Finding Calm – Chapter 3 from Nancy Sherman’s “Stoic Wisdom”

Today’s episode of the podcast features an excerpt from Nancy Sherman’s Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. Stoic Wisdom presents a compelling, modern Stoicism that teaches grit, resilience, and the importance of close relationships in addressing life's biggest and smallest challenges. A renowned expert in ancient and modern ethics, Sherman relates how Stoic methods of examining beliefs and perceptions can help us correct distortions in what we believe, see, and feel. LMNT is 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. As a listener of this show, 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. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. 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. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Nancy Sherman: Twitter, Facebook See 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?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You may have heard my interview several weeks ago with the great Nancy Sherman, who was formerly a professor of ethics at the Naval Academy, and I now believe that she is at Georgetown University. She is a longtime writer and thinker about Stoicism, someone whose works have been influential and helpful to me. She was just nice enough to give me a blurb about my new book on courage. When I read her new book, Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, I thought, this is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to bring to the podcast. So I asked if I could pick my favorite chapter from the book and bring it to you guys.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  And she and the publisher were more than willing to oblige. The audiobook is published by Recorded Books, and this chapter is about finding calm. She talks about writing the book during the pandemic, how to overcome internal and external obstacles with physical training and mental discipline. As we've talked about many times, this is what Stoic philosophy is for. How do you stay calm amidst chaos? It's easy to stay calm on a beach somewhere. How do you stay calm when the world is falling to pieces? How do you stay calm in the midst of overwhelming difficulties? And how do you operate then when it's really called for? We're at a high level of excellence and elite performance. And if you can do this, you can sustain yourself through just about anything.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, the Stoics were, when the Stoics talk about peace and fulfillment and happiness, they meant inside a world, not unlike the one that we're in now. So I feel like today's episode is very fitting, and I can't wait to bring it to you. You can check out Nancy's book, Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. This is the audiobook, obviously, which, as I said, is brought to you by Recorded Books. So check out the audiobook on Audible, anywhere books are sold. You can also get the physical edition, anywhere books are sold. And be sure to check out my interview with Nancy on the podcast as well.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Lesson Three: Finding Calm. Stoicism in the Time of the Pandemic. I am writing in the midst of a raging pandemic. We are under siege. When it will end is hard to predict. But one thing is certain for me. It is a time to test the full promise of Stoicism. COVID-19 has lurched us into worldwide war against an invisible enemy for which we have little armor. I have written about war for over three decades as a noncombatant. But this is a war in which we are all combatants with an enemy.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  We are in this war together, the global community that the cynics and the Stoics augured. We are interlocking pieces of a larger puzzle in terms of protection and social behavior, enlightened leadership and clear messaging, financial markets, travel, supply chains, and, crucially, testing, treatment, and the race to develop an effective and safe vaccine that can be equitably distributed. We want outcomes, but day to day, we want ways to lower our anxiety as we worry about exposure to the virus, how to break out of loneliness, the vulnerability of healthcare

• 4:19Speaker 01

  workers and others on the front lines, the limits of access to hospitals, and the availability of lifesaving equipment. We face our mortality squarely in a way many of us have never done before. It is a moment, if not to be Stoic, to use Stoic tools wisely. We do what we can to be prepared. The public message from the chief infectious disease doctor of the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci, is that preparation has to be strategic. Fauci, with his plain-speaking Brooklyn accent, is a consummate communicator who,

• 4:58Speaker 01

  not unlike Epictetus, knows he has to reach a lay public with memes that catch. When you are dealing with an infectious disease, you know, you always have that metaphor that people talk about, that Wayne Gretzky, he doesn't go where the puck is, he's going where the puck is going to be. Well, we want to be where the infection is going to be, as well as where it is now. That is, we need now to be acting as if we are already facing the future. We have to be proactive, not just reactive. We have to anticipate. Pre-rehearsal, anticipation, learning how to dwell in advance, vividly imagining future

• 5:43Speaker 01

  evils as if now present, are key to the stoic approach of mitigating anxiety. Know the enemy you might be fighting. Don't be caught off-guard. Applying these tools to the COVID-19 scenario. Run simulations, understand the potential trajectory of a pandemic, and then heed the warnings. The Trump administration's Department of Health and Human Services actually ran such a simulation from January to August 2019, code-named Crimson Contagion. The warnings were not heeded.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  In stoic terms, there were extensive, high-level pre-rehearsal exercises, but they were not taken seriously by those in power. The bottom line is that we failed to be prepared at both an individual and systemic level.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  A pandemic is a colossal crisis. It is hard to anticipate something of its magnitude, and hard to coordinate an enduring, effective global response. Still, one lesson it has taught is that surviving is a coordinated community project. Yet, part of the popular appeal of Stoicism, especially in the online community, is in its treasure trove of lessons for self-sufficiency. Here's popular advice from Epictetus. "Yes, my nose is running. And what have you hands for, then? Is it not that you may wipe your nose?" Epictetus's surface point is, "Don't complain."

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Some put the stress note on self-reliance. "Take care of wiping your own nose, and don't wait for someone else to do it for you." Many generalize the point as a univocal Stoic theme that is all-purpose. But human self-sufficiency, on any honest conception, is relational, dependent at all levels on support from those whose help we often don't acknowledge, or whose dignity we don't always properly respect. The notion of interconnectedness has deep Stoic roots, as deep as any themes of self-reliance. Marcus Aurelius puts it this way: "Beings endowed with reason,

• 8:08Speaker 01

  constituted for one fellowship of cooperation, are in their separate bodies analogous to the several members of the body in individual organisms." The idea in this will come home to you more if you say to yourself, "I am a member of the system made of rational beings." California Governor Gavin Newsom, in his early shelter-in-place order to all state residents, put forth a message that echoes not just Marcus's sentiment, but words. "A state as large as ours, a nation-state, is many parts. But at the end of the day, we're one body. There's a mutuality.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  There's a recognition of our interdependence." He went on to say that we have moral duties, anchored in our sociality.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  The lessons in this chapter are about Stoic techniques for mitigating anxiety. But Stoic insistence that we are socially interdependent will always be in the picture, as foreground or background. "We are woven together by a common bond, with scarcely one thing foreign to another," Marcus writes, telegraphing Zeno's image of a cosmic city. "Our preparedness to face the present and future depends on our own will and the will of others in coordinated, well-informed, and cooperative efforts." A more stable happiness.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Still, it is hard to square the Stoic idea of social connectedness with their view that our vulnerability rests in things precisely outside our own virtue. The Stoic promise is to stabilize happiness through stable and reliable good character. That, too, was what the Stoics' great intellectual predecessor Aristotle was aiming for. But Aristotle insisted that good character alone was not enough for happiness. "We need, in addition, resources, opportunities, means, and friends for exercising virtue in the world.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Otherwise," as Aristotle put it, "happiness would be compatible with passively being asleep for the rest of your life and with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes." Yet if happiness is virtuous activity, and thus depends on things outside your control, both for its exercise and full promise, on luck, children who don't predecease you, good political leadership, and more, then, as Aristotle himself admits, "you entrust to chance what is greatest and finest," and that would be a defective arrangement.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Still, to deny common sense and hold that you can be happy tortured on the rack, or lose some thirteen sons as Priam supposedly did during the Trojan War, without suffering a reversal of happiness, is pushing matters too far. And so Aristotle, it seems, had an unstable position. Happiness included both inner and outer goods, but just how to order them in a good life so that things outside your control don't derail your happiness, was never fully resolved. Aristotle likely held that the matter couldn't be formally resolved. "The decision rests with perception.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  We discern the particulars and take up matters case by case. We settle with how things are for the most part." "It is foolish," he insisted, "to look for the kind of precision in ethical theory that you would demand from the demonstrative proofs of a mathematician." But this didn't stop the Stoics from wanting more precision and brighter stripes. At the very least, they wanted to secure happiness and tranquility for the fully virtuous and provide guidance for a path of progress. If it required forging new concepts and coining new terms, so be it. Clunky machinery wasn't an obstacle if the end goal was tranquility.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  "External goods," the Stoics go on to argue, "are categorically different kinds of goods from virtue. In fact, they are not real goods." Here the Stoics appeal to Socrates, who argued that virtue alone is necessary and sufficient for happiness. "Possessing such things as good health, stable and sufficient income, good friends and family, enlightened political institutions and communities, social esteem and respect, all these are not themselves part of happiness," the Stoics teach. "They grant common sense and say these are things that in general we are naturally attracted to as human beings.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  They are preferred. Their opposites are things that in general we naturally avoid. They are dis-preferred."

• 13:26Speaker 01

  But they insist that their presence or absence can't make or break happiness. They are not just externals, they are indifference. They do not make a difference to happiness positively or negatively. The rub, as we shall see, is that they still play a substantive role in our lives. Indeed, virtue involves wisely selecting or rejecting them. The view is challenging, no less in ancient times than now. But one thing crucial to remember is that the term indifference, at theaphera, does not mean indifference. We are by birth and breeding neither indifferent to these goods or bads,

• 14:11Speaker 01

  nor should we harden ourselves to become so. Still, learning to live in a stoic way requires fundamental recalibration of values. In particular, we need to learn behaviorally and not just intellectually that preferring or dispreferring goods or bads involves going for them or avoiding them in a way that isn't filled with restless yearning or panicky aversion. So not only do the Stoics have a different valuation system for what we might loosely call inner and outer goods, they also carve out a distinctive kind of approach and avoidance behavior

• 14:54Speaker 01

  that is meant to inculcate calm. We go for things without sticky, acquisitive attitudes. We reject things without fearful avoidance or anxious dread. Learning how to cultivate these new attitudes is part of stoic training. And the striving critical to stabilizing that new value scheme is itself a stoic way of life. So while the sage may be too exalted a model, the human termed divine, the sage arrived where she is through strategies for minimizing what's outside her control. And those are strategies, the Stoics teach, for all of us to adopt.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Some things are up to us. Assent to impressions. Still, what do we say about our clutch on life? Or fear that our children might predecease us? Or worry about a pandemic and a death toll that has taken more American lives than lost in battle in all of World War II? What do we control when we act with disciplined stoic self-control? What do we let go of? Stoic self-control begins by drawing a line between our psychological faculties and what lies outside. Epictetus famously opens the Enchiridion this way:

• 16:25Speaker 01

  “Some things in the world are up to us, while others are not. Up to us are our faculties of judgment, motivation, desire, and aversion.” In short, everything that is our own doing. “Not up to us are our body and property, our reputations, and our official positions.” In short, everything that is not our own doing. Many of us would protest right off the bat at where the line is drawn. Even if we can’t fully avoid disease, penury, ignominy, loss of career, or office, many of us can do some things, some of the time, to protect our health, material means, and

• 17:10Speaker 01

  so on. Epictetus grants that, but at some point, he argues, our armor and efforts, even that of the most privileged of us, will be no match for natural or human-made misfortune. That is Epictetus’s core claim: We are all hostages of fortune in some way or other.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Fine, we can grant him that. But we still might object that there is no hard line between controlling what is outside and what is inside. What's inside is vulnerable. Our capacity for judgment might be impaired by traumatic brain injuries or an aging brain. Our cravings not in line with what we want to want. Our fears, pathological phobias rooted in psychological syndromes we wish we didn't have. Equally, there are epistemic biases. What we see may be tainted by implicit bias, and what we judge to be the case may be less

• 18:15Speaker 01

  our doing than the product of privileged standpoints and access. This is, of course, a modern view of the psyche and of knowledge. The Stoic view, by contrast, is radically volitional. And their claim is that the range of our willpower is expansive and its work empowering. With effort and choice, we can turn our gaze inward to monitor stubborn patterns of attention. Through a modern Stoic lens, these might include cognitive or epistemic biases. I explore this application later.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  The locus of control on the Stoic view is our assent to impressions, or how things seem to us from the sensory input from outside and from within. Assent is the mechanism by which we tacitly say yea or nay to that input. It is the moment of basic control in judgment, motivation, desire, or aversion. So we may assent to a perceived insult as an evil that is distressing, or to disease as a perceived threat to be feared, or wealth as a perceived good to be desired and acquired. Each of these is an evaluative judgment,

• 19:36Speaker 01

  an acceptance that what appears is a good or a bad. In the case of evaluative judgments that are emotions, such as anger or fear, the evaluations are umfy. They engage us effectively and impel us, through impulses or hormi, to action. They are motivational. Hormi is the cognate of our word hormone, and like that organic substance, it stimulates action. But it does so through the meditation of the mind. Seneca explains it this way: "Anger is undoubtedly set in motion by an impression received of a wrong.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  But does it follow immediately on the impression and break out without any involvement of the mind? Or is some assent by the mind required for it to be set in motion? Our view is that it undertakes nothing on its own, but only with the mind's approval. Emotion is thus a kind of voluntary action. Through assent, we implicitly frame and grasp the world propositionally and act on the resulting opinions or judgments. Emotions involve agency. Epictetus insists that with agency comes responsibility. It is not things themselves that trouble people,

• 21:03Speaker 01

  but their opinions about things. So whenever we are frustrated, or troubled, or pained, let us never hold anyone responsible except ourselves, meaning our own opinions. The idea is intuitive. We are inveterate interpreters at the most basic level of perception, seeing a penny, to take a simple example, as having three-dimensional depth, when we really only see its two-dimensional face. We wear lenses of all sorts to sort and shape and construct and categorize the world. And so too, when it comes to categorizing goods and bads and how they affect our happiness,

• 21:48Speaker 01

  we always see and assess from what philosophers call an epistemic standpoint.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  As we said, we are not always free spontaneously to choose those standpoints. How we see may be the result of others' impositions, sometimes invisible, hidden persuaders, whether through the work of advertising agencies or social bots corrupting an election. How we see or interpret situations can also be the result of systemic and profound forms of domination. So, a woman's crippling sense of shame as a rape victim may be someone else's opinion that she has internalized. The work of patriarchy and shaming runs deep.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Similarly, a young altar boy's fear of a pedophilic priest's continued assaults may get muted by the priest's sacred robes and his avuncular role at the Sunday family table. The inner world can be a socialized construct, and it isn't always an enlightened place for freedom or peace. Yet it may be a place of retreat when external forces give you other options. The young boy finds safety in his mind, even if through psychological dissociation. Subordinated or in captivity, we push our will to the limit.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  This is Epictetus's stance: "A person enslaved and in bondage can still find inner freedom." It is what so inspired U.S. Navy's senior POW James Stockdale in his seven-and-a-half years of imprisonment, two-and-a-half years of which were in solitary confinement in the Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam. Epictetus's handbook was his salvation. "Stockdale and I met several times and talked about the torture he endured. He came to embody for me what it was to live as a stoic in the most extreme conditions of deprivation." Epictetus is politically disenfranchised.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  If there is any freedom, it has to come from within. That is his political reality, or at least, it is the formative conditions of his early life. His Stoicism is a response to it. The situation is different for other Stoics. Seneca becomes a public servant, par excellence. He is politically enfranchised, powerful, and in the most elite inner circle as Nero's minister. But he wasn't always in public favor. Recall his exile in Corsica for some eight years, under Claudius, and under Nero. He knows well the cost of voluntary retreat.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Retirement from the work of the Commonwealth needs justification, public and private, and not just the sort that makes theoretical research its own kind of public action that serves the common good. Seneca's concern about retreat, voiced in many of his writings, serves as guidance for our own times, when public servants choose or are forced to retire because of evil or corrupt political leadership. In "On Leisure," Seneca aims to align his views with the orthodox Stoicism of Zeno, whereas the Epicurean say, "The wise man will not engage in public affairs except in an emergency."

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Zeno says, "He will engage in public affairs unless something prevents him." The exemption rests on special circumstances, adds Seneca, a state too corrupt to be helped or wholly dominated by evil. Nero is not far from the page here, as Seneca eases himself out of public service. Forced suicide on Nero's orders will soon follow.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Seneca gives us a clear-eyed view of the systemic constraints that surround personal control and endurance. In this same essay, he underscores the point: "The hindrance is not in the doer, but in the things to be done." We live in commonwealths, local and cosmopolitan. We work within the local commonwealths through the externals of power and office, until we can't. Assent to impression itself has limits in giving us freedom. We can push the limits out fairly far, but again, we are constrained by access to input, implicit bias, as well as our own intellectual curiosity and defiance.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Mental control can hit barriers, even when we are not suffering dementia or neuropsychological disorders. Still, the Stoics have promising tools for greater empowerment. But that said, we need Stoic exhortation and discipline to push the boundaries outward, whether those boundaries are internal or external. With assent to impressions as a starting point, let's turn to other specific Stoic techniques for self-control, and how we can best implement them in our lives. Physical training and mental discipline.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Recently, I found myself on a physical therapy table doing exercises for a rotator cuff tear, exacerbated by too much swimming. While doing my boring 30 times 3 shoulder abductions with a dumbbell, my physical therapist, Chris, asked me what I do for a living. "I'm a philosopher, and I'm writing a book on Stoicism," I said. His face lit up. I now had his full attention.

• 27:58Ryan Holiday?

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

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Chris is a well-built athletic guy who trains hard and treats folks like me, as well as serious athletes. He tells me he's listened to Tim Ferriss's podcasts on Stoicism, and has also read a Ryan Holiday book on Stoicism. He tried listening to Marcus Aurelius's meditations on his commute to and from work, but it wasn't exactly a gripping yarn. Too many disconnected snippets? Yep, he replied, it jumped around too much. So he went back to podcasts on Stoicism. The philosophy really appealed to him.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  When I asked why, it became clear that it had to do with the idea of hard training and discipline. Building strength, or regaining it in the face of injury, is what he teaches and coaches. Transferring strength and stability exercises to a different arena made perfect sense to him. In my own case, he had told me that the natural wear and tear of a mature body, plus repetitive overuse, is what did my shoulders in. Psychologically, we face the grind of wear and tear daily. The mind, no less than the body, needs healthy exercises to mitigate the impact of injury and heal trauma when it occurs.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Chris and I were on the same page. Epictetus casts physical training as a model for overall mental discipline. Whatever means are applied to the body by those who are exercising it may also be valuable for training if in some way they aim toward desire or aversion. He then warns that the point of a toned body, or psychological toughness, is not to build a fanbase if their aim is mere display. These are traits of a person who has turned to externals, and is hunting after something other, and is seeking for spectators to exclaim, "What a great person!"

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Training is for the purpose of discipline, not adulation. It helps build character, and is a sign of the effort and striving of aspiration.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Pre-rehearsal of bads.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  One of the better-known Stoic exercises for finding calm is pre-rehearsing future evils or bads. Anticipate the traps that lay ahead. Don't be caught off-guard. The exercise goes back to the early Greeks. Cicero approvingly quotes a fragment from Euripides. "I learned this from a wise man. Over time, I pondered in my heart the miseries to come: a death untimely, or the sad escape of exile, or some other weight of ill. Rehearsing so that if by chance some one of them should happen, I did not be unready, not torn suddenly with pain."

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Euripides, he says, in turn, takes a lesson from the pre-Socratic Anaxagoras, who, legend has it, said when his son died, "I knew my child was mortal." The Stoics turn the teaching into a premeditation exercise, regularly rehearse potential future evils to mitigate the shock of accident and tragedy.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  I don't think I have ever uttered Anaxagoras's remark in an undergraduate lecture on Stoic ethics without my students being horrified at the message. They roll their eyes in disbelief. "It's cold and callous," they say. "They can't believe I'm expecting them to take Stoicism seriously if that's what it teaches." It's as if I told them then and there that their parents don't love them, or were willing to abandon them at any moment. It takes a lot of backpedaling to make the Stoic message appealing. I typically do. And I begin with the fact that the Stoics, and especially Epictetus, went in for shock and awe. He clearly succeeded.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Still, the gist of the message, I suggest, is quite humane. We shouldn't run from the fact of our mortality. But to stop running from that fact takes work. It takes daily pre-rehearsal and a willingness to actually think about potential losses. The Stoics claim that if we do, we can mute some of the freshness of a sudden loss. The Greek term here for "fresh" is telling. Prospatos connotes not nearness in time, but rawness, as in freshly slaughtered meat.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  We need advance exposure if we are to weaken the visceral, raw assault of close-up losses. The technique, presumably, involves more than just an incantation of words. "I always knew my child was mortal." Dwelling in advance may take immersion in imagination, but also some humor and love. When my mother, Beatrice Sherman, was in her mid-90s and in a nursing home, I often thought about how we would talk about death. She was healthy, but I knew the end would soon come, and I knew her well, that she wanted to avoid talking about death at all costs. She wasn't a talker at the best of times.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  When I asked her about a book, she read three or four novels a week. I was lucky if I got out of her "it was fine." That was her standard response. "Fine." Life was fine, she wasn't a complainer. But she was into denial of death. And so, at some point, I decided we would have to make a joke of it. I would ask every so often, as we talked, about how much she liked the Hebrew home and her caregivers and friends. "Remind me, Mom, we didn't sign up for the immortality plan, did we? Because if we did, it's going to be really expensive." She would smile gently. She was very beautiful. And she chuckled a bit.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Of course, she never said the words "I always knew I was mortal." But she thought the idea. She couldn't talk about death, it just wasn't her style. But I think our little repeated pre-rehearsal, our joke about the immortality plan, made her last days easier for both of us. We shared our mortality. And we shared not dreading death, together.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  My mother died just three days after we danced together. She in her wheelchair, and eyes swirling her around with other couples on the dance floor at the nursing home. She had been coughing a lot the week before, and we both knew that the end might be near. The antibiotics weren't working. The nurses were monitoring her closely. We spent the last day together, in her room, facing death together. Our little whimsical joke about the immortality plan was preparation. She for leaving this world, and me for saying goodbye. And that it was going to be on my mom's terms.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Fine. Pre-rehearsal, as I've intimated, is a form of pre-exposure, a desensitization ahead of time. If events don't occur, then we take it as a gain. In the case of death, the question is only when? There are contemporary clinical parallels to the notion of pre-rehearsal. Some may be more familiar with exposure techniques that work on desensitization after the fact. Clinicians have for some time successfully used evidence-based prolonged exposure, PE

• 36:18Speaker 01

  therapy, after the fact, to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. PE is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, itself with roots in Stoicism, during which patients confront, in vivo or through imagination, situations or events that are reminders of traumatic situations, though now experienced in safe settings. Through repeated approach rather than avoidance, the fear response is deconditioned rather than reinforced. Take the case of military service members exposed to the constant threat of improvised explosive devices.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Survival depends on quickly responding to those threats. But the fear response can become overreactive. Hypervigilance is adaptive in a war zone, but not always after war. At home, when thunderclaps are heard as gunfire, fresh bumps on a pavement read as newly planted bomb sites, a black plastic bag on a lawn, a hiding place for an explosive. Re-exposure to stressors by talking about them, seeing them in virtual settings, and revisiting and processing memories in a relationship where there is trust and safety, become a way of deconditioning both the avoidance response and hyperreaction.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  The "neutral" garbage bag on a lawn, or "new bump on the neighborhood road," over time loses its associated negative valence. In more recent studies, researchers have begun to investigate pre-treatment exposure. Attention bias, or to cast the idea in Stoic terms, the patterns in our ascent to impressions, is modulated by balancing focus between threat and neutral stimuli. The idea is to learn to shift attention, so that we develop perceptual and cognitive resources for focusing not just on threat, but on neutral situations.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Research suggests that advanced training of this sort in shifting focus between threat and unthreatening stimuli reduces anxious hypervigilance, characteristic of PTSD. In a related research experiment, Israeli Defense Force combat soldiers in units likely to face potentially traumatic events were exposed to "attention bias modification" training sessions. Through computer programs, they were trained to attend to threat in an attempt to enhance cognitive processing of potentially traumatic events.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  The idea is to make the response to stress cues adaptive and agile, elevate the response in acutely threatening situations in combat, but train it to be transient, so that it recedes in safe circumstances.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Again, we can put a Stoic gloss on this: "Train in advance to withhold inappropriate assent to impressions of threat, by laying down alternative patterns of assent to impressions of calm and safety." Of course, Stoic standards of what is and isn't appropriate won't map onto what most of us commonly hold to be appropriate or adaptive. The devil is in the details of how we interpret the doctrine of indifference, and what will count as wise selection. But the general Stoic idea of preventive exposure and training and what we focus on in our environment is prescient. The Stoics go on to suggest that pre-rehearsal

• 40:08Speaker 01

  may reduce the compounding effects of secondary distress, or, as Cicero reports, "the distress that we were caught off-guard and might have been able to prevent what happened." Of course, hindsight bias can be magical thinking, a tendency, after the fact, to overestimate our ability to predict an outcome. Should-haves and could-haves can be grandiose ways of misattributing responsibility. Sometimes they are ways of coping with grief, or survivor guilt, as I learned in my work with military service members returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. We tend to take moral responsibility

• 40:53Speaker 01

  in order to make sense of what seems senseless. In the case of service members, many replaced flukish luck with failed moral agency. Moral injury, the extreme moral distress of real or apparent moral transgression as agent, victim, or bystander can result. Conscientiousness becomes overwrought and anguished. But moral conscientiousness needn't always be anxious. Many ways of being prepared and being responsible for being prepared are far from irrational or overwrought. They are what good people do to take care of themselves and others.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  This is in sync with Stoic notions of taking preparation seriously at a personal and societal level. Still, Stoic pre-rehearsal, if it focuses on the glass half-empty and not half-full, can seem a recipe for inducing anxiety. Reducing future distress comes at the cost of increasing present distress. We ruminate about worst possible cases, imagine how we would react to bad news, become preoccupied with adversity and loss. We are in battle mode before there is a war to fight. But again, there are good and bad ways of being future-minded.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Strategic thinking, risk analyses, long-term planning, and coordinated and collaborative efforts, all are ways to mitigate disaster that help reduce the emotional overlay of individual debilitating fear or depression. They are not necessarily ways of being alarmists, but ways of being realistically prepared. Anticipating a natural or medical disaster is a collective enterprise managed by institutions, but anticipating profound personal loss is something else, and each of us has different resilience levels to do with psychological, social, political, and historical factors and more.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Epictetus suggests that we can train for personal loss by gradually increasing the stakes. We move incrementally from rehearsing small potential disturbances to great ones. In the case of everything that attracts you, or has its uses, or that you are fond of, keep in mind to tell yourself what it is like, starting with the most trivial things. He suggests we start with a jug. If you are fond of a jug, say, "I am fond of a jug." Then, if it is broken, you will not be troubled. Again, the advice makes no sense if it's just a verbal incantation, tacit or expressed. Let's try to fill it out.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  We give ourselves advance warning. I say to my husband, as I recently did, "I really adore this Richard Bader Ham large-fluted celadon crock. I'm going to be really upset if either one of us breaks it." What's unsaid, but both of us are now queued up to think, is, "Let's be careful." And that might lead to a conversation, again, half tacit, half spoken, about whether it's the end of the world if it breaks. It's meant to be used. Storing the bread in it now is a perfect use for it. We'll be really careful. Why have it if we don't use it? And if it breaks? Well, it breaks.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Maybe something like that is what Epictetus is inviting us to rehearse. It's all too fast in his formulation. But we're not at his lectures in real time, milling around with other followers, analyzing and interpreting. We're doing it now, some 2,000 years later. We're trying to imagine rehearsing loss at the same time as we think about recalibrating our values about what really matters. We're trying to test how stoic we are. Epictetus then widens the sphere of practice. If you go out to bathe, picture what happens at the bathhouse.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  The people there who splash you, or jostle you, or talk rudely, or steal your things. Remind yourself about what you might expect. The case, again, hits close to home. I often think about going to the Y at the end of the day for an outdoor swim, in winter and summer, and in winter, a post-swim warm-up in the hot tub or sauna.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  But the locker room is often crowded with screaming teens coming in from swim team practice. Are they going to be there today? Is it a practice day? Did I time my visit just right? If they're there, it's not what I want at the end of a tough day. But now, if I'm listening to Epictetus, he's telling me, "If at the outset," I say to myself, "I want to bathe, but I also want to keep my will in harmony with nature, that is, in sync with how things turn out, then I'm less likely to get angry about what is happening." It makes sense. I will have given myself an advance talking to. I'm armed.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  If the swim team girls are giggling and gossiping at high volume, then it won't be what I wanted initially, but I may be better poised to adjust expectations. Epictetus then graduates from triflings to what's most pressing in our lives. The now-familiar anecdote gets embellished. When you kiss your little child or your wife, say that you are kissing a human being. Then, if one of them dies, you will not be troubled. Wait. This is a steep progression, from a broken jug to the loss of a loved one with an unruly throng at the bathhouse somewhere in between.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Pre-rehearsal may give you a perspective on mortality, but to think that it averts grief suggests both the worst parts of Stoicism and psychologically unsound ways of dealing with loss. Is there a way to humanize the view? The following may help, even if it doesn't soften the view. Stoic mental preparation involves working one's way up to tough tests that we might face, and know we would if only we had fuller divine-like knowledge of how things will unfold.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Some of those future scenarios and counterfactual reactions to them, if this were to happen, then I would, blank. We might now find outright distasteful. Explains Epictetus. Chrysippus was right to say, “As long as the future is uncertain to me, I always hold to those things which are better adapted to obtaining the things in accordance with nature. For God Himself has made me disposed to select these.” So, if I knew I was destined to be ill, I’d have an impulse to be ill. And, too, if my foot had a mind, it would have an impulse to get muddy.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  That is, what are now dis-preferred in deference might, in another context, be preferred and appropriate to select. Seeing that we do not know beforehand what is going to happen, it is appropriate to adhere to what is by nature more suited for selection. Of course, we don’t know what it is to adhere to what is by nature in the absence of knowing nature’s full secrets and how and when they will be disclosed to us. But what we can do is train to be adaptive and prepare ourselves for the worst, even if we hope for the best.

• 49:09Ryan Holiday?

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

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Pandemics are, again, a salient case. With guidance from expert epidemiological and policy teams, economists and medical researchers take steps to prepare. Teach the public to imagine what seems unimaginable, and then prepare for the personal and emotional toll. Know the attitudes that travel with disaster: anxiety, dread, massive sorrow and grief, loneliness, dislocation, a sense of an empty future. And know the sources of comfort and support.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  There is no way we can be immune from psychological distress, nor would we want to be. Moreover, any armor that claims to fully protect is a scam, a fool's errand. Still, there are Stoic lessons we can learn about possible ways of minimizing and managing distress, both on a personal and institutional level. And the app of pre-rehearsal is at its core: try to make hardships that are distant and almost unthinkable, real and proximate. And then imagine best responses in those hard cases. What is a path forward?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  That's a way to humanize the account and update it for our times. Are there other Stoic techniques for mitigating emotional distress? Hedges and reservations. In addition to pre-rehearsal, the Stoics teach us to frame our plans and intentions in a way that mentally prepares us for the possibility that things might not work out as we'd like them to. They advise this technique: "Tag on to your intentions," or, as they say, "impulses toward preferred indifference, a tacit mental reservation, if nothing happens to prevent it."

• 51:22Speaker 01

  We can think of the strategy as a way of hedging bets: things may not work out. Always think of what you want as tentative. Here's Seneca illustrating the mental technique: "Say to yourself, 'I will set sail unless,' Nisi Cee, 'something interferes.' 'I shall become praetor, a Roman magistrate, unless something thwarts it.' 'My business will be successful unless something interferes.'"

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Epictetus invokes a similar idea, reminding his listeners about effective ways to modulate attitudes toward indifference. "Given we are not sages, what is 'up to us,' which it would be fine to desire, is not now present to you, and use only impulse and aversion, but lightly and with reservation, and in a relaxed way." Epictetus's points are compressed and in Stoic idiom. The gist is this: As non-sages, we don't yet have stable access to fine or noble desires directed at the only real good virtue.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Instead, what we have at our disposal are impulses and diversions directed at indifference. In going light on those impulses, we avoid excess and strain, the ache of yearning and the anxiety of panicky avoidance. Mental reservation adds the thought like that of the cautious bather at the public bathhouse: "It may be noisy there." Readjust your expectations. What you find may not be what you originally hoped for. A late-first-century BCE Stoic, Arius Didymus, invokes a similar idea from the Old Stoic.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  "They also say nothing, contrary to his desire or impulse, occurs, in the case of the worthwhile man, because he does all such things with reservation, and nothing adverse befalls him unforeseen." But what exactly is the advice here? Should we always qualify impulses so they become fail-proof? Impulses, on this reimaging, come with built-in cushions, a bit like car airbags that inflate upon impact in an accident. Formulated in the right way, impulses ensure psychological immunity that protects when you need it most.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  The idea seems a bit too good to be true, psychologically if not logically.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Maybe a better way of thinking about reservation is on the financial trading model. Most of us are familiar with a tagline that's standard in market prospectuses: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." It's a warning not to assume an investment will do well in the future just because it did well in the past. Market climates change. We have to be adaptive. But equally, what did poorly in the past may just as easily be an opportunity in the future. Either way, we have to be agile, not market timers, but poised to rebalance on a regular basis to meet target asset allocations.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  This is actually a useful way of thinking about key Stoic texts on mental reservation. No, the Stoics were not financial advisors. If anything, their cynic roots make them suspicious of money. Recall the cynic motto from Diogenes: "Deface the coinage." The point of the financial analogy is, rather, that information about the world and our best analyses of it are constantly changing. Impulses should change and be responsive to those updated ways of seeing the world. So, to return to Seneca's example, I'll go on a boat ride, but I'll change my plans

• 55:36Speaker 01

  and motive or impulse to carry it out if I notice that a storm is heading in. I plan to campaign for election as a Roman magistrate, but I will change my plans and impulse to go forward if my bid for election seems highly unlikely, and so on. In the sage's case, there is quick responsiveness to new information. This is a highly idealized case. The sage's impulses align with the present epistemic landscape. The sage doesn't assent to future wished-for contingents. He keeps updating impulses in light of updated beliefs.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  In short, the sage doesn't get stuck on what's wished for or what was. Motive always tracks cognitive changes, and cognitive agility guarantees keeping up.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Seneca unpacks the idea behind mental reservation in this way. It captures the preceding idealized line of reasoning, but with a few critical additions. "This is why we say that nothing happens to a wise man contrary to his expectations. We release him not from the accidents, but from the blunders of humankind. We ought also to make ourselves adaptable lest we become too fond of the plans we've formed." He accents the last point: "Both the inability to change and the inability to endure are foes to tranquility."

• 57:13Speaker 01

  The first point to note is that the sage is protected not from accidents or misfortune, but from human error. And this is because a sage's knowledge keeps up with the facts, in the sense of what's objective and outside the knower. It's in this sense that things aren't contrary to his expectations. It's not that the sage cushions all impulses against disappointment or failure; rather, she changes impulses to keep up with what is now the case. "We fallible beings are not so lucky. Our knowledge isn't always one step ahead of accidents."

• 57:54Speaker 01

  But then Seneca brings the sage down a little to our human level. A sage may suffer by having to abandon plans and desires. So here we learn that the sage makes emotional investments that can actually lead to pain. But the suffering, dolorem, will be much lighter if success isn't promised; that is, if there is mental reservation and there is a capacity to be adaptive. That is a tip for all of us, even we who are fallible and who invest with more passion than as often wise.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Overall, this is a remarkable set of lessons with implications for our times. If the fundamental point behind mental reservation is cognitive agility, facing facts squarely, trying to keep up with fluid informational landscapes, then the Stoic idea here is less about how to beat frustration than about how to change motivations in ways that align with new and reliably curated information. Beating frustration may be an indirect windfall, but the work in getting there is cognitive. Of course, as we said, the Stoics idealized the model. The sage is an exalted knower, indeed, an infallible one, who doesn't have to worry

• 59:18Speaker 01

  about assenting to misleading and attractive impressions, or clinging too tightly to health or clean feet, when the inevitability of disease or muddy feet is how nature is unfolding here and now and guiding what we should assent to. And he doesn't seem to have to worry either about all the unconscious ways we "take in" impressions without surveillance or will. But even so, the general idea of being responsive to a changing world, aided by exercises in pre-rehearsal, is a cautionary lesson for trying to find calm in unnerving times.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Like an archer. Another way the Stoics counsel us to adapt to the uncertainty of outcomes is through an analogy with archery. In shooting an arrow, the "objective" is to hit the target, but the "goal" or "end" is to do all in one's power to shoot straight, to do all one can to accomplish the task. So there are two values: an objective, about preferred outcomes, and an overall end or goal, about striving.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  In terms of living a good and morally decent life, missing the mark with respect to specific actions is compatible in the course of a life with achieving the overall end of excellence or virtue. Put otherwise, virtue is in the striving, in doing everything we can to live a good life. The accidents of bad luck may frustrate our objectives and preferred outcomes, but not the overall end of virtue or goodness. The two values, indifference, or preferences in virtue, or goodness, are distinct. Many would say, again, this is the harsh side of Stoicism.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Shouldn't we be distressed by accidents and bad luck that frustrate the objectives of our good actions? To save lives as a healthcare worker? To keep innocents out of the crosshairs of fire? To save a toddler in a playground accident? Even if tragic outcomes don't impugn our best judgment and fine efforts, don't they typically stress us? And, if severe enough, shake our confidence that we did everything we could? And isn't that distress a good thing? A sign that we care and are invested in the world around us? Consider the following case to test Stoic intuitions. In the fall of 2019, I gave a keynote speech on moral injury

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  at the Psycho Trauma Center in Amsterdam to a group of clinicians, senior first responders in fire, police in the military, as well as humanitarian aid workers, among others. Firefighter Art van Ousten told us of a harrowing choice he had to make one Christmas Eve. He was having a holiday meal with his family when he received a call to lead a rescue operation in the close-knit, small, Dutch town of Arnhemuyden. The apartment above a Chinese restaurant was ablaze, and four children of the restaurant owners were trapped inside. The parents stood outside the building in shock as they watched the flames balloon out the upper-story windows. Three firefighters already on the scene

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  had tried to rescue the children, but the flames had overwhelmed their efforts. Conditions had only worsened. As Art surveyed the scene, the question was no longer "how" to rescue the children, but "if" they should be rescued.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  And his judgment with thirty years of experience behind him was that the mission was futile. The children couldn't be saved, and the firefighters wouldn't survive the rescue attempt. With a heavy heart, he went to break the news to his colleagues and to a police officer who was with the parents. When Art arrived home that evening, his wife already knew of the aborted mission from having followed a news broadcast. She worried about his safety, but also his career. They had lived through a previous incident of a lethal fire, where the media had severely criticized the fire department for not being able to save lives. He assured her and his children that the causes of the deaths of the children were

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  not his or anyone's fault. The firefighters could not have done more that evening. The next couple of days were marked by psychological trauma after care for himself and his crew. He made sure that recovery of the bodies was carried out by the police, who were doing the investigation, and not by the firefighters who had been at the rescue scene. Several days later, the police released a post-incident report determining that the children had succumbed to the flames before the firefighters arrived. That brought some solace. Still, the fire stays with Art, because, as he explains, he made a conscious and deliberate choice to stop saving.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Despite his years on the force, it was the first time that he had experienced an emergency of this magnitude. When he speaks to first responders, as he did to our group, he tells them that "it is almost impossible to fully mentally prepare for this sort of emergency. Everyone experiences a fire like this differently, and there should be no shame or stigma in seeking psychological help."

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  I wept as I listened to Art take us back to that night. I was spellbound by this fireman, admiring of his moral and professional leadership, his ability to make calm and circumspect judgments in an acute emergency, his psychological acumen, his protection of his people, and concern for the family of the four children, his protection of his own family, and his clear-eyed sense of how a small town might judge him, and yet his ability to separate accident, fortune, and reputation from doing his work well. That is one Stoic lesson to reap from this case.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Art is a highly skilled exemplary professional firefighter, and he leads his team with insight and professional intelligence. Not all actions and omissions in firefighting will yield the desired outcomes. It is a high-risk activity, and selecting wisely in this business means facing lethal fire and its consequences. Preparation trains, but it doesn't fully inure against disaster. That's a modified Stoic lesson. Art's judgment to call off the rescue operation was validated by the after-incident report, and that gives some solace.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  But the harder Stoic tonic to swallow is that even if the children had perished after the firefighters arrived, the wise selection in the circumstances, protecting the firefighters from a mission that would have cost them their lives, as well as the lives of the children, should also bring peace of mind. For the Stoics are committed to the view that virtue is a skill like being a good doctor. Good doctoring isn't a guarantor that interventions will work. Will and intelligence, the best medical expertise and equipment, can only control so much. Medical workers live with the solace of doing their best. Good firefighters do as well.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  So, too, argue the Stoics, do good persons. Good professionals aren't always good persons, but many are. And aspiring to achieve the finest is common ground. Healthcare workers on the front lines know this implicitly, as does Daniela Lamas, a critical care doctor in Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is on the phone with the husband of a patient. It is the end of March 2020. Covid-19 is raging. I was not sure what to say. We were midway through one of the family update phone calls that had become our new reality in the visitor-free intensive care unit when he paused.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  He had a question. His wife had been on the ventilator a few days now, and he understood that these machines might be in short supply. He just wanted to make sure. Were we planning to take her ventilator away? "You don't know her," he went on. "Yes, her cancer has advanced, but before this pneumonia, she was taking conference calls from her hospital room. She's smart as a whip, funny, too. We have plans together," he told me, "places we want to see." It was then that I realized what my patient's husband was doing.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  He was trying to prove to me that his person was worth saving. I hang up the phone and return to the buzz of the unit to check on my patient. Sepsis from her pneumonia, coupled with the immune compromise of chemotherapy, threatens to overwhelm her. Though the ventilator is helping to buy her time, she still might not make it. But I know if she dies, I will be able to tell her husband that we did everything we could. I will be able to tell myself that, too. This is sage counsel for a modern Stoic.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Goodness and the peace of mind that can come with it is in doing our best, operating at the highest levels of excellence with those similarly committed. Excellence doesn't bring immunity from failure or suffering. It doesn't bring immunity from moral distress. But it is a source of psychological sustenance of a profound sort. Dr. Anthony Fauci, aged 79 at the time of an interview, is asked how he would like to be remembered after the coronavirus pandemic is over. "You know, I just would hope that I'm remembered for what I think I'm doing, is that I'm doing the very best that I possibly can."

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Good doctoring is the model for what the Stoics call the "art of living." And it is what most of us who live honorably try to do: live well, by doing the very best that we possibly can.

• 1:10:08Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of Stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our Daily Stoic Courses and Challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge, which we're going to launch in January. You get a special cloth-bound edition of the Best of Meditations that we've done. You get a bunch of cool stuff. It's an awesome community. I've loved being a part of it. I've loved getting to meet everyone who's trying to take their study of Stoicism to the next level. Love to have you join us. Check us

• 1:10:48Ryan Holiday?

  out at DailyStoicLife.com. We'd love to have you and join us on this digital stoia that we've staked out together and get better every day.