Live Like A Stoic: 52 Exercises for Cultivating a Good Life

A basic tenet of Stoicism is that nobody wants to do wrong on purpose, and everyone thinks they have good reasons for their actions. But it is up to us whether to indulge our anger, which the Stoics refer to as a “temporary madness,” and likely make things even worse for both parties, or to be charitable and open-minded instead—ending up agreeing w

Now that you’ve listed some possibilities, choose a type of discomfort you’d like to focus on for the week. Here are some tips: Concentrate on something that happens often. Ask yourself: If you were able to wave a magic wand to make yourself completely resilient to this discomfort, would your life improve dramatically? If

The Stoics would say that much of James’s distress is caused by his failure to anticipate how things might go wrong. This week’s exercise is to soften the blow of misfortunes by anticipating them in advance.

set a timer for 5 to 10 minutes and write about your experience. Were you able to practice every day? If not, what obstacles did you face and how could you have overcome them? Did the hardship ease over time? How useful were the at-hand phrases you used, and could they have been improved? And, most importantly, how useful did you find this exercise

Method 1: Plan for things to go wrong. We’ll start this exercise by writing out a few plans for the day. Then we’ll assume that what could go wrong will.

You may have noticed that we’ve been focusing on aversion in the Discipline of Desire. That’s because aversion can be seen as a type of desire: the desire to avoid misfortune. We use the Discipline of Desire as shorthand for the Discipline of Desire and Aversion, the shortened name given to this discipline by French scholar Pierre Hadot.1 The cruci

The ancient Stoics were pantheists—that is, they thought that God was the same thing as the universe. The God/universe was made of matter and regulated by cause and effect. In a sense, the cosmos itself was a living organism, and whatever it was doing was for its own benefit. However, since we are literally bits and pieces of the God/universe, we a

Before you settle on your choice, you should also be sure that the exposure is doable for you. Ask yourself: How hard will the exercise be for you on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being super easy and 10 being next to impossible? If your answer was 3 to 5, then great! This seems like an exercise you’re likely to accomplish while still pushing your bou

Last week you practiced focusing on an outside view in order to quash your desires for things to go how you want them to. This week is similar. You’re now countering desires about other people’s behaviors. Instead of doing so by taking an outside view of your own struggles, you’re taking an inside view of other people’s actions.