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These 5 Stoic Strategies Will Help You Slay Your Stress
Stress is part of life. But suffering because of stress? To the Stoics, that was a choice.
“It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal — if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad?” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.33
Life has always been hard. Even in the ancient world, there were children to raise, debts to pay, and terrible bosses. People got sick. They committed to too much.
Stress was a fact of life. But suffering because of stress? To the Stoics, that was a choice.
They mastered the discipline of perception, the ability to see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are: neither good nor bad. Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations: “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.”
In modern times, psychologists and neuroscientists have confirmed what the Stoics knew intuitively: Stress isn’t something that happens to you. We say things like “my boss is making me stressed” or “this project is making me stressed” or “this stack of dirty dishes is making me stressed.” But no…
