What’s Your Emergency Routine?

Ryan talks about the importance of thinking about what you will do when you get thrown for a loop. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:05Ryan 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 at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  What's your emergency routine? We don't mean for actual emergencies, like the arrival of a tornado or a tyrant, although you should definitely be doing your premeditatio malorum. This is about the other kind of emergencies that life throws at you. Waking up depressed, getting blindsided with news that a loved one has died or that your job has been eliminated. You know, the stuff that throws us for a loop, the stuff that can very easily, if we're not careful, send us into a downward spiral. We interviewed the writer A.J. Delario on the Daily Stoic Podcast a while back about just this. A.J. is a guy who turned to Stoicism after a billionaire-backed lawsuit

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  put him $200 million in debt, which you can read about in my book, Conspiracy. And this finally drove him into drug and alcohol recovery. He explained how critical it's been for him to have emergency routines that he can rely on when, to borrow Marcus Aurelius's phrase, "he is jarred unavoidably by circumstances." If he wakes up to bad news, if he suddenly gets hit with a craving, if some painful memory comes flooding back, he needs to have something to do that brings him back to center, that prevents him from giving back all the progress he has made. When that happens, he knows he has to get to a meeting. He knows he has to go pick up his journal. He knows he has to spend a few extra minutes meditating.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  He knows, for example, that one of the best things he can do is call somebody else and help them. In recovery, they speak a lot about being of service, but this is not simply about making amends or processing guilt. This is also a practical, functional, adaptive strategy, because focusing on somebody else's problems is a great way to prevent you from indulging your own. These emergency routines can vary person by person and circumstance by circumstance. Could be reading for one person when things are getting chaotic at work, or it could be working out for another person when things are too calm and the negative internal voice gets too loud. Could be heading to church to pray, or to a recovery meeting in the same church's basement.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  Could be asking for help or offering help. What you choose doesn't matter. What matters is that you choose, and that what you choose works for you. The point is, you need a plan. Because fortune, like always, is going to behave as she pleases. Life is going to challenge us, trigger us, kick us around. We cannot expect otherwise. All we can do is be prepared to respond. All we can do is have a good emergency routine when that moment of difficulty arrives. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.