A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus Aurelius' insights and advice—on everything from living in the world to coping with adversity and interacting with others.
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Stoic Stress Management: MEDITATIONS by Marcus Aurelius | Core Message
Key Takeaways
Stoicism is a practical philosophy designed to help you remain calm and steadfast when facing hardship.
Meditations is a collection of thoughts by Marcus Aurelius detailing the Stoic practices that he used to cope with stress.
3 Stoic Practices to Manage Stress
1. Praemeditatio Malorum
In Latin, this means Premeditation for Adversity. This is the act of imagining and accepting a troubling event.
Not merely worrying about it, and planing to mitigate it, but accepting the stressful event has occurred, and now you need to deal with it.
“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.
Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”
The key to stress management is to convince your mind that you can cope with any upcoming situation, no matter how stressful it might seem.
In a way, Premeditation Malorum is a vaccine, or small dose of simulated stress in the morning that inoculates from crippling stress during the day.
"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
2. Stoic Reframing
A stoic sees opportunity in every situation—even when others sees disappointment.
When you encounter a troubling situation, reframe the situation as an opportunity to practice virtue. Virtue is an old-fashioned word derived from the Greek word “Arete” which means excellence of character.
If you’re not sure which virtues you should practice at any given moment, just imagine someone you admire, alive or dead, and ask yourself: which character trait do I want to emulate?
Four Virtues the matter most to Marcus Aurelius:
- Justice
- Truth
- Temperance
- Fortitude
The next time you encounter hardship, select a virtue you admire in others, and want to develop in yourself.
See each hardship as a chance to accelerate the development of that virtue, and become a person that other people will admire.
3. Stoic Explaining
- Keep an untroubled spirit.
- Look things in the face and know them for what they are.
The human mind is like a great hollywood director. It’s great at adding drama to advance and making situations seem dire.
When we encounter a setback in life, it’s natural to use vivid emotional language to describe a situation as devastating. It’s natural to jump to a dire conclusion and assume you’re doomed.
These dramatic and dire descriptions unnecessarily amplify stress.
But if we can learn to strip away emotional language when solving a problem, and talk about a problem like a scientist or robot, only speaking about the facts, and never making untested assumptions, stress will start to dissipate.
The next time you want to feel in control of your stress levels:
- Strip away the emotional language.
- Stop making catastrophic assumptions.
- Use mundane factual descriptions.
"You have the power of your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength."