Daily Stoic Sundays: How Marcus Aurelius Conquered Stress (and the Rest of Us Can Too)

In today’s episode, Ryan reads his latest article describing how Marcus Aurelius fought against the stresses and anxieties that come with running a continent-spanning empire. He draws actionable insights and tactics from Marcus Aurelius’s practices during his reign. This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. WHOOP is a fitness wearable that provides personalized insights on how well you’re sleeping, how much you’ve recovered from your workouts, and how much you’re stressed out from each day. It’s the ultimate whole-body tracker for someone who needs an all-in-one solution. Visit WHOOP.com and enter STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order. Sign up for Daily Stoic’s Slay Your Stress course here: http://dailystoic.com/stressRead the original article here: https://ryanholiday.net/how-marcus-conquered-stress/***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of The Daily Stoic. Today's episode is something I've been thinking a lot about. I don't know about you, but the last couple of months have been particularly stressful, not just because there's a pandemic, not just because I don't have childcare for my kids, not just because the economy is ping ponging around, but I've been trying to finish this book. I've been trying to start the next one. I've been, we were in the middle of setting up a new office. I've been stressed. And stress is a reality of life in the sense that there are things that cause stress. But the Stoics would, I think, say that ultimately, we have a choice as to how we respond to that stress.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  Or even if Epictetus sort of talked about how if we get upset or angry, we're complicit in the offense. I think the Stoics, we could extend that and go, hey, we're actually complicit. When we feel stressed, we are choosing to feel stressed. As my wife says, "People can't frustrate you. You can only be frustrated." In AA, they say, "You can't make me angry." And so, this episode is about stress. And that ties in to what you'll hear about at the end, which is our new challenge or course for The Daily Stoic. The Daily Stoic Slay Your Stress Challenge. And it's some of the best exercises and insights from the Stoics about stress.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  But this piece is how Marcus Aurelius specifically tried to slay his stress, how he went through the day dealing with what must have been incredible stresses, running an empire, having a large family, having bad health issues. He experienced stress and yet he was not a stressed out person, certainly. And you can't read meditations and feel like this wasn't a guy who had some equanimity and poise beneath all the chaos. And so, check out this episode, check out this Stress Challenge. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/stress. And of course, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you get the challenge for free. So if you want to check out Daily Stoic Life, go to dailystoiclife.com.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  To say that Marcus Aurelius had a stressful life would be a preposterous understatement. He ran the largest empire in the world. He had a troublesome son. He had a nagging and painful stomach issue. There was a palace coup led by one of his closest friends. There were rumors that his wife was unfaithful. The Parthenians invaded the empire, triggering a war that lasted five years. The Antonine Plague struck in 165 AD and killed by conservative estimates more than 10 million people. The Tiber River had one of the worst floods in history, destroying homes and livestock and leaving Rome in famine. Should we be surprised that he talks openly in meditations about his anxiety,

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  about losing his temper, that he sometimes felt grinded down and exhausted by life? Of course he did. He had all our problems and more. He was besieged by stress. And yet, this is exactly why he inspires us, because he conquered that stress, just like we can. "Today, I escaped my anxiety," he writes, "or no, I discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside." So how did he do it? What can he show us about slaying that demon of stress that we all suffer from? Turns out, a lot. For starters, the fact that we even know about his anxiety is because

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  of one of those strategies. It was in the pages of his journal that Marcus worked through his problems. Instead of letting racing thoughts dominate his mind and drive him crazy, he put them down on paper. It was also in these pages that Marcus prepared himself for difficulties in advance. He reminded himself that the people he was going to meet during the day would be troublesome. He reminded himself that things were not going to go perfectly. He reminded himself that getting angry never made things better. By taking the time to journal and write, he was chipping away at his anxiety, just as we all can, in the morning, at night, on our lunch break. Never. To calm his anxiety, Marcus was also

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  constantly trying to get perspective. Sometimes he zoomed way, way out. He meditated on his insignificance. "The infinity of past and future gapes before us," he wrote, "a chasm whose depths we cannot see." So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Other times, he zoomed way, way in, telling himself to take things step by step, moment by moment. "No one can stop you from that," he said. "Concentrate like a Roman," he said, "on what's in front of you, like it's the last thing you're doing in your life. Don't worry about what's happened in the past or what might happen in the future." And this idea of being present was key to overcoming his stress. We are often anxious because

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  of what we fear will happen next, or after what happens next. We worry about worst-case scenarios. We dread potential obstacles. But Marcus, from Epictetus, knew that man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems. And that's why Marcus really has spent so much time trying to be present, reminding himself to return to the present moment, where nothing is novel or hard to deal with, but familiar and easily handled. Like all busy people, Marcus Aurelius had a million things going on. But he also knew that much of what people expected of him, or even that he found himself focusing on, was not important or necessary. So to reduce stress,

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  he tried hard to separate the essential from the inessential. "If you seek tranquility," he said, "do less." But then he makes a critical clarification. He says, "Or, more accurately, do what's essential, because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate that," he said, "you'll have more time." Was there stuff he had to do that he did not want to do? Of course. Problems he was stuck with that he'd rather not be stuck with? Of course, you bet. That's life. Which is why he and all of us have to practice acceptance. "That's all we need," he said, "willing acceptance in every moment." He said, "You can scream until you're blue in the face and curse the world as if the world would notice,

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  or you can accept the obstacle and work with what you're given." But ultimately, Marcus worked hard to be a good friend to himself. He was firm and strong and self-disciplined. He did not whip himself. He knew that it was inevitable that he would mess up. We all do. "The key," he said, "is to just focus on getting back on track. Don't dwell. Don't call yourself an idiot. Don't smack your forehead and angry. No," he said, "get back up when you fail. Celebrate behaving like a human. Or, when jarred unavoidably by circumstances," he said, "revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help." He said, "You'll have a better grasp of harmony if you can keep going back to this."

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  It would be wonderful if none of this was necessary, if life was easy, if things always went right. But that's not possible. Stress is an inevitable part of life. It is the friction of the plates of our responsibilities rubbing against each other. But if stress is an inevitability, anxiety and anger and worry are not. Marcus believed that these things were a choice, that we could work past them, through them, that we could discard them, as he said, because they are within us, or at least up to us. We can slay our stress because it's not an external enemy. It is an inner battle. Of course, I also suggest you check out our SLATE, your Stress Challenge that we're doing at Daily Stoic.

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  It's 12 days of Stoic wisdom inspired to help you conquer your anxiety, your worry, your fears, your frustrations, your depression, all the things that the Stoics dealt with, that we deal with here in modern life. And that Stoic wisdom and Stoic philosophy is designed to help us conquer. You can check it out. It's something I've been working on using myself. We've melded in some of the best insights from modern psychiatry and psychology. We've looked at characters from history and literature. We've put together what are a number of invaluable, actionable strategies that will help you manage your stress, get perspective, stop sweating the small stuff, feel some peace, feel good about yourself, and of course, do what you need to do.

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  And you can check that out, dailystoic.com/stress.