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Continued from Part 1.
More techniques of the Ancient Roman Stoic philosophers to combat modern anxiety include:
(4) Deliberate discomfort. The Stoics put themselves through forms of deprivation while meditating on losses. They went through regular exercises, such as regularly refusing the comfort of the bed for one night, and sleeping instead on a rug on a hard floor, or fasting for three days to teach themselves that what we fear and think we cannot live without more often than not turn out to be phantasms - “This life event is not as bad as I feared it might be.”
This also helped to prepare the Stoics to face physical hardships, in case they lost some, or all, of what they had; to train themselves not to desire things that are outside of their control and to remember that they could strengthen their control over how they responded emotionally to “externals”. So, deliberate discomfort and the expectation of un-ease and unpleasantness strengthens the person. With training you can find yourself saying: This divorce is not so bad, I will survive it. This loss of employment, is bearable, I will get through it. This loss of a health, is temporary and I will either get better or worse, but worrying about it will not help.
(5) Contemplating death and man’s insignificance in the universe. Marcus Aurelius recommended walking through graveyards and witnessing the fallen on the battlefield. “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years…” he said, while Epictetus agreed, saying, “You are a little soul carrying about a corpse.” Contemplating death, not every minute, but at least once a day, helps us to accept that the things that seem extremely urgent and important to us, right now, will have absolutely no relevance in a hundred years, or ten years, or even one year, and maybe not even within a week, a day or an hour. Seneca's book On the Shortness of Life reminds us that it is not the duration of a life that is important but the manner in which is it lived. This humbling check in with man's Infinitesimally small place in the universe can be an immense relief; for some at least.
(6) Seneca’s one simple daily denial. Seneca advised that we perform this task: to locate one thing that the mind usually craves and then to refuse it. This could be food, sex, a pleasant distraction, causal banter or even something you were about to say to someone. “Brave men rejoice in adversity…” said Seneca. “…the Stoic sees all adversity as training.” So, giving up things becomes a habit, not for the sake of health, per se, but for the sake of the challenge and the training involved. The Stoics saw the untrained mind as being rather like a puppy, running this way and that, trying to eat everything, defecating everywhere, running after every piece of passing stimulus, with no understanding of when to sleep and when to play; it cannot tell the difference between itself and the world beyond that scares it and thrills; it wears itself out and destroys the serenity of its owners.
(7) Each thing in itself in the moment. The Stoics used the same methods as Buddhists to focus on the now but unlike the Buddhists they believed every daily action could be a form of meditation. They advised that when riding a horse, you focus on the horse and not what you will do tomorrow; when cooking a meal focus on the act and not on the debts you owe; when playing with your children focus on their happiness and safety and not on your fears for their future. Being more focused makes you better at all activities and alters your brain activity and the brain’s connections to the body. When you are having a full-blown panic attack, you can calm yourself, by asking yourself, “is anything threatening actually happening right now - or is it just in my mind?” as Epictetus endlessly reminded us.
A powerful way to do this is by staring out the window at trees, or the street and observing nothing much happening at all as you try to get hold of your panic attack. Focus on the outside, not on the adrenalized feeling of racing pulse and breathlessness. Focus on the process, not on the projected outcome.
Observe carefully: A bird flies by, a car passes, the wind blows a leaf. Tell yourself the mantra, “nothing much is happening. Nothing needs to happen” as you keep on observing. Repeat it as you watch nothing much happening. This focus on the banal reality then makes your panicked mind-body come out of flight-or-fight mode and you sense that there is no immediate threat. In time you come to realise that, in fact, most of the dramatic things that happen in the world, begin with over-reaction in our heads.
(8) Seneca’s nightly self-monitoring. Seneca advised a period of reflection and or diary reflections before sleep: “When the light has been removed from sight and my wife, long aware of my habit, had become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words” This looking back and weighing the day has, Seneca claims, the by-product of good sleep. “How tranquil it is, how deep and untroubled.” And in the morning, the Stoic wakes up, refreshed and plans out the likely challenges to come, and through negative visualization, the possible problems ahead.
(9) All things pass. “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away”, said Marcus Aurelius. Recognizing that all things pass is a useful way to cope with the anxiety caused by a sense of failure. No failure is permanent and the people who judged you will change as does the entire world they live in. "All is ephemeral, fame and the famous as well”. People who are depressed or even suicidal from a catastrophic collapse in status would do well to meditate on how the ultimate goal of the Stoic life is a long-lasting self-control, not the fleeting thrills of success in the eyes of others. As such, failure is a necessary training. If you don’t fail, you don’t learn. “The thing itself was no misfortune at all, to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.”
Going back to technique 5 - another calming Stoic technique around the issues of envy and humiliation, is the thought that soon enough, the people who have humiliated you or made you jealous will be gone or dead. And so will you, and none of this aggravation that seemed so important will be recorded in the books of history.
(10) Musterbating. Our final important Neo-Stoic technique was created by Albert Ellis (1913-2017) the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, REBT (REBT then led to CBT). I mentioned him before - Ellis was a provocative break-away therapist from Queens, New York who had a unique therapeutic method that included giving advice, provoking the patient, telling vulgar jokes and anecdotes and swearing. He based his entire practice on Epictetus, and openly revealed that “discoveries” made by REBT & CBT therapists in the 1970s, were actually rediscoveries of Ancient Roman wisdom. Ellis made a profound point about a one of the biggest stress-related problems of our time: It is what he called Musterbation. This hilarious phrase is one he used to explain the state we get into when we start thinking that X or Y MUST happen. I MUST win the lottery tonight. The Democratic Party MUST win the next election or I will die. My next tweet must be liked and shared by ten people or I am a nobody. My partner MUST tell me he loves me tomorrow or I will have to leave him, and so on. As Ellis says:
“There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.”
When we create mental narratives in which we demand that the world must treat us with respect and recognition and that world events must follow our desires, we set ourselves up, as the Stoics and Ellis said, for a greatly elevated sense of failure. And this endless musterbating is self-indulgent, a form of ego masturbation. When we start creating MUST narratives and crash into disappointment, we then start “Catastrophising” and are overcome with a sense that the entire world is against us, that something is wrong with us, and that we are trapped. As Ellis says, we are more than partly responsible for the emotional states we let ourselves fall into.
“People don’t just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.”
So Ellis teaches us to catch ourselves in the act of Musterbating. To stop short and tell ourselves “there I go with those damn musts again”. Musts also lurk within “should” and “have to”, as when people say, “you should do X or Y” or when we say, “everyone has to do X or there will be a disaster.” In place of must, should and have to, we could instead use phrases like “I would prefer it if…” and “I would like it if X happens, but if it doesn’t, it won’t be the end of my life. I’ll still have work tomorrow and a roof over my head.” Could, is also useful as a replacement for should. As in “I could go for a jog and I might lose some weight” rather than “I must go for a jog because I have to lose some weight.”
I was an absolute “musterbator” in my twenties and thirties; almost every second thought was a must a should or a have to. Most of these musts were to do with anxiety over success. If you go around thinking that success is due to you because of your intentions and efforts then when the world and the 6 billion people in it, fail to notice that you exist, it is quite normal in the musterbating-narrative, to feel like an abject failure. To develop that musterbating-narrative even further, the next stage is to feel that you are branded with this condition for life. So you end up trapped in a cycle in which the world must do what you want and since it doesn’t, you feel trapped, impotent, unable to change any outcomes, then rejected, neglected, angry and probably self-destructive. It’s a very common complaint in a world in which we are endlessly told to “believe in yourself and success will come to you.” A phrase and an ideology that Albert Ellis would have, in his usual tone, called horseshit.
What I learned through Ellis and the Stoic wisdom that informed him, was that chasing “success” as we currently picture it is always going to be a disaster waiting to happen. It is a temporary blip of high status, which is only ever the result of the fleeting and biased opinions of others, opinions which are subject to massive fluctuations over time. From my own notebook, after an ego-crash following a rejection I wrote, “I gave up worrying about my status, as soon as I realized I couldn’t micro-manage everyone’s opinion of me.”
Having practiced these ten useful Stoic processes for seven years now, I can attest to having attained a kind of calm that is so stable and steadfast, so re-assuring that it has only one downside - it really annoys people who aren’t Stoics. It makes them furious, as they go about their lives of musts, and road rage and panic attacks, constantly battling their sense that they are being seen as lesser in the eyes of others. But as Epictetus taught me. “Don’t be concerned with other people’s impressions of you. They are dazzled and eluded by appearances. Keep your attention focused entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that the opinions of others are their business and none of yours.”
return to part 1
