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Feeling anxious? The Greco-Roman philosophers have some advice
Weighed down by worries? There’s some unexpected comfort to be found in the Stoics’ millennia-old teachings.
By Brigid Delaney
It can be tempting to accept anxiety as a modern affliction that arrived with smart phones and intensified with the pandemic and climate collapse, but the Stoics referred to it regularly in their writing.Credit: Miguel Manich/illustrationromm.com.au
It’s the start of 2022, and I’m at the dentist getting fitted for a mouthguard to wear at night to protect the enamel on my teeth, which has been worn down by constant grinding. I’m vaguely embarrassed by this. I thought I was chill, relaxed, ataraxic.
I mean, maybe I have been a little anxious, but it’s been a time! I’m not the only one, says the dentist. He’s run off his feet fitting mouthguards to the anxious people of Sydney whose bodies are trying to expel anxiety by grinding their teeth at night.
The president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Dental Association, Jeremy Sternson, told the ABC that 2021 had been the year of the cracked tooth. “Normally in a year you may see a handful of these patients, but we were seeing three or four of these a day!” he said. People were coming in with neck, jaw and face pain, with dentists identifying stress as the cause.
It’s the rare person who hasn’t been heartsick and afraid, closed down their tabs and switched off from the news because they couldn’t bear One More Thing. Then there are the mind games and pretending: trying to convince yourself at the start of a fresh day that, if you don’t look at the news, all the things happening out there aren’t really happening, and you can build a New Jerusalem – if not in your home, then in your head.
But the anxiety accumulates: a build-up in the bones, a hardening of the tender matter around the heart, a speedy, cortisol-firing feeling of fast-racing blood through the body, followed by frequent dips into a new, draggier exhaustion that sometimes seems it will never lift. Has anyone ever been as tired as you are now? No. It’s not possible.
It can be tempting to accept anxiety as a modern affliction that arrived with smart phones and intensified with the pandemic and climate collapse, but the Stoics – a school of Greco-Roman philosophers who were alive at the dawning of the first century – referred to it regularly in their writing. Their anxiety about the climate was also acute but, unlike the climate anxiety of our age, wasn’t backed up by science and reams of data. There’s also the anxiety of everyday life, which the Stoics also sought to deal with. Fear of not having enough money; of losing a loved one, relationship or position; of getting sick or of dying. It could be the anxiety of a job interview or having a crush or public speaking. Or it could be more general and free-floating – a feeling in the body, the sense of an oncoming panic attack – which has such an extraordinary and powerful capacity to ruin tranquillity.
“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”
Epictetus
The Stoics welcomed hard times like a well-prepared student welcomes an exam. They saw their life – and the cultivation of the four virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and moderation – as training for difficult moments where resilience, a crucial part of developing character, is tested. Epictetus, the Greek slave turned Stoic philosopher (50AD-135AD), wrote in his “handbook” The Enchiridion: “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”
For William B. Irvine, developing resilience requires learning to overcome the subconscious.
According to contemporary American Stoic William B. Irvine (author of 2019’s The Stoic Challenge), developing resilience requires learning to overcome the subconscious, which is always looking to blame and judge when we run into difficulties.
These things are antithetical to Stoicism; as Irvine notes, “by treating a setback as a Stoic test [that is, an opportunity to create resilience], we take our subconscious mind out of the setback-response loop.” When this happens, our emotions aren’t triggered to the extent they otherwise would have been, which enables our rational, thinking mind to step in. Irvine said, “The biggest cost by far is the emotional distress a setback triggers.”
If we handle setbacks well, he says, we not only avoid negative emotions, but we experience positive ones – pride, satisfaction and joy – after meeting the challenge. We’re also exercising courage, one of the four virtues and the engine that powers us through tough situations.
A Stoic would recommend you be careful of what media and opinions you consume during times of anxiety. Counselled Epictetus: “Other people’s views and troubles can be contagious. Don’t sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.”
“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make of it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journal, Meditations.Credit: Getty Images
Stoics prized rational thinking, acting on good information and contemplating the situation fully rather than acting rashly or from a place of panic and anxiety. The Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (121AD-180AD), once considered the most powerful man in the world, coped by not allowing his thoughts to be overrun by negativity. “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make of it,” he wrote in his private journal, Meditations. (Millennia later, it regularly tops lists of the most popular books of all time.)
How this may look for you includes sticking to only one or two trusted news sources and limiting the time you check them. There’s a fine line between being informed and being overwhelmed. Ideally, pick a time in the morning and in the afternoon. Live the rest of your hours concerned with your own life and that of the people around you, rather than worrying about the worst things happening to people far away whose situation you’re unable to change.
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond our power or our will,” said Epictetus. The only things within our control are our character, our actions and responses and how we deal with others. When something is out of your control, then you need to let the anxiety go and let the situation take its course. Marcus Aurelius instructed us to “not be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should”. This means not being lost in reveries of the past or fantasies and fears of the future, and just dealing with what is in front of you right now.
“Just do what you can and should.”
Marcus Aurelius
“Caretake this moment,” agreed Epictetus. “Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person or that person, this challenge, this deed. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in right now.”
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond our power or our will,” said Epictetus.Credit: Alamy
Stoics, then and now, have a number of practices that involve making themselves deliberately uncomfortable. These include taking ice baths, walking on a hard road in bare feet and fasting. Seneca, the great powerbroker, player and playwright (4BC-65AD), writing to his friend in Moral Letters to Lucilius, advised: “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while, ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’ ”
If you successfully fast or live on vastly reduced means, you have robbed fate of the chance to take you by surprise when bad times come.
There is a teeny-tiny book with a big story that will tell you more about Stoicism in action than any how-to guide. It’s a speech given in London in 1993 by the highly decorated American serviceman Vice Admiral James Stockdale, later published under the title Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior. Stockdale came to Stoicism as a 38-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. It was 1962, and he was in his second year, studying international relations with the aim of becoming a strategic planner at the Pentagon. Taking a break from his regular curriculum, Stockdale “cruised into Stanford’s philosophy corner one winter morning”.
“So make sure in your heart of hearts, in your inner self, that you treat your station in life with indifference, not with contempt.”
William B. Irvine
With his grey hair, Stockdale was initially mistaken for a fellow professor by Philip Rhinelander, the Dean of Humanities and Sciences, who was teaching the class. The two men hit it off – and to make up for Stockdale’s lack of background in philosophy, Rhinelander gave him a copy of Epictetus’s Enchiridion. Stockdale found it plain-speaking and appealing.
In 1965, back on active duty, Stockdale was in Vietnam in the cockpit of a plane when he was shot down by the Viet Cong. Parachuting downward, he whispered to himself, “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
He was taken to Hanoi’s Hoa Lo Prison where he spent seven-and-a-half years leading a group of about 50 POWs in cruel and painful circumstances.
According to a post-World War II protocol, American prisoners of war were never to break the chain of command, even in captivity. They were also never to provide the enemy with any information that might be harmful to their comrades. Everyone in the group was tortured “endlessly” and underwent spirit-sapping periods of isolation. The 42-year-old Stockdale was interrogated daily.
Stockdale took command in the prison, turning it into a Stoic laboratory. The first thing he did was work out what he could or could not control in captivity. Within his power were “my opinions, aims, aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my judgments, my attitude about what is going on, my own good and my own evil”.
He then utilised the Stoic teachings of the “preferred indifferents” (that is, the principle that we shouldn’t be anxious about the loss of states such as beauty, health, wealth and status in life because they will come and go. The only thing that we should worry about, and keep focused on, is our own character and its development, since these are among the only things that are truly within our control). Stockdale’s station in life had been abruptly reduced from high to low (he was “an object of contempt”) in the 30 seconds it took him to fall to earth. “So make sure in your heart of hearts, in your inner self, that you treat your station in life with indifference, not with contempt,” he said.
The next challenge for Stockdale was around emotions. He recognised that his ordeal, and the daily torture, might never end, and that he needed to accept that. The people who were most broken (and this was also the case in concentration camps, according to an account by Primo Levi, the Italian author and Holocaust survivor) were those who thought they would be rescued. Using negative visualisation, you needed to imagine that you wouldn’t be: you needed to confront the reality of your situation without relying on hope.
Stockdale later said in an interview with the American author Jim Collins: “The optimists – oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by
Christmas.’ And Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And
they died of a broken heart ... This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.” (In his 2001 bestseller, Good To Great, Collins called this “The Stockdale Paradox”.)
Stockdale endured the relentlessly harsh conditions in the prison by not looking too far into the future. “I lived on a day-to-day basis,” he wrote in Courage Under Fire in an echo of Epictetus, who said, “Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.”
Vice Admiral James Stockdale spent seven-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He learnt to focus only on what he could control.Credit: Alamy
The main aim for Stockdale was keeping his self respect even when the worst-case scenario was unfolding. That was within his control. In order to keep it, he had to not betray his country or his fellow soldiers; he
had to have good character.
He was rescued in February 1973 and enjoyed a distinguished career, dying at the age of 81 in 2005. Stockdale credits his survival in the camp – survival not just in body, but also in terms of his self-respect, dignity and spirit – to Epictetus’s teachings.
Stockdale did not spend time in captivity living in hope that he would be freed; he just tried to live with dignity and respect in the small area that he could control. Like Levi in Auschwitz, he kept his focus on just trying to stay alive each day: “To harbour desires inside the Lager [camp in German] is a mental death-sentence, as no desire will realistically be fulfilled,” wrote
Levi. “To dwell on hunger and to hope for food is to subject oneself to mental torture as sufficient food will never be offered.”
The Stoics weren’t fans of hope, seeing it as a form of wishful thinking – and a denying of reality. Seneca’s friend Lucilius, to whom he addressed his Moral Letters, was a civil servant working in Sicily. One day, he learned of a serious lawsuit against him that threatened to end his career and ruin his reputation.
Distressed, he wrote to Seneca, who replied, “You may expect that I will advise you to picture a happy outcome, and to rest in the allurements of hope”, but “I am going to conduct you to peace of mind through another
route”. This culminated in the advice, “If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.”
Seneca famously wrote: “Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.” Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. If you have a hope, then you also have a fear that the hope will not be realised. The price of peace of mind is the relinquishment of hope. And for Stoics, who prized ataraxia – the business of living tranquilly – it was a price they were more than willing to pay.
Recently, I gave similar advice to a friend who was involved in complex commercial litigation that has lasted for many years. If he lost, he’d owe millions of dollars, his business would be shut down and he might face gaol time. “Prepare for the worst,” I told him, echoing Seneca’s advice to Lucilius.
“And hope for the best?” he said.
“No – just assume you will lose,” I replied.
By assuming he will lose the case, he is then able to prepare himself should the worst happen. He’ll be unafraid – or less afraid – of losing since he has adjusted his reality away from hope and towards the likelihood of a loss. He would then be more prepared mentally to start from scratch with no money, a trashed reputation or having done time in prison. All these things are undesirable – but being shocked and unprepared for them
would make his situation worse.
Part of giving up hope is the joy of being able to live firmly in the present rather than constantly thinking and dreading what might occur in the future.
There’s another good reason to ditch hope. When you remove hope from your life, you also remove its opposite: hopelessness. This is truly one of the worst human emotions. Nothing is as abject. It’s a sibling of despair and creates its own dark fantasy – that is, the fantasy that you cannot recover, nothing will ever go right again, you will never succeed, your situation will never
change and you are doomed.
This is an edited extract from Brigid Delaney’s Reasons Not To Worry: How to be Stoic in Chaotic Times (Allen & Unwin, $25), out September 20.
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