What Is The Function of Worry? | How Stoicism Can Help You Get Sober (And Stay Sober)

One of the most timeless lines in all of the Stoic writings comes from Epictetus, "What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgements about these things.”It's a powerful idea. And it's made all the more transcendent by the remarkable fact that nearly every other philosophy has come to the exact same conclusion.---And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan presents clips from interviews in which his guests share applications of Stoic wisdom that have used to get sober and stay that way. You can watch the video on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.🎧 Listen to the full Sam Harris interview here: https://dailystoic.com/sam-harris-on-stoicism-and-mindfulness-practice/ ✉️ 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.📱 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  What is the function of worry? One of the most timeless lines in all of the Stoic writings comes from Epictetus. "What upsets people is not things themselves," he says, "but their judgments of things." And it's a powerful idea, and it's one made more transcendent by the remarkable fact that nearly every other philosophy has come to the exact same conclusion. I talked recently to Sam Harris on the Daily Stoic Podcast, and whilst Harris' work is heavily influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions, on the podcast, Harris talked about one of the big overlaps between his work and the Stoics.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Ultimately, with mindfulness, you're not doing anything other than noticing what is happening all by itself. Everything's arising all by itself, thoughts, sensations, and it's in that recognition that you see that the problem that you thought you needed to solve a moment ago isn't even there, right? The problem of your anxiety, the problem of your disappointment, the problem of your... It's always this thought-based delusion that something that's not actually present here is... it needs to be unraveled. I'm not saying that there aren't challenging experiences. I mean, there's obviously the things like

• 1:48Speaker 01

  physical pain, and that doesn't magically go away once you know how to meditate. But so much of our suffering in response to something like physical pain is our psychological contraction around it, and our anxiety about it, and our fear that it won't go away, and our fear of what it means.

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  East, west, north, and south worry is pointless. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, "Today I escaped from anxiety." Or no, he says, "I discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions and not outside." Remember this, the next time you get anxious, the next time you're stressed, you're overwhelmed with worry, these are thought-based delusions. You can discard them. You can let them go. Don't make these things make you miserable twice over. Change your judgment about these things. And the interview with Sam was, it was a great interview. I was so honored to be able to interview him. He's someone I've been a big fan of for a long time. You can check that out. I'll link to it in today's show notes, but it's definitely worth a listen if you haven't

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

  heard it yet.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  "We're all slaves," Seneca says. He says, "Actually, show me someone who isn't a slave." He said, "This person to ambition, this one to their mistress, this one to wine." He was talking about how so many of us, even if we're powerful, even if we're rich, even if we're famous, we're addicted to something.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe you can't start your morning without coffee, or cigarette, or a drink, or maybe you can't go to bed without doing those things or some other thing, right? We all have addictive tendencies. But addiction comes when that thing gains full and complete power over us, when we are powerless to not do that thing. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm the author of a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to the NFL and the NBA, sitting senators, special forces leaders, also as a human being with my own addictive tendencies and my own demons that I've battled, workaholism being the darkest and the hardest of one. It's also a reason that I don't drink, don't do drugs, because I know I have that part of me, and I know it's not a part of me that I want to enable.

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  Well, in today's episode, we're going to talk about what the Stoics teach us about sobriety, about discipline, about getting clean, keeping clean, taking control of ourselves, and how we battle these very timeless and very human addictions, and what Stoicism can teach us on that day-to-day journey.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  All right, so walk me through, how does stoicism help you get sober?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  People think that rehab, people who haven't been, I think they have this preconceived notion that there's like this pill they give you and suddenly it just all goes away. You go to rehab and you come out and things are just fine. And what I realized it was for me is it's a deep dive into why we make the choices we make and why we're so self-destructive. After you start understanding more about what is kind of triggering you on this journey, the answer to these kind of insecurities is discipline and it is a structure. And people, it's funny, as I've read more, as I get older and the more things I've taught myself, I've realized that a lot of the spiritual practices or a lot of books that I've read are almost saying the same thing in different ways.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Like the theme that I found most important to me is that, for lack of a better word, discipline is destiny.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  And that has been my way out of the turbulence in my life back in the day.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think like if anyone's ever been to physical therapy or rehab from an injury, you get the sense that it's like, oh, I'm going to be worked on. I'm going to go and I'm going to get massages or this kind of treatment or this medicine. But really they're like, no, here's the work that you have to do, right? And it's the same for, I think, the other forms of rehab. You don't go there and then they're like, here are all the secrets to not drinking or doing this or that anymore. What they're like is, here are the things that you have to do every single day of your life. Like, as they say, they say it works if you work it, right? If you do that work, then you'll stay sober. If you don't do that work, you won't. And it's really, really hard work. It's like the hardest work because it's on yourself and it's against habits or practices

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  or assumptions you've had your whole life.

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  In recovery circles, they have this great acronym HALT. It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. The point is, when you're feeling those things, when you haven't been sleeping enough, when you haven't been eating right, when you're isolated, whatever it is, you're less likely to be able to be the strong-willed, disciplined, healthy, safe Smart person that you want to be. You know, the Stoics weren't super humans. They didn't, because they read a couple of these texts, never have cravings, never slip, never mess up. And in fact, a big part of Stoicism is that kind of self-awareness, monitoring why you're feeling what you're feeling. Stopping when you feel that feeling and going, "Why am I feeling this way? Am I feeling frustrated, upset, like I need to do this thing that I told myself I'm trying to stop doing? Do I need to do it?

• 7:02Ryan Holiday?

  Or do I just feel that way because of some other thing that I've been neglecting or not taking care of?" There's a great study I saw a couple of years ago that found that the majority of arguments between spouses were rooted in one or more of them being hungry, right? So if you're mad at yourself for falling off, if you're mad at yourself for not being the disciplined, stoic and complete and total self-command of themselves, stop and think about that acronym. Ask yourself, "Hey, what's actually going on with me? And am I setting myself up for success, generally? But then specifically in this moment, what voice inside me am I listening to? What is the context in which I'm considering this or thinking this or reacting this?" Seneca says that philosophy doesn't take away natural feeling. You know, it doesn't matter how many books you've read,

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

  how steeped in Stoicism you are. If you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, you're not going to be your best self. And thinking about that is a really, really important part of making better decisions.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  Over and over and over again, more than 40 times in meditations, he talks about being of service to the common good, doing things for other people. He says, "Our job is to put up with people or to help them, right? Pick one of those, right? And I love this idea. We should not just give help, but get help. We should not just get help, but give help. Be of service to as many people as possible, to be and to do as much good as possible insofar as that is in our control." And this is why the idea of being of service, I think, is so developed into the 12 steps and to sobriety is that one of the best ways to lighten our burdens is to help someone with theirs. One of the best ways to get perspective on our own problems is to think of people, to spend time with people

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  who are really, really strong. And then one of my favorite ideas from Seneca is that we learn as we teach. As we help, we're helping ourselves. This is something that when the world feels like it's falling apart, when it feels like we can't possibly make a difference in the big scheme or scope of things, what we can do is help our neighbors, our families, you know, a stranger on the street. We can make a difference in a very small way. That's in our control. To me, that's actually the essence, not just the essence, but the highest point of Stoicism.

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  We don't overindulge because it's a violation of the key virtue of temperance, the right amount. Moderation in all things, the Stoics would say, although some things not at all. Nobody is having less fun than the glutton or the addict, the Stoics would say. If the pleasure means you wake up with a hangover, it's not really so pleasurable, is it? So it's about moderation. It's about temperance. It's about finding the right amount of things.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  The essence of Stoic philosophy is being in command of yourself. In fact, Seneca says, "No one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves." And the reason we're not masters of ourselves is we give that power over to someone or something else, right? Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, right? Codependency. That's the tragedy of addiction. Not only is it bad for the person, but often we can become addicted to our relationship with different addicts, right? The Stoics, it was about being in control of yourself, not your urgent, not your desires. The Stoics look at Alexander the Great, Marx, he looks at Alexander the Great as someone who is super powerful, but not actually powerful because you can't stop.

• 10:29Ryan Holiday?

  There's never enough. Seneca himself actually defines poverty as not having too little, but wanting more. If you, more is all you need, as the great Metallica song "Master of Puppets" goes, that is such a dark and slavish place to be. So the reason we battle our addictions, the reason we try to get clean, the reason we practice discipline so we can be fit to be good parents, to be leaders, to be bosses, like if we're not in command of ourself, if something or someone, some urge or some substance, if that's really what's ruling our life, that is not a good place to be.

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's really simple. There's all the things in the world that happen, and then there's the tiny, tiny bit of it that you control. All the things that happen in a little dot that you control. The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control. There's some stuff that's up to us, some stuff that's not up to us. The chief task in life, Epictetus said, he was a former slave. He knew all about unfortunate realities. He said, "The chief task in life is discerning what's up to us and not up to us, what's in our control, not in our control." This is also the brilliance of the Serenity Prayer. That's the key. Is this up to me? Then it should deserve 100% of your energy. If it's not up to you, if you can't influence, if you can't control it, then it's none of your concern. All the things that can happen, tiny bit that you control.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  And we're at the screening the night, you know, the movie premieres, and Quentin Tarantino is there. And suddenly, I'm like, literally amongst the people I so look up to. And I wake up the next morning, and the reviews are coming in, and the reaction's great. And I immediately tell everyone in the house, I'm saying that, "I need to leave right now. I'm getting on a plane. I'm out of here." And people are screaming at me. They said, "Josh, why? Like, this never happens, and it may never happen again. And you're gonna leave, enjoy this." And I just, as soon as I was a member of the club, you know, it's that great saying, like, I never wanted to be part of a club that would have me as a member. And it was one of the most impactful moments in my life that I realized, good or bad, at the highest of the high

• 12:40Speaker 03

  or the lowest of the low, I am bottomless. And nothing, be it food, drugs, or prestige, can fill up this hole in my soul. And I got sober two weeks later. And I think it's undoubtedly correlated, that sort of spiritual bottom.

• 13:02Ryan Holiday?

  And it is inevitable that we will fall short. Marcus did, I do, everyone does. Antoninus Pius probably did too. Which is why in Meditations, Marcus really says to pick yourself back up when you fall, but he also says to celebrate the fact that you're a human being. What matters, he says, is that you come back to the rhythm of it. We're gonna be jarred by circumstances, we're gonna be messed up, we're gonna slip on our diet, on our New Year's resolution, on the progress we were making. That's okay. What matters is that you get back up. What matters is that more often than not, you stick to it, that you always come back home to it.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures. And he says, if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures. And this is the Stoics' idea of freedom. What leaves the residue and what doesn't? What has power over you and what doesn't? Who is in charge, right? Is it you or the urges? So I think about this with my phone. Am I using the phone, or is the phone using me? And when I can't not use the phone, that says something about my relationship to it, I need to change, right? What rules your life? What has power over you? What power do you need to take back? So you can enjoy the fact that legally, we have incredible freedoms in this country, in this era, in this time, right? In this prosperity.

• 14:27Ryan Holiday?

  The freedom that you have has to be enjoyed and lived up to. But first, that means freeing yourselves from a lot of things that we self-impose, right? Epictetus says, "It's better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind than to live anxiously amid abundance or to be dependent on something." The idea is that you live free, or you live a kind of death, and that this pleasure turns very quickly into pain.