Stoic Coffee Break

When was the last time that you read a book. A serious book. Something stretched your mind? Something that you had to stop and go back and reread a sentence or paragraph to make sure you understood it? Maybe even learned some new words? New ideas? In this episode, let’s talk about why you should read deeper — not just so you can check another book off your list, but as a tool to help you deal with the complexities of life.

“Friends, the school of a philosopher is a hospital. When you leave, you should have suffered, not enjoyed yourself.” — Epictetus

The Problem

Last year, only 60% of Americans read at least one book. Almost 57% of Americans placed a bet. That's not a statistic I'm making up to be dramatic. It's from a piece in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch called "The End of Reading Is Here." She's not calling us illiterate. She's calling us something worse, in a way — post-literate. Still surrounded by words. Words everywhere. Just losing the capacity, and the appetite, to sit with the hard ones.

The top selling books today are simpler and less complex, with young adult novels taking the lead, even among adults. Libraries are following this trend getting easier to read books for patrons. In 1958 the English translation of Doctor Zhivago was the best selling book. Boris Pastenak wrote in long complex sentences, demanding your attention. Last years top novel? Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games series. Nothing wrong with that book, but nobody's calling it a wrestling match.

I want to be clear about something before I go further: this isn't me being a snob about it. This isn't "kids these days" or "nobody reads anymore, sad." This is me pointing out something specific — we are choosing, at scale, to stop training the one muscle that everything else in a thinking life depends on. And I don't think that's a coincidence that it's happening at the exact moment we need that muscle most.

Difficult reading, as Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA points out, strengthens the cognitive abilities of comprehension and synthesis—the ability to read something and integrate it into real life situations.

And here's why it matters. When you stop reading hard things, you don't just read less. You lose practice at friction. At hitting a sentence you don't understand and going back over it instead of scrolling past it. At holding two conflicting ideas in your head at once instead of picking a side in the first four words. You start expecting to be handed the conclusion. Told what to feel. And when real life doesn't hand you the conclusion, when it just hands you the mess and expects you to work it out, you're out of practice for the one skill that job requires.

Why is Reading Hard?

Reading and writing is not something that comes naturally to us as humans. Our brains don’t naturally have a space set aside for processing the written word. This is a skill that we have developed as humans. Writing allowed us to preserve ideas that otherwise would have been handed down orally, and changed in each telling.

But in that development we’ve also developed logic, grammar, rationality, mathematics, emotional complexity. In order to put something down on paper, the author has to think through their arguments and clearly articulate what they are actually trying to say, so they can best communicate their ideas to the reader.

On the reader’s side, it means that the arguments and ideas don’t disappear as they do when a conversation or video ends. It’s still there on the page, allowing you to go back and dive deeper, consider other possibilities, find rebuttals, and poke holes the flaws you might find.

Reading doesn’t just give you information. The act of reading literally changes the way that you think. Reading helps you construct mental models in a way that no other medium can.

Reading also places you in the mind of other people. It’s like you experience the world as another person. You read their thoughts and observations. You understand a completely different perspective on that world that you otherwise couldn’t. If you only stick to books that are easy, or ones that speak to your worldview, then you never understand how others experience the world.

As we become a more oral and visual world, thanks to social media, we lose something. Social media, while at times can be instructional, is meant to be entertaining and hook your attention, not to deeply educate you. It’s too short for the reader (or watcher) to really engage in the material, to challenge their own thinking. It’s simplified down to soundbites and that’s not a way to educate yourself. If it doesn’t catch your attention, you skim past it looking for something to amuse rather than inform.

Videos are a more passive form of engagement, requiring less imagination and reasoning. In a study by University of California San Francisco, they found that reading actually increases the size of the cortex in the brain. Those that spent more time reading performed better on cognitive tests. Those that spent more time watching videos actually had regions of the brain decrease and performed worse on the same cognitive tests.

This weakens our ability to handle the complexities of the world, other people, and even ourselves. We reduce things down to simple narratives and assumptions. Things become more black and white, eliminating the shades of gray and nuance that are part of the complex world we live in.

The Thinking Class

A few months ago, I listened to an interview with Brené Brown where she noticed an interesting disconnect. She talked about how in her work that she meets with leaders from all kinds of companies, including some of the top tech firms. Every leader she talks to tells the people under them to learn to code, learn data science, get the technical skill that'll survive the future. Yet, when pressed on the books that they read that actually shaped them the most, they all mentioned books on philosophy, critical thinking, literature, psychology, history, even art. None of them pointed to a technical book.

That's not hypocrisy. That's a class system, and it's an honest one, whether anyone means it that way or not. One class gets trained to execute, the other gets to keep the skill of deciding what's worth executing in the first place.

And the interesting things is that a YouGov study on reading in America backs this up. They found that that just 19% of Americans read 82% of the books.

So the question is, which class do you want to be in?

If you’re not expanding your mind, if you’re not challenging yourself to consider alternate viewpoints and new ideas, then you’re making that choice.

When we meet challenges in our lives we can either lower the bar, or increase our capacity. Lowering the bar is easier. Increasing your capacity is harder. But which one has a higher likelihood of being successful?

Attention

What this comes down to is not only are we losing our ability to think about complex things, we’re losing our ability to pay attention. SAT and ACT scores have been falling each year as students struggle with long reading passages, even as the test creators have been shortening the passages for reading comprehension.

College students, even in Ivy League schools, regularly complain about having to read long books for their classes. Not just because they are difficult, but because they struggle with the capacity to finish reading them. Teachers are being instructed to use shorter passages from the books, basically dumbing down the curriculum.

Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, even talked about how some students see reading as a burdensome way to acquire knowledge.

Think about that. Isn’t that what higher education is about? Increasing your capacity and skills? Challenging yourself so that you’re better, smarter, more creative than when you started?

If we as a society aren’t even just keeping up, but are actively lowering the bar, how do we expect to continue advancing, not just technologically, or as a society, but as human beings?

As Neil Postman wrote in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments... a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility." — Neil Postman

The Philosophy

Here's the thing the Stoics understood about the mind two thousand years before anyone ran an fMRI study on it: attention isn't a background feature. It's the kernel of the operating system.

They had a word for it, prosoche, which is usually translated as attention, but it’s really closer to vigilance — a trained, sustained watchfulness over your own mind. They treated it as the foundational discipline. Not a nice-to-have next to the "real" Stoic work. It’s the foundation everything else stands on. Because before you can sort what's in your control from what isn't, before you can choose a response instead of reacting, you have to actually be there long enough to see the choice in front of you. No attention, no discipline. No discipline, no Stoicism.

Epictetus points this out directly:

"When you relax your attention for a while, do not fancy you will recover it whenever you please; but remember this, that because of your fault of today your affairs must necessarily be in a worse condition in future occasions." — Epictetus

So when I say we're losing the ability to sit with a hard sentence, I'm not being precious about literature. I'm saying we're losing the raw material the whole practice runs on. You cannot examine an impression you scrolled past.

Seneca saw his own century's version of this. Not video, not doomscrolling. For him it was people bouncing from scroll to scroll, author to author, never landing anywhere long enough to actually digest it. He wrote to his friend Lucilius:

"You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind." — Seneca

Linger. Digest. Firm hold. He's not telling Lucilius to read more. He's telling him to read deeper, on fewer things, or end up, in his word, "unsteady." Swap "authors and books of every sort" for "tabs and feeds and fifteen-second clips" and he's describing your Tuesday.

Here's where people get it backwards: they hear "read hard books" and assume it's about sounding smart. It's not. It's about training the exact muscle Stoic practice needs to function at all — staying with something uncomfortable long enough to actually think, instead of reaching for the next hit of easy resolution. Lose that muscle, and you haven't just gotten less well-read, you've lost the capacity for the thing you're actually here trying to practice.

The Practice

So what do you actually do with this. Three things, and none of them require a syllabus.

First: pick one book, and finish it before you start another. This is Seneca's actual prescription, not a metaphor. Most of us have four books going at once and finish none of them, which means we never get past the first, easy layer of any of them. Pick one hard book. No new book starts until that one's done. That's the whole rule.

Second: give it twenty minutes before you're allowed to quit. I noticed when doing theater that Shakespeare was always a challenge for me at first. But about fifteen, twenty minutes in, something shifts. The rhythm starts to land. The jokes start landing where they're supposed to. It's the same thing that happens learning a language. Most people quit a hard book a few pages in, right before the part where it would've started working on them.

Third: build your capacity for attention, your prosoche: take a difficult paragraph from a book you’re reading and really read it. Then read it again. Then, out loud or on paper, explain what it's actually arguing, not what it's about. "This is about grief" is a summary. "He's arguing that grief is the tax we pay for having loved something specific, not something in general" is the argument. That gap between noticing the topic and naming the claim is where the attention actually gets built. Do that once a day and in a month you'll notice you're doing it automatically with things that aren't books. Conversations. Arguments online. Your own thoughts.

None of this is about becoming a more impressive person at dinner parties. It's building the capacity that lets you tell the difference between what's really happening and what you're being told is happening. Conclusion

When I was a child my mother read to me and my siblings every night. Not just when it was convenient. Not when she felt like it. Every night. Even if it was late, we’d read a short book. We had weekly trips to the library which were just as exciting as going to the playground. We even had a Christmas tradition of reading a chapter a night of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever each December.

I passed along that reading habit to my own kids, reading such treasures as Goodnight Opus, The Stinky Cheeseman, and Cowboy and Octopus before tucking them into bed each night. Taking them to the library or Powell’s books each weekend. If they wanted a book, I’d get it for them.

Reading has always been a constant in my life. I always had an extra book in my backpack throughout school, and regularly hit up the used book store when I was in college. When I moved to Amsterdam, I sold and gave away hundreds of books, which I now kind of regret, as I’m slowly rebuilding my library after moving back to Portland.

So I would implore you read some hard books. Not just about philosophy, but other ideas. For me some hard books that changed my worldview include James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, Carlo Rovelli’s the Arrow of Time, and Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. The first two aren’t that long but are can shift your perspective in a chapter. The latter, I’ll admit is thick and takes work to get through, but the mental payoff is worth it.

And the thing is, we don’t just have to spend all our time reading books on philosophy, history, or science.  Reading can be educational and entertaining. There are plenty of other books that are complex and challenging that are also entertaining. Personally, I love reading complex science fiction. Works from Asimov, Neil Stephenson, Ursula Le Guin, and Andy Weir have have complex plots, and novel ideas that have changed the way I think. Each one created a world that I conjured in my own imagination, with the help of the author, experiencing things that I never would have considered on my own.

Lastly, reading is fun. You don’t have to read only complex books. You can read something just because it delights you. I remember reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy and laughing my ass off. Every now and then I pick up a Christopher Moore book because I find them ridiculously entertaining. But try to have some veggies with your dessert.

The point is, reading is a muscle that will weaken over time, so make sure you get your reps in.

But read those hard books to so that you can be part of the thinking class, not the part that follows them. Prosoche, vigilance of mind, is how you buy your way into the first group. Not money. Not credentials. Just the willingness to sit with something difficult long enough to actually see it.

As Epictetus put it:

“We should discipline ourselves in small things, and from there progress to things of greater value.” —Epictetus

So, which one are you training for? I know which camp I’m in. See you at the library.

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Jon Brooks is the host of the Stoic Handbook podcast and Substack page. In this episode we talk about the dangers of over-managing your emotions and finding ways to be a good Stoic while not shutting yourself off emotionally.

You can find out more about Jon and his work at stoichandbook.co

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

Watch episodes on YouTube!

Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

Thanks again for listening!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Courage, one of the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism, is what I consider the fuel for virtue, and really for living a good life. But what does courage actually look like? Are we born courageous or it it something we can develop? In today’s episode we’re going to dive into what Stoics taught about courage and how it’s backed up by modern science.

What Does It Actually Take to Be Courageous?

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."

—C.S. Lewis

The Problem

When I started this podcast, I was scared. Not just nervous. Scared. I was convinced that at any moment, someone was going to figure out that I didn't belong — that I wasn't qualified enough, smart enough, or interesting enough to be talking about Stoic philosophy to strangers on the internet. Imposter syndrome was ever present. Every episode I recorded in those early days, I'd finish it and think, "That’s probably the one where people are going quit listening."

But here's what I've come to understand after years of doing this work — that feeling wasn't a warning. It was an invitation. An invitation to do something that takes real courage: to show up honestly, even when you don't feel ready.

Today I want to talk about courage. Not the Hollywood version — the battlefield moment, the heroic leap. Real courage. The everyday, grinding, unsexy kind that determines the actual quality of your life.

Researcher Brené Brown has spent twenty years studying this. The other day I was listening to a podcast where she was a guest, and they were talking about what it takes to be courageous. What she found in her research cuts against everything we think we know. Courage, she says, isn't a personality trait. It's not something you have or don't have. It's a collection of four learnable skills. And when I dug into her framework for the first time, I kept stopping because the Stoics had already mapped the same territory two thousand years earlier.

So that's what we're doing today. Brown's four skill sets of courage, paired with the Stoic philosophy that's been teaching the same lessons since before Rome fell. And I'll tell you where each one showed up in my own life, because if it's worth talking about, it's worth being honest about.

Let's get into it.

PHILOSOPHY & PRACTICE

SKILL SET ONE: Rumbling with Vulnerability

Brown's first skill set is what she calls "rumbling with vulnerability." She defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. And the rumble part matters — it means staying in the discomfort instead of tapping out. Not performing openness. Actually sitting with the hard thing.

Most of us don't do this. We armor up. We get busy, get sarcastic, get certain — anything to avoid the exposed feeling of not knowing, of being seen, of possibly being wrong or hurt or rejected.

Brown's research shows that without this foundational skill, the other three are impossible. You cannot be courageous while armored. The armor has to come off first, because vulnerability is a prerequisite for courage. You can’t be courageous if something doesn’t scare you.

The Stoics called this prosoche — self-examination. The practice of looking honestly at yourself, not to punish yourself, but to see clearly.

Socrates felt this was so important that he said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

He would often practice self-questioning, cross-examining his own thinking about something. Once, while on campaign with the Athenian army, he stood still on a beach for 24 hours, lost in deep thought. The other soldiers, curious about what was going on, gathered around keeping vigil. Then as the sun rose, be woke from his trance-like state, said a prayer to the day, then went on as if nothing had happened.

Epictetus pushed his students toward self-examination constantly. And Seneca in his treatise On Anger describes his own nightly practice in first person. He wrote:

“When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that’s now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

And then, crucially, he doesn't spiral into self-condemnation. He says:

“For why should I be afraid of any of my mistakes, when I can say: ‘Beware of doing that again, and this time I pardon you.’”

That's the practice. See it clearly. Don't hide from it. Just let it go and do better.

When I started this podcast, the vulnerability wasn't optional. I was putting my voice, my face, my actual beliefs out into the world with no idea if anyone would care. That exposure, was scary. But the harder vulnerability, the one that took more courage, was admitting to myself that I was afraid. That I felt like a fraud. Because as long as I kept that hidden, even from myself, I couldn't do anything about it.

The Stoic practice of self-examination gave me a framework for that. Not "beat yourself up at the end of the day." Look honestly. What did you avoid? What did you do from fear instead of from your values? See it. Correct it. Move on.

Doing so allowed me to see myself not as some sage that knew everything, but a fellow traveler along the road, sharing what I’ve learned. That my experiences, both my successes and my failures, could be of use to others.

Practice: Tonight, before you sleep, spend five minutes doing this. Not a gratitude list. An honest review. Where did you avoid something you knew you should face? Not to shame yourself — to see clearly. That's the beginning of courage.

SKILL SET TWO: Living into Our Values

Brené’s second skill set is living into our values, and to be precise about what those values are. She says most people have vague, aspirational values. Integrity. Honesty. Courage. But vague values don't guide behavior under pressure. She pushes people to get specific: what does integrity actually look like in a hard conversation? What does honesty cost you when it's inconvenient?

That gap between stated values and actual behavior is where courage lives or dies.

The Stoics made this the center of their entire philosophy. Virtue, excellence of character, wasn't an abstract idea or an aspiration. It was how you acted, specifically, when it was hard. Marcus writes in Meditations:

"No random actions, none not based on underlying principles."

Every action either expresses your values or betrays them. There's no neutral ground.

And Marcus knew how easy it is to betray them. He was the most powerful man on Earth. He had every excuse to let himself off the hook. He wrote the Meditations as a daily practice of bringing himself back to his values because he knew that without that discipline, the gap widens without you noticing.

One of the things I committed to early on with this podcast was honesty. Not just talking about Stoic philosophy in the abstract, but being real about where I struggle with it. That meant talking about my failures on air. Not as a performance of humility — that's its own kind of armor. But because the show is built on the premise that this work is hard and real, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. It would go against the actual virtue I’m trying to teach.

That was harder than it sounds. There's a version of a podcast host that looks like they have everything figured out. I knew my audience might be more comfortable if I projected that image. But it would have been a betrayal of what I actually believe, which is that the messy, uncertain, still-figuring-it-out life is the only honest one.

Living into your values means it costs you something. If it doesn't cost you anything, you're not really being tested.

Practice: Name two values that are genuinely yours. Not what sounds good, but what actually guides you at your best. Then find one moment from the past week where you acted against them. That's not dwelling on failure. That's useful information. That's where the work is.

SKILL SET THREE: Braving Trust

Brown's third skill set is braving trust. She breaks trust down into specific, observable behaviors — she has an acronym, BRAVING, that maps it out.

B — Boundaries: Say no when you need to; respect others' no

R — Reliability: Do what you say, consistently, without overpromising

A — Accountability: Own your mistakes, apologize, make amends

V — Vault: Keep confidences — don't share what isn't yours to share

I — Integrity: Choose courage over comfort; what's right over what's easy

N — Non-judgment: Ask for what you need without judgment; others can do the same

G — Generosity: Extend the most generous interpretation of others' intentions

But the core insight is this: trust is not a feeling. It's not something that just happens between people. It's built through consistent, specific actions over time. And it requires courage because trusting someone means accepting that you can be hurt.

Most of us either over-trust, where we hand ourselves over and get burned, or we under-trust, we armor up, and we end up isolated. Neither is courage. Courage is the willingness to be in genuine relationship, with your eyes open, knowing the risk.

The Stoics were deeply committed to this idea, even though we don't always talk about it. They believed that humans are fundamentally social, that we are made for community, for relationship, for mutual care. Marcus returns to this again and again. We are not isolated units managing our own inner states. We are connected to each other, and our obligations to that connection are part of what it means to live well. Justice (dikaiosyne) one of the four cardinal virtues, is entirely about relationships with others. You cannot be fully virtuous alone.

I took two breaks from this podcast. Both times, it was because I needed to deal with personal challenges in my life. And both times, the hardest part wasn't the break itself. It was trusting my audience to still be there when I came back.

That's a hard thing. When you build something with people over years, you feel an obligation to them. And stepping away feels like a breach of that. But here's what I had to learn: sticking around just to please others wasn’t serving them. It was serving my fear of being abandoned. Showing up when I wasn't actually present wasn't trust. It was a transaction. Real trust meant being honest about where I was and trusting that the relationship was strong enough to hold it.

It was. Both times.

Practice: Think of one relationship where trust has eroded — maybe slowly, maybe all at once. Don't start with what the other person did. Start with your own behavior. What specific thing did you do or not do that contributed to that erosion? That's your work.

SKILL SET FOUR: Learning to Rise

Brown's fourth skill set is learning to rise, and she's clear that this doesn't mean bouncing back quickly or pretending the fall didn't hurt. It means owning the full story of what happened. Not the sanitized version, not the victim version, not the "everything happens for a reason" version. The real version. What happened. How it felt. What you contributed to it. And what you're going to do differently.

That's hard. Most of us either grab onto the failure and let it define us, or we rush past it and pretend it didn't happen. Rising means doing neither. It means going through it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote what is probably the most quoted line in all of Stoic philosophy:

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

People print it on posters and put it on coffee mugs. But what it's actually describing is something brutal and honest — that the obstacle doesn't get removed. You go through it. The going through is the point. The going through is what builds you.

I picked this podcast back up twice. And both times, I had to reckon with the question of whether I was coming back because I had something real to say, or because I felt guilty about quitting. That distinction matters. Rising isn't just resuming. It's understanding what happened, being honest about it, and choosing to move forward from that honesty rather than from fear or ego.

The episodes I've done about my own failures, the relationships I've gotten wrong, the times I've been less than I wanted to be, those are some of the most important things I've made. Not because failure is glorious. It's not. But because the willingness to look at it honestly, to say "this is what I did and this is what it cost me and here's what I learned," that's what makes the philosophy real. That's the difference between reading about Stoicism and actually practicing it.

Practice: Pick one failure you're still carrying. Not a small inconvenience. A real one. The kind that still has weight when you think about it. Write down three things: what happened, what you contributed to it, and one specific thing it taught you. Not a silver lining. An actual lesson you can act on.

Conclusion

Brown's research and Stoicism arrive at the same place through different routes. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is not armor. It is not performing strength while feeling nothing.

It is the willingness to examine yourself honestly. To act from your actual values when it costs you something. To trust, and to be trustworthy, even knowing you can be hurt. And to fall — because you will fall — and to get back up having actually learned something instead of just surviving.

That is what this podcast has been about since the beginning. Not because I figured it all out before I started recording. But because I kept choosing, imperfectly and over and over again, to show up honestly. To rumble with the discomfort. To let the work be real.

That's the invitation this week. Not to be fearless. To be honest. Courage follows honesty. It always does.

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

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Kelly McGinnis has a long and storied career working her way up the corporate ladder to CFO and later President of Thermo Fischer, a Fortune 100 company. In this episode we discuss ideas around what it takes to be good leader, company culture, and stepping out on your own.

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

Watch episodes on YouTube!

Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

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Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” We’ve all heard this before. Usually it’s tongue in cheek just before something really bad does happen. But counterintuitively, it’s actually one of the most powerful questions that we can ask ourselves when we’re stuck in anxiety. So let’s talk about how imagining the worst can you you be your best.

“The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.”

— Seneca

The Problem

In today’s busy world, we all struggle with anxiety. Most people complain about anxiety hampering their daily happiness. And where does this anxiety come from? It’s from worrying about things that we think are going to happen.

This is a natural part of being human. The brain is a prediction machine. Think about when you're walking through a crowd, your brain is constantly reading people's trajectories so you don't collide. It does the same thing with the future — always trying to anticipate what's coming next.

That capacity kept us alive. If we couldn't imagine bad outcomes, we'd never prepare for them. But most of us have taken that survival tool and turned it into a source of constant stress.

What if instead, you could take that same ability and use it to build resilience rather than anxiety? What if considering the worst could help you become your best?

The Philosophy

Paradoxes

In episode 377, I talked about paradoxes — holding competing ideas without rushing to resolve them. It's one of the most powerful skills we can develop, because the moment we choose a side, we close off other possibilities.

Seneca puts it plainly:

“Ignorance is the cause of fear.” — Seneca

The longer we can withhold judgment and hold each idea and try to understand it, the deeper our understanding of it. This is how we gain wisdom, which is not just about knowledge but about being able to see things clearly. Marcus Aurelius captured this idea in his Meditations:

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” — Marcus Aurelius

The more clearly we can define what troubles us, the easier it is to turn it to our benefit.

Premeditatio Malorum

Stoicism is full of paradoxes, but one of the most useful is premeditatio malorum, the “premeditation of evil”. Rather than ignoring what causes our anxiety, we look it in the face. We stop judging it as good or bad and treat it as something that simply is.

This is why the Stoics teach that events are neutral. We're the ones passing verdict on them.

“It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them.” — Epictetus,

When we see things as neutral, some of that anxiety loses its grip.

The Present Moment Problem

Here's the paradox: the Stoics also teach us to be present. To stop worrying about what might happen, and focus on now.

In his Letters to Lucilius, Seneca writes:

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

The anxiety we feel is a direct result of the story we're telling ourselves about the future. We catastrophize. We treat the worst possible outcome as the only one. And what makes it worse — we're doing it to ourselves.

The mind has a hard time distinguishing imagination from reality, so the body responds as if the threat is real. Think about a time you were convinced someone was upset with you. You felt the tension. Maybe in your stomach or shoulders. Then you found out you were wrong, and the relief was immediate. Your body was responding to a story, not a fact.

That physical distress creates a spiral: thoughts create story, story creates sensation, sensation triggers the fight-or-flight response, which narrows your thinking to the very thing you're afraid of. That's why getting someone to breathe slows the spiral. Calm the body first, then the mind follows.

Avoidance Makes It Worse

When we try not to think of something, we give it more power. It’s the pink elephant problem. Try not to think about about a pink elephant and you will think about one. The brain has to imagine a concept before it can dismiss it. It can’t operate in a void, and suppression takes energy.

So the fear stalks you. You scroll your phone. You have a drink. You eat things you shouldn't. Anything to avoid sitting with it.

But Seneca reminds us:

“Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.” — Seneca

The courage to face it head-on is the path through.

Outcomes

One more thing worth naming: when we fixate on outcomes, we lose agency. Outcomes aren't under our control. Actions are. That's why the focus has to shift to what you can actually do — not what might happen.

But here’s another part of the paradox. We do have to consider what might happen, consider other possible outcomes. Even ones that we’re not focused on at the moment. As Seneca writes:

“What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person's grief. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.” —Seneca

This isn’t about running a catastrophizing session. It’s considering as many possible bad outcomes as you can so that you aren’t caught by surprise. You don’t have to do them all at one time, but by taking on the things that scare you, you’re following Seneca’s advice:

“So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.” —Seneca

The Practice

So how do you actually do this — and what makes it different from just ruminating?

Two things. First, you do this in a safe space — not in the heat of the moment, but sitting quietly with time to think. Second, you approach the problem with objectivity. And objectivity isn't cold. Think about the friends you trust most — they're the ones who tell you the truth, not what you want to hear. This practice is you doing that for yourself.

Seneca explains this clearly:

“This is why we need to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. Misfortune may snatch you away from your country… If we do not want to be overwhelmed and struck numb by rare events as if they were unprecedented ones; fortune needs envisaging in a thoroughly comprehensive way.” — Seneca

Now, it’s important that you write it down. Don't do this in your head. Getting it on paper creates distance. You see it more clearly. You have to actually articulate the thing.

This practice that I’m going to share with you is one from my course, Build an Unbreakable Mind. If you find this useful and want to learn more useful practices, make sure to check it out on my website at stoic.coffee/unbreakable

Step 1 — Write down the the story you're telling yourself. It can be freeform, or you can ask yourself:

What outcome am I afraid of?

What do I think happens if that outcome occurs?

What doubts do I have about myself?

What assumptions am I making?

Step 2 — The facts.

These are things that could be proven in a court of law:

What are the actual roadblocks?

What's outside my control?

What skills do I have? What am I lacking?

No opinions. Only what could be proven.

Step 3 — The emotions:

Write down everything you're feeling. Angry, sad, scared, nervous. All of it. Get it out.

Then take a break. Step away. Come back later with fresh eyes.

Step 4 — What you can actually do:

How will you handle the roadblocks?

What could you learn to close the gaps?

If the worst actually happened — what would you do?

What's under your control right now?

Where can you take action today?

This is how you rewrite the story. You use your rationality to see more clearly, and shift your perspective toward something useful.

Conclusion

Anxiety about the future is part of being human. You're not going to think your way out of having it. But you can stop fighting it and start using it.

Premeditatio malorum is leaning into the fear. It's having the courage to ask: what am I actually afraid of? It's sitting with the hard thing — clearly, not catastrophically — and dismantling the doom loop before it dismantles you.

So the next time you catch yourself trying not to worry about something — stop resisting. Welcome it in. Look it in the face.

And ask: “What's the worst that could happen?”

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
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