There’s a Difference Between Urge and Action

📔 Grab a copy of Dr. Becky Kennedy's Good Inside: A Guide To Becoming The Parent You Want To Be at the Painted Porch.☮ Check out dailystoic.com/anger to sign up for the Daily Stoic Tame Your Temper Challenge.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including the Amor Fati Medallion.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  There's a difference between urge and action. It's pretty simple, but we are sometimes so hard on ourselves that we forget. There's a difference between urge and action, being tempted and indulging temptation. As we've talked about the Stoic response to anger, we've made this distinction. Getting angry and making a decision out of anger are not the same thing. That's why Seneca said that the greatest remedy for your temper was delay. Feeling the feeling and acting on the feeling are separated by a space, and the bigger the space, the better the choice we can make. In her wonderful book, Good Inside, Dr. Becky talks about teaching this to children. "Parents often have the goal of getting rid of the urge," she writes. "What's wrong with you? Why would you want to hurt someone? But it's better," she says, "if we can try humanizing the urge

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  and then shifting where we allow a child to discharge it, because it allows the child to gain regulation and over time make better decisions." But this is just as important for us as adults. Marcus Rios talks about how we have the power of no opinion over events, and he's right. Still, as we said recently, that's an incredibly advanced power, maybe one that only the sages can regularly wield. More realistically, we can set our sights on the more attainable power of just deciding not to express unhelpful opinions, too. The urge is human. The ability to restrain from, to mitigate and redirect that urge, that's Stoicism. That's what we should be trying to get better at. And that's the idea in the Daily Stoic Tamer Temper Challenge, which I haven't talked about much recently,

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  but I think it's one of the best things we've done. I'll link to that in today's episode, but I think you can grab it at dailystoic.com/temper or just go to store.dailystoic.com. Or if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, you can get that course and all the courses for free as part of the membership. My temper's something I'm always working on. As I say, just because you don't have an anger problem doesn't mean anger's not a problem. And that's true for a lot of these impulses and urges that we all have. That's what we talked about in the course, and I think you'd like it.