Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Are You Bringing The Words To Life? | This Is Why You're Anxious. About this episode Epictetus didn't just theorize about resilience—he lived it. It’s why his powerful lessons have endured for nearly two millennia as perhaps the most practical and accessible playbook in Stoic philosophy.💡 We designed our How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) as a personal field guide —part book club, part masterclass, part daily practice. It’s designed to help you not just read the words of Epictetus, but live them—to turn his timeless wisdom into real change in your own life and the lives of those around you. And if you get the guide before July 26th, you’ll receive a private invitation to an exclusive LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday, where he’ll go deep on all things Epictetus, Stoicism, and how to apply these ideas right now, in today’s world. Head to dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today!👉 Get How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.
0:55 Ryan Holiday? Are you bringing the words to life? When Schach is smart recruits players, he gives them a 26-page culture document that outlines exactly what his program stands for and who they are striving to be as a team. It details what will be expected of them, how they'll train, how they'll treat their teammates, how they'll carry themselves on and off the court. It is detailed, it is specific, it's non-negotiable. "We say that culture is simply how we act, interact, and respond. That's it," Schach explains. So you can stuff it up on the wall, you can have a culture doc, but if it's just words on paper, it doesn't really matter.
1:38 Ryan Holiday? Our job is to bring it to life. This, as Epictetus said, is actually the job of the philosopher too. When the standards have been set, the work of philosophy is just this: to examine and uphold the standards. But the work of a truly good person, Epictetus says, is using those standards when we know them. So yeah, look, it's great that we read meditations or letters from a Stoic and discourses, or even The Daily Stoic, or these emails. It's great that we do our journaling. It's great that we underline passages, that we take notes, that we save quotes. It's great that you're listening to this podcast. But if it's just words on paper, or a screen, or in our earbuds, it doesn't really matter.
2:21 Ryan Holiday? We have to bring it to life. Epictetus also said that we don't explain our philosophy, we embody it. He was saying, don't talk about it, be about it. The whole point of Stoicism is what you do. It's about who you are. It's the act of virtue, not the act of talking about virtue. If you want to do a deep dive into Epictetus, we're spending the whole month of July trying to give Epictetus the attention he deserved, doing a deep dive into his life, his lessons, and the legacy of this incredible teacher. Well, we'd love to have you join us. We're just calling it How to Read Epictetus, and it's going to be a practical companion where you can do a deep dive into his books.
3:03 Ryan Holiday? You can have some discussions with our fellow Daily Stoic members, thousands of Stoics all over the world. And on July 26, we're going to do a live Q and A about it, sort of a group reading discussion, which I'm really excited about it. Plus, we have discounted copies of the Penguin Classics Edition of Epictetus, which you can bundle with the course. That and more at dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse. I'd love to see you in there. You gotta sign up before July 26. I'm really excited to do this with you. We're going to have a bunch more Epictetus stuff the coming weeks, but I wanted to tell you about it. And I wanted to remind you, if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life and you haven't yet, you can get this course and all the courses for free, dailystoiclife.com. I hope to see you in there, and I hope you join us
3:46 Ryan Holiday? as we explore the fascinating life of Epictetus.
3:58 Ryan Holiday? I'm pretty good with my money. I don't live outside my means, but I have one very expensive habit. A habit that if I'm not careful, will cost me everything. What I'm talking about is anxiety, and nothing in my life cost me more than it. Nothing has taken me out of more moments. Nothing has caused more fights. Nothing has stressed me out more. Seneca says, "He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary." That's why I say anxiety has cost me so much. It has caused me so much unnecessary suffering. And in today's video, I want to share the best Stoic advice to confront and then discard your anxiety, so you can live a life of clarity and peace and purpose.
4:44 Ryan Holiday? One 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. Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, talks about how he had a good day because he escaped anxiety. And then he actually corrects himself, he 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.
5:29 Ryan Holiday? 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. This is my little reminder here. This is an anxiety coin I carry. It's a little fidget, and it's got some Stoic reminders on it. And that's because even now, even after all these years of studying philosophy, I still deal with anxiety.
5:49 Ryan Holiday? Whenever Epictetus saw someone who was in the throes of anxiety, he tried to think about what they were after. He said, "If a person isn't wanting something outside of their control, they'd have no reason to be upset, no reason to worry." I think that's an interesting way of thinking about anxiety. The cause is never the thing itself. It's our desire, our expectation, our concern that things need to go a certain way, or we're not going to be okay. As a parent, what do you want? You want the world to always be okay and nothing to ever go wrong for your kids, which of course is not something you can ever possibly make happen. When you're traveling, what do you want? You want to get there on time, you want nothing to go wrong. But again, not only is that not possible, we know that things go wrong and most flights are delayed. For a nervous investor, you only want positive returns.
6:34 Ryan Holiday? You want things to go well. And that's not going to happen either. The market goes up and down. Having goals is fine, having standards is fine. But getting worked up, getting excited, biting your nails, torturing yourself because you need it to go that way is a recipe for misery. "If you can cut free of the impressions that cling to the mind," Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. "Free of the future and the past, you can make yourself," he says, "like a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness." Now, that's an ideal. I don't get there all that often. But when I am there, when I've stopped trying to make things go a certain way, when I can practice acceptance, I am happier, I am more at peace.
7:20 Ryan Holiday? Seneca was famous for practicing poverty. He would wear his worst clothes, eat simple foods, starve himself a little bit. He'd really like slum it for a day or two, supposedly as often as once a month. Now, why was he doing this? On one hand, it was to toughen himself up. But really, it was a psychological exercise. He wanted to, as a wealthy, successful person who had a lot, he wanted to familiarize himself with losing all of it. He wanted to be able to stare poverty in the face and say, "Is this what you were so afraid of?" Because that's what can happen in life. The things we possess become the new status quo. And then we're worried and anxious that we're going to lose them. And so the thought exercise... Of going, okay, what would it actually be like to not have them? There's a Zen story about a cup and the Zen master is saying to himself over and over again,
8:04 Ryan Holiday? "The cup is already broken, the cup is already broken." So he doesn't become so attached to it that he fears losing it and thus doesn't actually enjoy it while he has it because he's so petrified of something happening to it. And this is the sort of relentless anxiety that a lot of successful people have. You'd think they'd be comfortable and feel awesome and feel like they have enough, but in fact, they're just petrified of losing it. Seneca says slavery lives beneath marble and gold, inside the palace that looks so wonderful and appealing on the outside. It's actually a lot of anxiety and stress. So he's trying to familiarize himself with losing it so it would lose its power over him.
8:42 Ryan Holiday? There's a great Latin expression. Basically, it means it is solved by walking. Things rough at home, go for a walk. Your kid's having a tough time, take them for a walk. Struggling with a big decision, go for a walk. Feeling antsy or anxious, go for a walk. As a parent, walks are magic in relationships. Walks are magic. If you're a creative, walks are magic. Whatever you're dealing with, whatever you're going through, walks are magic. Seneca said, "The mind must be given over to long wandering walks or it'll break the way that that hammer eventually breaks against the anvil." We go for walks, we get outside, we get moving,
9:25 Ryan Holiday? and we're amazed at the problems it solves.
9:32 Ryan Holiday? There's a tension in Stoicism. So on the one hand, Seneca says we should imagine all the things that could possibly happen. This is premeditatio malorum. 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, that the Stoic idea of anticipating and considering what happened. It's not to torture ourselves, it's not just to... Go down this spiral of negativity and doomerism. It's to think proactively. I'll give you an example. Napoleon said that three times a day, a general should say to themselves,
10:17 Ryan Holiday? "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. It's constructive. "Okay, if this happens, here's what I'm gonna do. If this happens, here's what I'm gonna 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."
11:10 Ryan Holiday? Later, you'll laugh about this. Later, you'll see it with some perspective. Later, it'll make a good story. Later, you'll see how it was good for you. Later, you'll see how it got you where you are now. The problem is now, you're upset about it. You're torturing yourself about it. You're worried about it. And that's why Marx really said that you don't have to let this upset you. You don't have to turn it into something. You can just let it be what it is. You can just let it happen. You don't have to add this sort of injury on top, this stress that you're feeling in the moment, working yourself up about it. You can just let it be. Just deal with it. Just go with it.
11:50 Ryan Holiday? Don't seek for things to happen the way you want them to happen, but want them to happen the way that they have happened. Wish for them to have happened the way That they did. That's Epictetus. He obviously precedes Nietzsche by a couple thousand years, but you know, Nietzsche had this idea of amor fati, right? Amor fati, it translates to a love of fate. So instead of needing things to be a certain way, instead of simply accepting them as they are, Nietzsche and Epictetus say that human greatness, human happiness is in loving things as they actually are, saying, this is the way that it's supposed to be. This is wonderful that it is that way. It was chosen for me. And this isn't even necessarily to say that you just accept the world as awful and unjust and you never
12:32 Ryan Holiday? try to change it. But you say, no, no, it was set up this way. So I could be who I am capable of being inside of it. That's what this reminder of it means to me. Marcus Aurelius talks about how what you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire that turns it all into flame and brightness. That's what we're talking about. Amor fati means that you embrace life as it is, you embrace situations as they are, instead of fighting them, instead of running from them, instead of resenting them, even instead of just tolerating them, you love them. That is the path to happiness and to greatness.
13:08 Ryan Holiday? Rome would have been a dirty place, a dark place. Rome was a violent place, smelled terribly, noisy. But for all that, we can imagine Marcus Aurelius, we could imagine Seneca, we could imagine Epictetus enjoying that special, wonderful time of day we now call golden hour. That few minutes in the morning, in the evening, when the sun is at just the right angle, when everything bass in a rosy goldness. And we can imagine that whatever was happening in the world, whatever was happening in their life, however frustrated or annoyed or depressed they might have been, catching a glint of that and smiling.
13:50 Ryan Holiday? Seneca said, the whole world is a temple of the gods. I always feel that at golden hour. Marcus Aurelius talked about how when you stare at the stars and you imagine yourself up alongside them, that it was enough to kind of wash away the dust of life. I think golden hour does that. Everything shines for a brief moment. Everything is beautiful and soft. The sun's rays are at just the right angle. It doesn't matter what's happening in your life. It doesn't matter what's happening in the world. Golden hour is something special and we should appreciate it. And there's nothing in Stoicism that precludes us from enjoying the beauty of that. Marx and Marx actually talks about this in Meditations. He says, "What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness."
14:32 Ryan Holiday? But to get out in nature, to enjoy golden hour is a way to bathe yourself in light, to cleanse yourself, to experience the world as Seneca tried to, as a temple of the gods. And to not see that, to not enjoy it, to not appreciate it, despite everything that's happening in the world is a very dark existence indeed.
14:57 Ryan Holiday? It may be reasonable that you're concerned about this thing. It would cause trouble if it happened. Again, so when the Stoics 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. Try 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. Put yourself to constructive use. Put yourself working on something that makes a difference.
15:39 Ryan Holiday? 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.
15:54 Ryan Holiday? There's a story about Klianthe, one of the ancient Stoics, and he's walking through Athens one day and he sees this man talking to himself. You know, the way that we all do it, like, what's wrong with you? You idiot, how could you be so stupid? You know, that sort of negative self-talk that sometimes when we get so frustrated, so disappointed in ourselves, we can't help but break out into. And Klianthe stops and he interrupts the man and he says, "Hey, I just want you to know you're not talking." To a bad person. What an amazing interruption. What a great kindness to do a stranger. I think we can imagine somebody doing that for us. The next time we get really riled up, the next time we get really upset with ourselves, just to remind ourselves, you're not talking to a bad person. You're talking to you. You're not talking to a bad person.
16:41 Ryan Holiday? "Life is difficult enough. It's hard enough. You shouldn't suffer imagined troubles," Seneca says. That means don't borrow suffering. Don't get scared, worried, annoyed, anxious in advance of something that may or may not happen. That doesn't mean you're naive. You think everything's going to go your way. You do have a plan for the worst case scenario. But that's different than torturing yourself in anticipation of something that perhaps the odds are only 50/50 of actually even happening.
17:12 Ryan Holiday? What people say, what people do, the things that happen, these things can't upset you. Only your opinion about those things can upset you. The events are objective. It's what we make up about them. It's the story we tell ourselves about them. It's that we say we've been insulted, or offended, or transgressed against, or harmed. That's the problem. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus said. It's our opinion about things.
17:44 Ryan Holiday? Look, 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 Stoics would say our mind is this incredibly powerful thing. How are you going to deploy it? How are you going to use it? Are you going to use it to torture yourself? Are you going to use it to move yourself forward, to solve problems, or create them?
18:29 Ryan Holiday? No 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 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. Marx really says that you have to remember that 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. We have to remember stoic philosophy isn't this magical thing that removes all the flaws
19:13 Ryan Holiday? and problems and urges and temptations we have inside of us. No, it's a 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.
19:30 Ryan Holiday? Look, things are gonna go sideways. People are gonna say things, people are gonna do things. There are definitely gonna be problems in life. Things that you don't want to happen are going to happen. That is how it goes. But remember the stoics say, "It can only harm you if it harms your character. If it changes who you are, if it makes you vindictive, or resentful, or lazy, or entitled. If it makes you worse as a person, then you have been harmed." But people don't have the power to make us worse as human beings. That's something we control, that's within us. So who we are in response to what happens, that's where the harm can come from, but it's also where the benefit can come from. It can only harm you if it harms your character. That's the essence of stoic philosophy.
20:13 Ryan Holiday? It can only harm you if it harms your character. And we decide whether this thing degrades us or improves us. We decide if we harm our character in response to what has happened to us.
20:30 Ryan Holiday? You're being crazy letting them determine whether you did a good job or not, whether you're happy or not, whether you're a success or not. Marx wrote this, "Ambition is tying your happiness to what other people do and say and think. Sanity," he says, "is tying it to your own actions." Like, when I work on my books, the writing of the book is up to me. How it does on the bestseller list, what people think about it, what the reviews say, that isn't up to me. So my definition of success is an internal one. I'm focused on the parts of it I control. Do I want other people to like it and care about it? Sure, I guess it's nice to have, but it's extra. It's not why I do it, because to need it is to be insane and, of course, incredibly vulnerable.
21:12 Ryan Holiday? Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email, totally for free, almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. Love to see you there.
Previous We Can Be Hurt…Or We Can Do This Instead | Ask Daily Stoic Next This Conversation Will Make You Rethink Everything You Create | James Altucher (PT. 2) Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
