3 Stoic Strategies to Help You Reframe Any Challenge
You can’t change the situation, but these techniques allow you to weather the storm
I’m a bonafide optimist. In fact, I’ll admit my sunny disposition can be a little much even in the best of times. But throughout this pandemic, I’ve been struggling to find the bright side of anything, and it’s disorienting. All my previous tactics for feeling better don’t seem to be working.
What I’m learning is that the best way to deal with hard emotions isn’t to arm myself with more optimism. It doesn’t work to simply put on a smile and chirp, “We’ll get through this!” Instead, I need to see this challenge in a different way.
A recent episode of The Happiness Lab, a podcast hosted by Yale psychologist Laurie Santos, explored the Stoic concept of “framing.” Philosopher William B. Irvine, author of The Stoic Challenge and a guest on the show, explained that it’s a strategy the ancient Stoic philosophers used to help control their internal emotional reactions when they couldn’t control what was happening in their external world. With practice, Irvine said, we can immediately reframe negative emotional reactions into something else. He talks about three specific framing strategies to help us during a crisis that seems hellbent on breaking even the most bright-eyed…
