Are you a worrier?
How to use the principles of Stoicism to manage your fears
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I come from a family of worriers.
Yet my grandfather, who was one of the wisest people I’ve ever known, used to say:
“Yes, the (metaphoric) guns are out. Yes, sometimes they’re pointing at you. But they probably won’t go off. So don’t let the guns spoil your life.”
This was curious advice, considering that my grandfather lost his entire family – and everyone he’d ever known up to age 17 - to literal guns. He lived a full and vibrant life, but he never stopped mourning his original family. He cried out for them on his deathbed, at age 94.
He knew that actually, sometimes the guns do go off.
But I think he was talking about the Stoic idea that we shouldn’t worry about imaginary futures that might never happen. As the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher Seneca put it, “We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”
And I think my grandfather was also talking about the Stoic idea that you shouldn’t throw good times after bad. “What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes,” said Seneca, “since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.”
And finally, I think my grandfather was talking about the Stoic idea that, even if the guns WILL one day go off (as of course they will, since no one lives forever), there’s nothing we can do about this - and therefore, we should focus only on what we can control.
If we could really learn to live by these three pieces of Stoic wisdom — that:
a) We shouldn’t worry about imaginary futures that many never happen;
b) We shouldn’t throw good times after bad; and
c) We should focus only on what we can control;
- think how mentally free we could feel.
The question, of course, is how to achieve this.
Today, I want to share with you some strategies. (Note that, for all these strategies, it often helps to write them down, journal-style, rather than to just think them in your head):