A Stoic practice
Stoicism for anxiety: what to do when worry takes over
When anxiety takes over, the Stoic move is to separate what is actually happening now from what your mind is predicting, then ask which part of it is up to you. Seneca noticed that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. The practice below takes about five minutes and ends with one small action you can take today.
Anxiety is mostly about the future. The body reacts as if the feared thing were already here: a tight chest, fast thoughts, the urge to check one more time. The Stoics did not think this reaction was shameful. Seneca wrote that some feelings come to everyone and cannot simply be argued away. What they questioned was the story riding on top of the feeling: that the worst is certain, that it will be unbearable, and that worrying now is a way of preparing.
Their main tool was a simple sort. Epictetus opens his handbook by dividing the world into what is up to us (our judgements, our choices, our next action) and what is not (other people, outcomes, the future). Anxiety pours attention into the second pile. The practice is to move it, gently and repeatedly, back into the first. The idea travelled a long way: Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, who shaped modern cognitive therapies, both acknowledged Epictetus as an influence.
A 5-minute Stoic practice for anxiety
Use a notebook or the notes app on your phone. Writing it down matters more than doing it perfectly.
- 1Name what is happening right now.
Describe the present moment in one plain sentence, without adjectives: I am at my desk. I have an email I have not answered. Keep to facts you could photograph.
- 2Write down the prediction.
Now write what your mind says will happen: I will lose this job. They are angry with me. On paper it becomes a claim to check rather than a fact you live inside.
- 3Sort it into two columns.
Up to me: what I do next, how I prepare, what I say. Not up to me: their reaction, the result, the timing. Be honest. Most of the prediction usually lands in the second column.
- 4Ask Marcus's question.
Marcus Aurelius told himself not to take in the whole of life at once, but to ask of this moment: what here is actually unbearable? (Meditations VIII.36). Usually the answer is: nothing yet.
- 5Do one thing from the first column.
Pick the smallest action that is yours: send the email, make the call, put the task on tomorrow's list, or take a ten-minute walk. Then let the rest wait where it belongs.
What the Stoics wrote
More things scare us than crush us — we suffer more in our imagination than in actual fact. Let me offer a few safeguards by which you can fortify yourself.
Seneca wrote this to a friend who was afraid of what might happen. He does not call the fear silly. He says most of what frightens us never arrives in the form we imagined, so the imagined version deserves a second look.
More Stoic passages on fear and anxiety →Why call up trouble at all? It will arrive soon enough on its own, and you spoil today by dreading tomorrow. There is foolishness in being miserable now because misery may yet come.
The cost of worry is paid today, even when the feared thing never comes. This is the line to remember when anxiety presents itself as being responsible.
If the gods have power, why not pray for them to give you the faculty of not fearing what you fear, or not desiring what you desire, rather than praying that things should happen or not happen?
Marcus turns the request around. Instead of asking for the world to go a certain way, ask for the steadiness not to be ruled by fear of it. That is something you can practise. The outcome is not.
More on what you can control →