You Can’t Just Stuff It Down

Ryan explains why a Stoic should process and deal with their emotions, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.→ We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It kicks off in a little over a week. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up before sign ups end on January 1st! 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. You can't just stuff it down. We know that Marcus Aurelius had a temper. He writes about it too much in Meditations for us to conclude otherwise. And yet, there are no stories in the surviving literature, or the annals of history, or even from his enemies, about him losing his cool with people. So what happened? Did he just stuff those feelings down?

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  No. As we talked about, that's not what a Stoic does. Suppressing your emotions, especially anger, is like putting it on a credit card. The charges seem small at first, in the moment, and a lot of times, you may even forget about them. But eventually, the bill comes due with a list of charges laid out in front of you, and interest attached. William Blake explains this in his famous poem, "A Poisoned Tree." "I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath; my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not; my wrath did grow." The key to Stoicism is precisely this: processing and dealing with your emotions. Marcus didn't fly off the handle,

• 1:34Ryan Holiday?

  and he didn't pretend that he was never upset. He wrote about it. He talked to the people he was upset with. He tried to put himself in their shoes. He tried to remember, as he said, all the times he had acted like they had. But most of all, he tried to take his emotions, be they anger, or fear, or jealousy, and in processing, transform them into love, into empathy, into compassion, into patience, and into understanding. And this is what we must do. We can't stuff it down. We have to face it. Speak up about it. Deal with it. We have to choose not to be poisoned by our emotions, or poison anyone else with them.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  Demand more of yourself in 2022. And one of the ways you can do that is by joining us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. All you have to do is go to dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. Remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this challenge and all our challenges for free. But sign up, seriously. Think about what one positive change, one good new habit is worth to you. Think about what could be possible if you handed yourself over to a little bit of a program. We all pushed ourselves together. That's what we're going to do in the challenge. I'm going to be doing it. I do the challenges, all of them, alongside everyone else. I'm looking forward to connecting with everyone in the Discord challenge, all the other bonuses. Anyways, check it out.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  New Year, New You, the Daily Stoic Challenge. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge.