This is How You Make Hard Situations Easier

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1:05Go to HelloFresh.com slash Stoic 10 FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com Stoic 10 FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it.

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2:57Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

3:25This is how you make hard situations easier. Airports are stressful and traveling can be a nightmare. Dealing with a toddler's tantrum at the grocery store tries the best of us. The confrontation with an employee or a colleague. The phone call where we get the news that somebody passed away. Life is full of these situations. They challenge us. They overwhelm us. There is no foolproof way to prevent them or manage them. But there is something that helps. Seneca talked about premeditatio malorum. He said that we had to meditate on all the things that could happen to us and that by thinking in advance, let's say about a nightmare travel day or the eventual death of a grandparent, we'd lessen it fully slightly.

4:06The unexpected blow, he said, lands heaviest. Even just saying that to yourself, that the airport is stressful, there may be delays, but I've dealt with that before and it's important for me to try to relax and take things as they come. This doesn't seem like much, but it helps. Dr. Becky Kennedy, whose book Good Inside we've been raving about, calls this emotional vaccination. In the same way that a vaccine exposes our body to a manageable amount of the virus or the disease, teaching it how to fight the illness, talking to ourselves or our children about what's going to happen in advance of it happening helps us deal with it.

4:40It removes the surprise, it removes the suddenness of it. The last thing you want to do is face anything, a virus or a trip to the grocery store with a tired kid. You don't want to face that defenseless, especially when there are defenses available, when medicine or the ancient Stoics have studied it and come up with things that work. Because we are going to catch these situations, we are going to be exposed to germs, but if we strengthen ourselves in advance, we can handle it.

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