How To Use Stoicism To Control Your Anger

Anger is antithetical to Stoicism, so naturally, the Stoics had methods of dealing with it. In this video, Ryan Holiday walks us through the various tools Marcus Aurelius used to avoid anger. If you'd like to learn more, go to https://dailystoic.com/angerThis episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. With Talkspace, you set goals with your therapist and they hold you accountable and make sure you’re really progressing. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.***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 @DailyStoic: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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del Día Stoic. Cada viernes te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que puede ayudarte a vivir hasta esas cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, sabiduría y tempera. Y aquí, en el fin de semana, nos sumamos a un profundismo en esos mismos temas. Intervemos a filósofos estoicos, reflexionamos, nos preparamos, pensamos profundamente sobre los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo y trabajamos esta filosofía de una manera que es más posible aquí cuando no estamos ruidosos de trabajar o de llevar a los niños a la escuela, cuando tenemos el tiempo para pensar, para ir a caminar,

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  para sentarnos con nuestros diarios y para prepararnos para lo que traerá el futuro.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hola, soy Ryan Holiday. Bienvenidos a otro episodio de fin de semana del Día Stoic. Debería haber sido, por supuesto, estresante ser Marcus Realis. Debería haber sido estresante ser Seneca. Estas eran personas con mucho en sus hombros, que eran brillantes, que tenían cosas que estaban tratando de hacer. Y así como el resto de nosotros, se habrían frustrado. Se habrían molestado. Y creo que es imposible darle la vuelta al hecho de que Marcus Realis claramente tenía un tempero. ¿Cómo podría no tener un tempero? Cuando lees las meditaciones y ves cuánto habla de manejar tu tempero. Las personas que nunca se enojan no tienen que hablar de por qué no se enojen. Y así con Seneca, quiero decir, Seneca incluso escribe un ensayo sobre el miedo.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  Y en algunos aspectos, esto es un advertido para el joven emperador Nero. Pero claramente está basándose en experiencias personales. Este es un hombre que ha estado en la dirección durante décadas, que había estado a la altura del miedo, que claramente había perdido su tempero en su propia vida y que estaba hablando de experiencia sobre los peligros del tempero y el miedo y las pasiones. You know, we've said before, we have this challenge, the tame your temper challenge. We say like, just because you don't have an anger problem, doesn't mean anger is not a problem in your life. Of course, it's a problem. It's a problem for everyone. No one is glad after they lose their temper, right? I've never gotten angry, said something out of anger and been like, I am so glad I did that. Honestly, you know, you tell yourself that you feel better,

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  but like, do you ever actually feel better? Like, when you go punch a pillow because you're so upset, or you scream, you know, that's sort of one of those primal yells, you know, after you get away from something that's really driving you nuts. Did it actually let anything out? No, it didn't. The anger is still there, still eating at you. Anger is a toxic emotion to the Stoics. It's one of the main emotions they were trying to work really hard to be free of, to get to a place of apathia or ataraxia, where they were not, you know, they did not have that coursing through their veins. So in today's episode, we're going to look at some of the Stoic strategies for taming your temper, for controlling your anger, and for getting to that place of peace and stillness. And that's not to say there aren't going to be things in the world that

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  you should be upset about. But being angry, being driven by anger, is not where the Stoics wanted to come from. So today, here we go. How to use Stoicism to control your anger. And of course, if this video is a good starting point for you, you want to go deeper down this rabbit hole, be sure to check out our tame your temper challenge, which you can do at dailystoic.com/temper.

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  You can imagine that for someone like Marcus really is, temper and anger are going to be things he's really thinking about, concerned about, because he's overseeing an empire of millions of people. The stakes are constantly high. He's overseeing court cases. He's building projects. He's leading an army. In some cases, it's the worst, most frustrating problems that make their way up to his level. And so he does, in meditations, he talks about sort of the importance of controlling one's temper, of managing our anger, because it was such a critical part of the reality of his life. How much more harmful the consequences of anger are than the thing that causes it. What he means is that when you get upset about something, when you get angry about

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  it, what you do in response is often worse than whatever the consequences of the things that caused the problem were in the first place. At one point in Meditations, he actually quotes Euripides, the playwright who said something like, "Why give in to anger as if the world would notice?" He's basically saying like, "Our anger is impotent and totally pointless." And so, he talks constantly about anger and there's a bunch of proven strategies, a bunch of ideas that we get from Marcus Aurelius, that I think we can apply in our lives to make us not only less angry, but to reduce the consequences or costs of anger in our life. The first thing we get from Marcus, he says like, "Just accept responsibility. Whatever the problem is, whoever caused it, you have to accept responsibility." It's when you're blaming other people, you get really mad.

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  So he says, like, "Blame yourself or blame no one." So if you've decided early on, "I'm not gonna make this other people's problem," my wife says to me, like, "Someone can't make you frustrated, right? You have to own the fact that you don't control other people, but you always control how you respond, right?" So at the core of Stoicism is an acceptance of responsibility, right? Which reduces the amount of people that you're able to get angry at. You can't get angry at anyone but yourself, and we also, we obviously know, being angry at yourself doesn't accomplish anything. Another idea that the Stoics get about anger, this actually comes from Socrates. He says like, "Nobody does wrong on purpose." What he means is that almost nobody, obviously I think Socrates is wrong when it comes to

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  say like psychopaths or sociopaths, but the vast majority of people, when they wrong you, when they're rude to you, when they mess something up, when they do things in a way that's different than the way you would do them, it's not because they're trying to hurt you, it's because they think that that's the best thing to do. And so this reminder, and actually Marcus Aurelius opens Meditations with this sort of meditation on all the frustrating things he's gonna experience in the upcoming day, but he says, "The people who do this, they do this because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. They don't know the right way to do things." And so, he wants to go through the day with some sympathy for the fact that- That people are not doing things to upset you personally. It's that your interpretation of them is what's upsetting you. Marcus is obviously a big fan of Epictetus.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  And what Epictetus would say, it's not things that upset us. It's our judgment about things. So Marcus would try to remind himself that the event itself is objective, right? Somebody just said something to you. We decide to interpret that as rude or as offensive or as outrageous or as an attack. Right? So, you know, your car runs out of gas. You decide to tell yourself that that is incredibly unfortunate, that that is really annoying, that it's so and so's fault. The events are objective. We decide what story we're going to tell ourselves about them. And when we realize this, we can decide not to get upset. We can decide to tell ourselves that it's not a bad thing.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 7:12Ryan Holiday?

  Another thing Marcus talks about in meditations, he talks about reminding yourself when you have done that. So when somebody does something to you that's upsetting, you don't think, how egregious is this? How offensive is this? How annoying is this? How totally uncalled for this is? What a monster this person is. Instead, you want to think about, when have I done something similar to other people? And this is a way to remind yourself of what we were talking about earlier, which is that most people are not doing wrong on purpose. It's like when we mess up, we know that we weren't being a monster, that we weren't intentionally inflicting harm, that it was an accident, that we didn't know better. We didn't even think about it, so on and so forth. And so it's important to remind yourself about this when it comes to other people.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  I think probably the funniest lesson from Marcus about anger is just this idea of reminding yourself that there's going to be stupid, annoying, incompetent, frustrating people in the world. Marcus is like, look, when you bump up against someone else's shamelessness, ask yourself, is a world without shamelessness possible? We know that that's not true. Like a certain small percentage of the population is going to suck. They're going to mess up. They're going to be deadbeats. They're going to be annoying. And so what Marcus says is, when you bump into one of those people, instead of being surprised, instead of being angry, go, oh. Oh, this is just one of those people. If 1% of the population is a bad driver, or if 1% of the population, you know, talks too loudly on their cellphone in restaurants. Instead of getting angry when you experience those things,

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  you go, "Oh, this is that 1 out of 100 people." And in fact, maybe you try to remind yourself that it's good that there's only 1 out of 100 instead of 10 out of 100.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  I think this is more in line with modern thinking, is the idea of using gratitude as a check against anger. I think it was Tony Robbins who said, "It's impossible to be angry and grateful at the same time." But when you read Meditations, when you read Marcus Aurelius, you see him constantly remind himself of the beauty of life, the wonder of life, how grateful he should be for things. And in this gratitude, I think he is checking himself against the tendency to be upset at how imperfect things are, or frustrating they are, or how aggravating they happen to be.

• 9:23Ryan Holiday?

  And then the final, final lesson as far as managing our temper, this is the thing that the Stoics return to over and over again. It's kind of their magical cure-all to all problems. It's just a meditation on our mortality, on how insignificant we are. You know, Marcus says like, "It's so silly to be angry about things as if any of this is lasting, right? We're not lasting, the event is not lasting. We're all gonna die soon and no one will remember any of this." And so, to hang on to grudges, to rage about something for three or four days, or even to yell about it for 20 minutes, is in a way like a delusional idea that you know for certain that you have 20 minutes to waste, that you have two hours to waste, or two years to waste. To not talk to your sister for 20 years because, you know, she messed up Thanksgiving dinner

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  is to assume that you have 21 years with your sister left to gamble with. You know, to not reconcile with your father or your mother is to say, "Oh, I know I'll be able to do this before they die or before you die." And that's not true. So, "Memento Mori," you know, "You could leave life right now." He says, "Let that determine what you do and say and think." And that's kind of the core, ultimate check against anger. So, anyone who's in a position of leadership, in a position of power, but also just in a position of powerlessness, anger is going to make things worse, according to the Stoics. And that's why we want to work these strategies to reduce our anger before it takes things that are already bad and makes them worse.

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic, we have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.