, I'll do this. If this happens, I'll do this. So when we think about this stoic practice, It's not just for generalized anxiety or worry.

7:53It's constructive. Okay, if this happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this happens, here's what I'm going to do. It's focusing on how we might respond to this. So it should actually be empowering in some way, as opposed to disempowering and scary and alarming. You're thinking, here are the constructive things I can do about these hypotheticals. I believe that I have agency and power to solve this scenario if it were to happen.

8:22It's not just that we suffer more in imagination than we do in reality, as Seneca says. It's that we add suffering, right? So we're dreading this thing that might happen. Indeed, it might happen. But by thinking about it, walking ourselves through it, going over it over and over and over again, living in it right now as if it will happen, what we're effectively doing is borrowing that suffering. We're like, I want to deal with it now. I want to sit in it now. I want to feel it for longer. So we have to remember that this use of our creativity, the way we're thinking about the thing over and over again, we're living in it, we're actually just adding suffering on top of the thing that may or may not actually even happen.

9:04He began to study philosophy. His teacher, Creates, gave him a bunch of weird tasks. One of them was to carry this pot of lentils through the Athenian Agora. And Zeno had no idea why he was doing this But the reason was that Cretes understood that his student was anxious and nervous and he cared way too much what other people thought of him. So as he's walking through the Athenian Agora, where all of Athens is, Cretes sneaks up on him, smacks the pot with his staff, and it spills lentils all over him. And as Zeno stood there mortified, Cretes says, courage, my little Phoenician. It's just a little bit of soup.

9:38He was trying to do what we would today call exposure therapy. He was trying to show him that it wasn't that bad, that this was all in his head. in fact most people weren't paying attention nobody really cared and even if they were this embarrassment this worst case scenario was not actually that bad that he hadn't died that it wasn't nearly as mortifying as he thought just trying to expose this to him to toughen him up to show him that the thing that he was so worried about wasn't so bad a lot of stoic philosophy is like this it's to really put these impressions these opinions these worst case scenarios we've made up in our head to the test and realize that the one thing they all have in common is us in In meditations, Marcus Rios talks about how he escapes anxiety.

10:17He has a good day. And then he realized, no, I didn't avoid it. I discarded it. It was within me. It was in my perception. And that's the lesson that Cretes is trying to teach Zeno in that story. He had the power to either be mortified or not mortified. We have to practice this as stoic philosophers.

10:36I do a pretty good job managing my finances. I make pretty good money. but I have one really expensive habit that I'm trying to quit. And it's an expensive habit that's cost me so much. That's caused me a lot of misery, a lot of frustration. It's caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. I don't have some secret gambling addiction. I don't have some terrible vice. Actually, I do. It is a vice. What I'm talking about is anxiety. And I would say nothing in my life has cost me more than anxiety. And I've gotten so little pleasure out of it. That's the terrible thing. It's no fun.

11:11There's no reward except the tiny bit of relief you get when the bad thing you were so worried about doesn't happen. And we don't tend to think of anxiety as an expensive habit, but it is. How many moments were you taken out of? How many experiences did you lose? How much strain was placed on relationships or connections because you were worried, you were stressed, you were scared, you were spiraling. You were thinking about not this moment that you're in, but this hypothetical moment of something that lay ahead. That's really what anxiety is. Seneca says we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

11:48The emphasis there has to be on the suffering that anxiety causes us. I have this little reminder that I carry with me. So philosophy is this quote from Epictetus about whether something is in our control or not in our control. That's what I try to ask myself when I'm getting worked up about something. Is this up to me? Is what I'm feeling about this thing, this, is it going to happen? Are we going to make the connection? Am I going to get to the airport in time? Is it going to be delivered? Is it going to go my way here? You know, what I'm feeling, the stress that I'm feeling in that moment isn't changing the outcome in any way, right?

12:19That's why Epictetus was saying we have to ask ourselves, is this up to me or is it not up to me? Seneca says that he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. That's the reminder on the back. On the front, it's the Ouroboros is this image of the snake swallowing its own tail. And that's what we are doing. We are punishing ourselves. We are feasting on our own thoughts, our own worries, and it comes at an immense cost. And so it's something I'm trying to do better at. I'm not perfect at, but I hope to get better at it every day. And I hope you do, too. By the way, you can check this out at dailystoic.com slash anxiety.

12:56Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

13:41We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

14:23Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. It may be reasonable that you're concerned about this thing. It would cause trouble if it happened. Again, so when the Stokes talk about how some things are in our control, some things are not in our control, what they're saying is, well, focus on what you control about this situation. Reminding yourself that, hey, just feeling anxiety, emoting about the problem, biting your nails about it, talking about it incessantly to people, it's not making it any more or less likely to happen. So try to put that energy to constructive use.

14:56Try to think about, okay, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what I can do. Here are ways that I can influence this situation or at least prepare myself to be resilient or endure or bounce back from it if it does happen, right? Put yourself to constructive use. Put yourself working on something that makes a difference. Just make sure you're not confusing spending mental bandwidth and energy and torturing yourself emotionally, don't confuse that with making a positive difference.

15:28A Stoic is not someone who stuffs their emotions down. That's not it at all. The Stoics process their emotions. This is why they journaled. Socrates went around asking these questions. This is why Seneca would write these letters to his friend Lucilius. We even have some of Marcus Aurelius's letters that survive. The Stoics were not stuffing their emotions down, pretending they don't have them. They were exploring them. The Stokes talk about taking an emotion when it hits you and putting it up to the test, observing it, meditating on it, processing it, getting to the bottom of it. If you just ignore your emotions, if you just conquer them, to me, it's like putting it on a credit card.

16:05Sure, you're not having to pay for it now, but eventually it's gonna come due and the interest is gonna make it even more expensive. So don't shut your emotions down. Deal with them, process them, explore them, get through them. Don't be ruled by them. But in ignoring them, you are guaranteeing that later it's going to be an even bigger deal and you're going to be even more powerless over that emotion. So work on your emotions. Do not fall into this trap that the Stoics suppress their emotions. They domesticate them, as Nassim Talib says. But first, that requires facing them and exploring them and coming to terms with them.

16:41You're being robbed and maybe you don't even see it. And what's worse is you're robbing yourself. Think about the times you left way earlier than you needed to because you were nervous or stressed. Think about that thing you went to and you were a wreck the whole time because you were thinking that something might go wrong while you were gone. Think about all that dread you felt these last couple months convincing yourself that this bad news was inevitably going to come. And how did all that end up going? What became of it? You missed time with your family. You spent it instead, you know, waiting at the gate at the airport.

17:12You missed the vacation. You missed the outing with friends because although you were there, you were not actually present. You built up this whole scenario in your head that turned out to be way worse compared to what actually happened. This is why Seneca said we suffer more in imagination than in reality. And what he was talking about is our anxiety. He was talking about our worries. And I want you to think about how much anxiety has stolen from you. Those racing thoughts, those worries, those doubts, that dread. Think about how much you missed because of it. How often did it actually turn out to benefit you?

17:44How often were you actually right? That's the funny thing. Anxiety is sometimes right, way more often than not. It's totally off the mark. And the problem with this idea that we suffer more in imagination than we do in reality, we are suffering in reality. Seneca says, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. We are suffering on top of the thing that may or may not actually happen. But it's so hard to remember that when you're in that vice grip of anxiety or worry, that spiral, what about this? What about this? What about this? And this is something that the Stoics think a lot about.

18:17Epictetus' critical question was, is this in my control? Because so much of what we're emoting about, worried about, thinking about, isn't affecting the outcome in any way. It's not making a difference at all.

18:34So this thing that you're anxious about, that you're dreading, that you don't want to happen, one question you can ask yourself, Mark Surreal says, is how does it stop you? This other person, this unfairness, this bad outcome, this is how does it stop you from acting with courage and justice and wisdom and discipline? How does it stop you from acting with the four virtues? And you realize it doesn't. Look, there can be a whole bunch of things that you don't want to happen. They're not going to be fun if they happen. They're going to cause problems, but they can't prevent you from doing your main job, from doing what's actually important, from acting and living with virtue, not only can these things not stop you from acting with courage and discipline and justice and wisdom, but in fact, they're opportunities to act with courage and justice and discipline and wisdom.

19:15Look, it's a bad use of your creativity. The time you're spending imagining what might happen, the conversations you're making up in your head, the things that you think people are thinking about you, this is a bad way to deploy your creativity. You're using it to make yourself miserable. You're imagining these terrible scenarios. Notice you're never imagining things going well, people liking you. You're putting your imagination to work on your anxiety, on your self-consciousness, on your doubt, and it's just not a good use of it. The Stokes would say our mind is this incredibly powerful thing.

19:47How are you going to deploy it? How are you going to use it? Are you going to use it to torture yourself or are you going to use it to move yourself forward to solve problems or create them.

20:01Marcus Reelius writes to himself, he says, fight to be the person philosophy wants you to be. And I just love that so much. It's that stoicism has this ideal for you to be someone who's resilient, someone who's strong, someone who's virtuous, someone who's kind, who cares about the common good, someone who isn't easily rattled, someone who's committed to bettering themselves. That's what stoicism wants for you. That's what the Stoics have been writing about for centuries. That's what we do in these videos in the Daily Stoic email. That's the ideal. But the question is, are you fighting for yourself?

20:34Are you fighting to be that thing? Are you striving today to get a little bit closer to that perfect ideal? Are you fighting for yourself? The Stoics can't make you be or do anything. They can just lay out the formula, but it's ultimately on you to follow it, to step up and actually be it. That's what I want you to think about today.

20:59One thing that's never changed about the world is how much of it's out of our control. 2 ,000 years ago, it was largely out of the control of all the Stoics, even Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world. Most things are not in his control. When we have a way we'd like things to go, we know they might not go that way. What does that create? That creates anxiety. And so for thousands of years, the Stoics have been dealing with this thing that you and I are still dealing with today. We get nervous, we worry, we have anxiety, we have fears and dread. Mark Surrealist in Meditations talks about how he had a good day because he escaped anxiety and then he actually corrects himself.

21:33He goes, actually, no, I didn't escape it. I discarded it because it was within me. He's realizing that he is the common variable in all the situations that cause him anxiety, just as you are. Anxiety is within us, so we want to work on it and think about it so it doesn't rule our lives or ruin our lives.

21:53I try to remind myself constantly that this moment is enough. I don't need to be anywhere. I don't need to do anything. I don't need to become anything other than I am at this very moment in time, at this very place that I am in this very instant. That's it. It's enough. The Stokes talk about poverty being not just a thing about your finances, but about needing, desiring, wishing, hoping, fearing that you are anything but what you are at this very instant to become present, to lock in. That's the key to everything to me. That's what stillness is about. And that's really what happiness is too. If you want more wisdom inspired from the Stoics, I send out one Stoic themed email every single morning, totally for free.

22:38You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. No spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I think it's the best thing that I do. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of Stoics all over the world. We'd love to have you at dailystoic.com slash email.

23:06Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you an ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free.

23:53No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.