When You’re Angry, Do This

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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 at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  When you're angry, do this. We all have things that upset us. People we know, people we don't know. We get triggered, get attacked. We see things happening. Stuff happens to us. Before we get angry, the Stoics remind us, we have to try to stop ourselves. Athenodorus counseled the Emperor Augustus to count all the letters of the alphabet before doing anything out of anger. In her book, Walk Through Walls, which I carry at the painted porch, the artist Marina Abramovic lays down this principle to aspiring artists. If you get angry, she writes, "Stop breathing and hold your breath until you can't hold it anymore, and then inhale fresh air." As we talk about in the Daily Stoic Team Your Temper Challenge,

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  it would be wonderful if we could get to a place where we don't get provoked or bothered in the first place. Maybe a lifetime of Stoicism will produce that. But for now, these tools are critical. Whether it's holding your breath or counting letters or going for a walk, what matters is that you're inserting a pause between the stimulus and the response, that you're catching yourself before you return a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule, as Seneca wrote. Because that's not just stupid. It's destructive and pointless. Catch yourself, catch your breath, hold it in, breathe it out, let it go, relax, move on. Don't let it get to you. Don't let it make you do something contrary to virtue.

• 1:50Ryan Holiday?

  Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It'll take time and effort. It won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper: The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger, and just go to dailystoic.com/anger.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.