Not No Emotions, No Useless Emotions

“Stoicism, as we have said, is not the elimination of all emotion. It’s the regulation of them. Effectively, as Nassim Taleb has said, it’s the domestication of your urges and impulses and knee-jerk reactions.”Ryan explains that the goal of a Stoic is to react with their ruling reason, not to stuff their emotions down into a dark hole, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome 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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Not no emotions, no useless emotions. Stoicism, as we have said, is not the elimination of emotion, it's the regulation of them. Effectively, as Nassim Taleb has said, "It's the domestication of your urges and impulses and knee-jerk reactions." "It's okay to be surprised, it's okay to be scared, it's okay to be hurt," Seneca said. No amount of philosophy can remove that initial feeling. But what you can work towards is getting to a place where you're not ruled by these things. Feeling love, that's great. Feeling a desire to help others, or feeling joy, wonderful. And contrary to belief, there's nothing in the Stoic texts about crushing those very human feelings. But feeling rage or bitterness,

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca has a whole book on the dangers of that. We're putting in our work on the destructive emotions because we know that not only do they do us no good, but they make us and the world worse. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, "My mother's advice was, 'Don't lose time on useless emotions, like anger, resentment, remorse, envy. Those,' she said, 'will just sap time. They don't get you where you want to be.'" And one way Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she coped with being angry was that, "I would sit down and practice the piano. I wasn't very good at it, but it did distract me from whatever useless emotions I was feeling at the moment. Later, I did the same thing with the cello," she said. "I would be absorbed in the music, and the useless emotion faded away."

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  A Stoic isn't an emotionless robot. They're also not just a body at the whim of every feeling originating from the heart or the brain. We are in control. Our ruling reason makes the decision. That's where we're trying to get.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  And look, we have two challenges here at Daily Stoic that I think will help you get to that place of being in charge, rather than being at the mercy of your whims. Our tame your temper challenge, if you've got a problem with anger. And look, you don't have to have an anger problem to have a problem with anger. And then our slay your stress challenge is another one if your demons are anxiety, or worry, or fear, or stress. And so you can check both those out at dailystoic.com. They're in the Daily Stoic store. Also, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you get those two challenges and all our other ones completely for free. So check it out, dailystoic.com.