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Socratic Stoicism and Mental Health with Donald Robertson (Episode 11)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Find out why Donald Robertson now calls Stoicism a fundamentally Socratic philosophy.
In this episode Caleb Ontiveros speaks with Donald Robertson. Donald is the author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and a number of other excellent books. He is trained as a psychotherapist and is one of the key players behind modern Stoicism.
We talk about Socrates, Epicureanism from the psychological point of view, ways that different psychological techniques can backfire, and the state of Stoicism today.
This is one of my favorite episodes. Donald has expertise in both psychotherapy and Stoic philosophy – for that reason he has many significant things to say that have shaped how I, and many others, think about Stoic theory and practice.
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Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Stoicism vs. Freud: Ancient Insights in Modern Therapy
00:00:00
Speaker
So, you know, ancient stoicism is more consistent with modern evidence-based psychotherapy than anything Sigmund Freud ever said. How weird is that? I'd say that to justify my seemingly hyperbolic claim that 2000 years ago, the stoics were way ahead of their game in terms of psychotherapy.
Introduction to Stoic Conversations Podcast
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. In this episode, I speak with Donald Robertson. Donald is the author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and the philosophy of cognitive behavioral
Influence of Socratic Philosophy on Stoicism
00:00:49
Speaker
therapy.
00:00:49
Speaker
in addition to a number of other excellent books. He is a psychotherapist by training and one of the key players behind modern stoicism. We talk about Socrates, Epicureanism, ways that different psychological techniques can backfire, and the state of stoicism today.
00:01:08
Speaker
This is one of my favorite episodes. Donald has expertise in both psychotherapy and Stoic philosophy. And for that reason, he has many significant things to say that have shaped how I and many others think about Stoic theory and practice. Here is a Stoic conversation with Donald Robertson. Welcome to Stoic. My name is Caleb Andoveros. Today I am talking with Donald Robertson. Thanks for joining.
00:01:38
Speaker
Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Yeah. Thanks for chatting again. Let's start with a broad question that I've asked you before, but I'm interested in the always revisiting this question as it were. How do you describe stoicism these days to people? I mean, one is in terms of the history of it, but in terms of the content of the philosophy,
00:02:01
Speaker
First of all I tend to explain to people, and actually I've changed my mind about this a little bit over time, now I'll often introduce it to people by saying it's a branch of Socratic philosophy, it's heavily indebted to Socrates, and I mention that just because most people are kind of more familiar with the name of Socrates at least, so it kind of gives them a bit of a reference point.
Stoicism's Ethical and Psychological Foundations
00:02:24
Speaker
And it highlights that it's part of a broader tradition, which I think helps in some ways. But the central doctrine of Stoicism, as far as I'm concerned, is based around the slogan that the goal of life, or the meaning of life, if you like, is living in agreement with nature.
00:02:39
Speaker
And what they mean by that is that we should actualise our potential, fulfil our nature as rational beings. And to live rationally, to the best of our ability, would be to live wisely. And so the goal of Stoicism is a kind of moral wisdom which we also call virtue or arity.
00:02:59
Speaker
And then I'd add to that Stoicism is an ethical doctrine, but it has a really important and really obvious psychological consequence. And that is that if someone believes that virtue, which is a character trait,
00:03:15
Speaker
is the only truly good thing in life. That would follow from that, that they think external things like health, wealth and reputation are at best of secondary value. And it would mean that they would be less perturbed if they were denied those things. So they would have a kind of psychological resilience and stoicism is known therefore for being associated with psychological resilience.
00:03:41
Speaker
And how is stoicism socratic? How do they use Socrates' method and as a figure, how is he inspirational to the stoics?
00:03:49
Speaker
This is an interesting point to raise, because it opens up a bit of a can of worms. How much do we know about Stoicism? Probably we have roughly 1% of the original Stoic texts surviving today. And most of what we have comes from late Stoics, from the Roman imperial period. We just have fragments really from the founders of Stoicism.
00:04:15
Speaker
And I think, you know, we get a pretty good idea about the central doctrines of Stoicism, because although we've only got a tiny fraction of the literature, it's pretty emphatic, it's pretty clear about what the central doctrines are. So it's not necessarily the case that we're confused about that. But one of the things that's missing from it, and there are several things perhaps missing from that literature, but one is there aren't that many examples of the Stoics using the Socratic method.
00:04:40
Speaker
of questioning and that's partly because in Seneca you've got more letters and you know he'd be a little bit more didactic and in Marcus Aurelius you've got notes to himself although in those notes there are fragments of Socratic dialogue anyway and in Epictetus we actually have these kind of discussions that he's having with students although there's one or two instances, notable instances where he uses the Socratic method with them
00:05:09
Speaker
So we know that the Stoics did use the Socratic method of questioning and they're indebted to Socrates in that regard, although we only really get glimpses, unfortunately, of them, how they would actually do that in practice.
Socrates vs. Plato: Stoic Alignment
00:05:22
Speaker
So that's one way. And the other way is that Socrates implies
00:05:27
Speaker
some people would say at times he appears to stay an ethical doctrine which the Stoics inherit and then develop more fully and they get other ideas from him. The main idea that they get from him is this idea that virtue is the highest and possibly the only true good in life and what the consequences of that would be. We see that in the Euthydemus, we see it in Plato's Apology and then there's hints of it in other
00:05:53
Speaker
Socratic dialogues. So other schools of philosophy interpreted Socrates in different ways, most notably Plato, as a different take on Socrates. But the Stoics, I think, would have argued that they were trying to get back to a simpler and earlier understanding of what Socrates was trying to communicate. So I suppose you have several Socratic doctrines that the Stoics share, at least interpretations of Socratic doctrines, like the idea that virtue is unitary. It's a single thing.
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah, that it can be taught. Yes, that it can be taught. Also Socrates' cosmopolitanism, his belief that virtue exists in men and in women, his willingness to communicate with foreigners and slaves and people from all walks of life, which is a radical aspect of
00:06:41
Speaker
what he was doing, he didn't have the kind of elitism that existed in some other schools of ancient philosophy. And what we don't have in the Stoics, what the Stoics kind of reject from Plato, like Socrates' main representative, a number of things. Well, Plato's kind of elitism, first of all, but also the theory of form, that metaphysical doctrine Plato's particularly famous work, that he puts in the mouth of Socrates,
00:07:05
Speaker
the Stoics abandoned that completely and I think the Stoics would say that was something that Plato had introduced and it wasn't really part of Socrates' original method. Aristotle implies, Aristotle at one point says that Plato invented the theory of forms from which we can deduce that it wasn't Socrates who invented it and it was a later edition.
00:07:27
Speaker
Do you have a view on whether Xenophon's Socrates or Plato's Socrates is closer to the conception of a sau- That's a stoic, I prefer. That's a can of worms. I thought you were going to ask me the harder question, which is which one's more accurate historically? Who knows? That's a real can of worms. The question about the stoics is easier. I think the stoics are far more aligned with Xenophon. Just that's the impression that I get is that the stoics would be more comfortable.
00:07:56
Speaker
But for a number of reasons, Xenophon places a lot more emphasis on what Suxy says about self-discipline and self-control, which I think resonates with the Stoics.
Historical Context and Modern Adaptation of Stoicism
00:08:05
Speaker
In the surviving Stoic literature, it seems to me there's about as much emphasis on Xenophon's dialogues as there is on Plato's. But Plato's are much more famous, so it's kind of not surprising that they buy with one another.
00:08:17
Speaker
And also, we have this fragment, albeit, in Dargene's Laertes that says that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was inspired to begin studying philosophy because he read the memorabilia Socratus, or he overheard part of it being read.
00:08:33
Speaker
So I think the Stoics seem to me to be more aligned with the Xenophones version of Socrates, and that may be more, it's a simpler version of Socrates, so it may also be more consistent with what the original Socrates was saying, whereas Plato is a victim of his own success, so Plato was a genius, but he ends up therefore putting some of his own ideas, at least many scholars believe, in the mouth of Socrates, so kind of adulterating the Socratic philosophy to some extent.
00:09:02
Speaker
Right. Yeah, Xenophon was a genius of a different kind. So he had the historian background, the military background, extensive military background, but it may not have been as much of a cerebral or intellectual genius as Plato was. I think the Stoics.
00:09:17
Speaker
I mean, we could talk about what we said earlier about how we only have a tiny fraction of the ancient literature surviving to date. We can assume that the Stoics had read a bunch of other stuff as well. There were many Socratic dialogues written by, I mean, we're told there were 10 different Socratic sects founded by different followers of Socrates in the generation after he died.
00:09:39
Speaker
And we can see, for example, Marcus Aurelius quoting Socratic dialogues that don't exist anymore. And they mention authors like Antisthenes that were followers of Socrates that they seem to think are important and they're quite interested in. So the Stoics probably had a different picture of Socrates than we do because they probably had access to a different body of dialogues than the ones that survive today.
00:10:06
Speaker
Well, you've been in the modern stoic movement for quite some time. To what extent would you describe it as Socratic?
Socratic Method in Modern Stoicism: Therapeutic Benefits
00:10:12
Speaker
The movement itself, just as a culture, in terms of its culture, I was thinking about this today, actually, in ways that it could be more Socratic, but perhaps not how you're asking. I was thinking today it would be cool if we actually walked around in parks more talking about philosophy in the way that Socrates used to. But I think the modern stoic movement
00:10:34
Speaker
could be a lot more Socratic because I think in order to get up, it will go through stages in its evolution. To begin with, I had to introduce people to the doctrines of Stoicism and I think as people become more familiar with that and the communities develop, I hope that we'll be able to facilitate more Socratic questioning, more of the actual process of philosophy rather than just the doctrines of philosophy.
00:11:00
Speaker
Because I think that's really integral to the Socratic tradition and to Stoicism as well. So we don't see modern Stoics doing a lot of philosophy, I think. I've always said that I thought it would be good if people engaged in dialectic a little bit more and they learned a little bit more about logical fallacies, for example.
00:11:23
Speaker
skills, because this is integral to ancient stuff. So the process is missing a little bit, but I think I'm hopeful about Evolve over time. And just to zoom into that, how would you sort of add some details or flesh out what that process would look like for people who are maybe not so familiar with dialectic? I think very simply Socrates
00:11:45
Speaker
thought it was problematic for people to learn philosophical doctrines that are kind of pre-packaged or particularly if they're written down in books. He thought it was more important that we examine our own assumptions and there are, that's a tricky, you know, we could dig a deeper into that perhaps but it's a lot better, maybe it's a lot better a tricky question why that would matter so much but let's just say that it does.
00:12:10
Speaker
intuitively we might think, okay, it matters that we actually learn how to think and learn how to question ourselves as a kind of therapeutic value rather than just kind of memorizing doctrines and things like that. Well, to do that, normally we do that by talking to other people. So to some extent, even if you do a degree in philosophy today,
00:12:33
Speaker
It's very different from the way that philosophy was done in ancient Greece. But you do sit in seminar rooms and question each other. Like somebody will say, hey, maybe this is what justice looks like. And someone else will say, hi, I'm in it. Like, how does that fit with this example? Or doesn't it contradict something that you said earlier? So a very superficial level. You can say, look, when we talk to other people about ideas and we engage in philosophy, we're allowing them to kind of pick holes.
00:13:00
Speaker
in what we've said and expose contradictions. And that's really, in the simplest possible terms, the essence of the Socratic method. But Socrates also used his method in solitude. In fact, Epictetus tells us that Socrates used to keep written notes where he would practice question himself in a kind of self-help journal, if you like. So what it would look like today, I think it's easier to learn those skills if we're talking to other people.
00:13:27
Speaker
and then we can continue to use them in solitude. It's hard to learn them if we're only ever doing it in solitude because we have blind spots for our own assumptions and errors of reasoning and it tends to be easier for other people to highlight those and point them out to us. That's actually something that's stressed in one of the texts that we have surviving by Galen
00:13:51
Speaker
which is called on the diagnosis and cure of the soul's passions. So Galen talks about how we tend to have blind spots that we need help addressing from other people. And I think that's one of the benefits of talking to other people about philosophy. But in the Socratic tradition we'd be talking, in modern academic philosophy we tend to talk about kind of abstract things.
00:14:13
Speaker
and metaphysics and stuff like that. But in the Socratic tradition, it would be really much more personal. It would be about how we conceive what's to our advantage in life, how we understand the nature of wisdom as it applies to our own lives, how we understand what's good and bad with regard to the goal of life
Stoicism's Therapeutic Dimension and Modern Resurgence
00:14:35
Speaker
and things like that. So it has a more obviously therapeutic orientation in Socrates and in the Stoics. That's right.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, Socratic dialogues always begin with some concrete social situation, whether it's a dinner party with a variety of different friends, kinds of get along, or a man bringing his father to court, whatever it is. It's not like a seminar room where you start with some abstract question. It's already embedded in the social context, as it were. And so it's funny because when we started doing modern stoicism,
00:15:06
Speaker
This is often how movements evolve or original things evolve. We've kind of gone through stages. For a first few years, we got more pushback in some ways from academics. So initially, what I noticed was academic philosophers gave us a bit of pushback because they said, you guys are interpreting the Stoics in relation to modern psychotherapy and self-help, and you're kind of projecting stuff into it that doesn't really exist there.
00:15:37
Speaker
And I always thought when they said that, it showed a kind of ignorance, a surprising ignorance of the prevalence of what I would call the medical metaphor or therapeutic metaphor in classical literature. It's quite prominent actually in Plato's Socratic dialogues, for instance, and it's pretty explicit in the Stoic writings as well. They definitely, the Stoics wrote entire books called Untherapeutics and things like that.
00:16:01
Speaker
And for example, Galen's on the diagnosis and cure of the soul's fashions is pretty explicitly like a therapeutic text. So I think they underestimated how much that already existed in the classics. But that's changed now. No one argues about that anymore. It's funny. Sometimes these debates are quite heated and then they just die off. Now everybody seems to agree that ancient Stoicism had a therapeutic dimension.
00:16:28
Speaker
And now it's too focused on the therapeutic dimension. Some people think it's maybe too focused on the... Actually, funnily enough, I've always argued since the outset, even though my background's in therapy and I wrote mainly about the therapy, you mentioned the philosophy of CVT, the first I wrote in Stoicism. And in the introduction to that book, I emphasised that Stoicism is not just a therapy. In fact, it's bigger than a therapy and it does something more fundamental than a therapy. It also addresses our ethical values.
00:16:58
Speaker
in a way that normally we can't in the confines of a therapeutic relationship. But sometimes when people talk about stoicism today, I think what you might be alluding to is they refer to stoicism as a light pack or a self-help approach. And some people who are interested in stoic philosophy see that as a kind of superficial reading of things.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, it does seem like it has a number of useful techniques, but as a philosophy, it doesn't end at those techniques, of course. And what makes it distinct from cognitive behavioral therapy is that there is this opinionated view on what it is to live a good life behind the philosophy that many people find quite valuable.
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, that's something that I really, from the outside, I thought that was what was so important about it. Like, transcended what we can do in therapy. And I addressed some of the problems that clients have in therapy, in a sense, at a deeper level. And I guess I should say something I would take for granted is that because it targets our beliefs at a deeper level and at a more general level, it holds out greater hope
00:18:10
Speaker
as a form of emotional resilience building. And I really think that's one of the reasons that modern psychologists and psychotherapists should be particularly interested in stoicism. So sometimes people say to me, how can you use stoicism in a consulting room with a client? And I think that's not really where my focus is on it funnily enough. It's more on the value that stoicism would have as a preventative, even from the perspective of cognitive therapy.
00:18:37
Speaker
It's what I see in it more as a wider value as a preventative form of educational training. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So one question a number of people have sort of started asking themselves is, so we see a resurgence of ancient philosophies like Stoicism. Why aren't there similar resurgences for other Greek and Roman schools like Epicureanism?
00:19:02
Speaker
Do you have a view on this? I've got lots of views on this. It's one of my favorite guys. This is another question that we asked really early on. Actually, I'm happy to admit this is something I got wrong and I changed my mind a bit quickly, though. So we started doing Stoic Week in 2012 and Stoic Week was an online event. It still runs every year, about at least 20
00:19:27
Speaker
maybe 25,000 people have done Stoic Greek all around the world, we've gathered data from it. So it was started by Christopher Gill, who's Professor Emeritus of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter, and he put together a multidisciplinary team of psychologists and classicists and philosophers, and I was one of the founding members of that team.
00:19:48
Speaker
We got a lot of media coverage in the early years. We were in most of the British newspapers on BBC radio and stuff like that. And systemicism seemed to kind of explode in popularity and it grew bigger and bigger every year, still going. And at the beginning, I thought, I used to say, I reckon within a year or two, we'll have Epicurean Week.
00:20:09
Speaker
And I thought, I remember thinking, I don't think we're going to see cynic week happening in the same way, but maybe Aristotle week or Plato week. But I thought Epicurean week seems like a kind of an obvious one. And then the years passed and it never happened. And I kind of watched and it seemed obvious to me why it wasn't happening.
00:20:33
Speaker
So first thing would be that none of those other schools of philosophy are certainly not the Epicureans. Although they have really amazing texts, like really interesting texts, I don't think any of them really have a book that compares to the meditations of Marcus Aurelius in terms of the breadth of its appeal.
00:20:56
Speaker
So I underestimated the extent to which we're starting from a base where like many people, like, I mean, there's something a million people on Facebook say the meditations is their favorite list. Meditations is their favorite book.
00:21:12
Speaker
And that's not true, say, of Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, right? It doesn't have that kind of accessibility. And even the Epicurean text and all that is quite as accessible and not quite as popular. So I think that made a big difference. Like, loads of people had already read the meditations.
00:21:30
Speaker
And I do believe that another factor is that stoicism places a lot of emphasis on forming communities and collecting or the store symbolizes in a sense this kind of intellectual community
00:21:46
Speaker
And on social virtue, funnily enough, I know many people are interested in Stoicism. Ignore that aspect of downplay, it's a central aspect of ancient Stoicism. And the Epicureans have a more ambivalent attitude towards social virtue in the ideal community.
00:22:02
Speaker
The Stoics, well, a simple way of putting it, right? The Stoics returned to the Agora to do philosophy out in public, in the marketplace, outside the ivory towers of academia. The Epicureans did philosophy in a private world garden outside the city, like there's more.
Epicureanism vs. Stoicism: Psychological Implications
00:22:20
Speaker
among a close circle of friends. Sistoicism had always been more about public engagement if you like, it's integral to the whole tradition and it has that in common with Socrates actually, but the Platonists and Aristotelians also were kind of a little bit more exclusive, they were a little bit more ivory tower in their approach.
00:22:38
Speaker
And I think another difference that should have been obvious to me, but maybe I didn't firmly enough see how significant it was at first, is that stoicism is the inspiration for modern common to behavioral therapy. And the teachings of stoicism are more consistent with modern psychological research on the emotions than some of the other schools. Particularly, I think Epicureans don't understand this. They are blind spot, if you like.
00:23:05
Speaker
But Epicureanism has never really had anything more than negligible acknowledgement or popularity among cognitive behavioral evidence-based psychotherapists or clinical psychologists because it seems on its face to really conflict with some of the state-of-the-art observations that we have about how our emotions work.
00:23:30
Speaker
to cut a long story short. So it's just epicureanism would seem, I think, to many evidence-based clinicians to potentially have bad psychological advice baked into it. Whereas stoicism is more consistent with the type of advice that we tend to give clients. So that's another reason.
00:23:46
Speaker
So I guess the three reasons are the quality of the literature and the popularity of it, the emphasis on forming communities and on social virtue, and the fact that the teachings are consistent with modern evidence-based psychotherapy. All of that, I think, has contributed to Stoicism going through this renaissance and really leaving the other schools of philosophy in its way. In what ways is Epicureanism not consistent with modern psychotherapy, in your view?
00:24:16
Speaker
Epicureanism places more emphasis on controlling or valuing our subjective feelings. So Epicurus said that the goal of life, the telos was hedoni or pleasure. And then famously or notoriously, he refines that definition to say it's a particular type of hedoni called ataraxia, which means freedom from distress.
00:24:42
Speaker
freedom from anxiety, freedom from pain, and so on. So he puts a kind of paradox, famously paradoxical twist on what he means by saying that the goal of life is pleasure. Nevertheless, he says that. So whether it's pleasure or whether it's the absence of pain and distress, either way, these are subjective feelings. Now we know in modern psychology that people who suffer from emotional disorders, like anxiety disorders and depression,
00:25:09
Speaker
The research shows, and clinical experience shows, they tend to be more preoccupied than normal with managing the subjective feelings. And so being overly preoccupied with trying to control those feelings, there aren't many converging pieces of research that show that's problematic. And in fact, the easiest way to illustrate that, so we're talking about lots of different research that's all converging in this, but an easy example would be there's data that show
00:25:36
Speaker
that people who respond very strongly to saying that they believe in and agree with the statement, anxiety is bad.
00:25:50
Speaker
are more vulnerable to developing mental health problems in the future. Right. This is a notorious research finding because those people will tend to experience a number of problems. Let's do a quick deep dive and I'll explain what some of the problems are. Sure. Let's do it. Right. Let's do it. Let's just do it. Let's just go there. And so anyway, first of all, the belief that anxiety is bad is very similar
00:26:16
Speaker
to the central doctrine of Epicureanism, which says that the goal is ataraxia, which would mean freedom from feelings like anxiety. It would mean peace of mind, and it implies that disturbance, including anxiety, is therefore the most fundamentally bad thing in life. So why is this psychologically problematic for a number of reasons?
00:26:42
Speaker
Like, one is that because it places a lot so much value, central value, like most value, supreme value, like on peace of mind, that naturally what we value we pay more attention to.
00:26:57
Speaker
And that naturally causes us to become more introspective and it encourages morbid introspection and rumination, which we know are associated with anxiety and depressive disorders. So somebody who really believes that the number one most important thing in life is freedom from anxiety is going to be focused on what's going on between their ears and less focused on what's happening out there in the world. And that's not a healthy balance to have psychologically. We also know
00:27:28
Speaker
When people place a lot of negative value on subjective feelings, they usually amplify those feelings. So someone who really strongly believes that anxiety is bad will pay, they see anxiety as a threat. They see it as dangerous or shameful, for example. Like, so they'll usually focus so much attention on it that they cause those feelings to dominate their attention. And they kind of magnify, like putting them under a magnifying glass, if you like, they amplify the feeling by paying more attention to them.
00:27:58
Speaker
And we also know that those type of people will tend to be more motivated generally to use emotional coping strategies that tend to backfire. So someone who really believes that peace of mind is all important and anxiety is really bad, will usually try and suppress feelings.
00:28:21
Speaker
or force themselves to relax. And those strategies we know often backfire. There's a rebound effect often when there's mixed research on this, but typically the research indicates that if you ask people to try and eliminate unpleasant feelings or thoughts by forcing them out of their mind, they'll cause them to become more frequent in the days that follow.
Misconceptions and Nuances of Stoic Emotion Management
00:28:45
Speaker
And they'll also
00:28:47
Speaker
Like I said, kind of amplify them. They'll do something that we call elaborating an idea as well. So say you have an anxiety-provoking thought that pops into your head and then you think, I need to get rid of that because I need to maintain my peace of mind. What you'll tend to do is interact with the thought more and create more associations between that thought and other behaviors and ideas.
00:29:10
Speaker
And because you create more associations, the thought will become more vivid and it's more likely to be triggered. So say you try to relax to get rid of feelings of anxiety, you potentially now create the problem that in the future when you relax through association, it triggers the feelings of anxiety that you were previously trying to get rid of. So anything that you do in response to a negative feeling potentially becomes associated with it, and that can backfire.
00:29:40
Speaker
And then the other problem is people who view anxiety as bad in many cases will try to conceal it from other people because they become ashamed of it. And what the research shows is that those individuals often avoid seeking emotional support from family members or doctors or psychotherapists. And first, the simple social reason that leaves them more vulnerable over the long term and less resilient
00:30:09
Speaker
So, some of those traits, ironically, this kind of toxic, kind of suppressive attitude to some extent is associated with a trait that modern psychologists call stoicism, but lowercase s
00:30:27
Speaker
like so we have a number of research tools that are used to measure lowercase stoicism and so we'd ask people questions about you know whether they should try to get rid of feelings of anxiety or you know whether like anxiety is something they should be ashamed or they should keep it to themselves they should try to prevent other people from being able to see it and stuff like that so that's kind of what we mean by lowercase stoicism it means having a stiffer and we know
00:30:54
Speaker
from a number of different studies that people would score high on local racism. Although, ironically, they think of it as something that makes them tough, it actually makes them weaker, because it makes them less resilient and more prone to mental health problems in the future. So this is a good segue into, I guess, one of the
00:31:13
Speaker
made fundamental questions about Stoicism today, which is, what's the most common misconception about it? And we wonder into our territory by talking about this. The most common misconception about Stoicism is that it's about suppressing your emotions. So if I had to define lowercase Stoicism
00:31:33
Speaker
pretty concisely and technically I'd say it's a personality trait or coping style that consists in suppressing or concealing unpleasant or embarrassing emotions like you know boys don't cry kind of thing and we know that's unhealthy whereas capitalist stoicism has a more nuanced approach to emotion that's the basis for cognitive therapy so we've got quite a lot of research that suggests that capitalist stoicism would be good for your emotional health
00:32:00
Speaker
And yet online, people every day confuse something that's known to be bad for emotional health with something that's known to be good for emotional health. So it would be important for us to try and separate those two things and clarify the difference.
00:32:16
Speaker
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00:32:35
Speaker
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00:32:58
Speaker
I think many people would interpret stoicism to be making a number of different claims, but at least one claim would be that anxiety is bad. But I think on both of our readings, the stoics don't necessarily think that's true. There are certain judgments associated with anxiety that might be bad, but the feelings themselves or circumstances are not necessarily bad to be avoided at all.
00:33:20
Speaker
I think if somebody believes that stoicism is saying that anxiety is bad, I would understand why they would draw that conclusion. To some extent, it's partly due to the problem of translation from ancient Greek to modern English, and sometimes just traditional misinterpretations or caricatures of the philosophy. But it's something we have to be extremely careful about because it risks turning good psychological advice into quite toxic or unhealthy, bad psychological advice. So the stoics distinguish
00:33:50
Speaker
between different aspects so actually let me say take a step back and say because I think this is so important
00:34:01
Speaker
I mean, I've worked in many different approaches to self-improvement and psychotherapy, many different types of clients, many different populations over many years, about 25 years. And there's many things I could say about psychotherapy and resilience building and stuff like that.
00:34:20
Speaker
So it might surprise people to know that I think one of the most fundamental things that, you know, if we could teach it to kids kind of things, like one of the most basic things would be just that I think
00:34:34
Speaker
Most people talk about their emotions using language that's overly simplistic. And that's the root cause of many psychological problems in my view, personally. So we have what psychologists in the past have sometimes called a lump theory of emotion.
00:34:51
Speaker
So when somebody today talks about anxiety, they talk about anxiety as if it's a thing, like this kind of homogenous blob of feeling or whatever. They don't distinguish, as you just did actually. So you went beyond the lump theory already. Most people don't distinguish between the thoughts and the sensations, the physiological components of an emotion, the cognitive components of it, and also how their behavior or action tendencies contribute to an emotion.
00:35:20
Speaker
So you could see emotion, you could see anxiety as a cake that's baked out of many different ingredients. But if we talk about it as if it's just a homogenous blob, we're at a very primitive level of understanding it in other people, but also in ourselves. We can't really hope to get off the ground.
00:35:40
Speaker
can't even get started doing self-improvement, us therapy, our self-help, unless we get beyond this incredibly primitive idea that an emotion is just a homogenous blob of feeling. We have to look at it like a piece of clockwork. There's cogs and other components in it that make it function the way that it does.
00:36:02
Speaker
And the simplest possible distinction, I mean, one distinction would be between different types of thoughts or underlying beliefs and the sensations and physiology and the behavioural tendencies. So we could carve it up that way. But an even simpler dividing up emotion would be to say some aspects of our emotional experience are involuntary.
00:36:26
Speaker
Whereas other aspects are actually under our voluntary control. And I can tell you and your listeners, in my experience,
00:36:36
Speaker
failure to distinguish between those two aspects of our emotion in depression or anxiety or anger is fundamental with most of the clients that I've worked with over the years. It kind of runs through a lot of the CBT that we do, but the Stoics did distinguish between different aspects of emotion.
00:36:57
Speaker
So they identified the cognitive component that you've mentioned earlier, but they also distinguish between propathy, like are they involuntary aspects of emotion, like the more kind of physiological aspects of emotion and the more voluntary components. They were mainly interested in the more voluntary cognitive and behavioral aspects of our emotional experience.
00:37:20
Speaker
So as we're doing a deep dive, let me give you a really specific example of that that's very relevant to today. If I have a client who has generalized anxiety disorder, a very common emotional disorder, we call it the worrying disorder, pathological worrying, right? So clients we know will typically, as I alluded to earlier actually, will try to suppress or conceal their hands shaking.
00:37:45
Speaker
or like the muscles tensing, or they're heart beating faster, they try to force themselves to relax, or they'll take drugs or use alcohol, or use distraction techniques to try to kind of control these feelings which are actually, you know, automatic or involuntary physiological responses. Now we can take control over those feelings, we can influence them, but we don't have direct control over them.
00:38:09
Speaker
And because of that, many of the things that we do to try to control those feelings will tend to backfire in the ways that we alluded to earlier. But when clients come into therapy, it's like they're banging the head against the wall. People with GAD are constantly trying to be very preoccupied with the hands shaking, the heart beating fast, and the feeling of anxiety, trying to control it by trying to manage it, trying to avoid it. So they're trying too hard to control involuntary components of emotion.
00:38:38
Speaker
And at the same time, they typically neglect to control the voluntary aspects of emotion. And so the simplest example of that, apart from their actual physical behavior, like what they do with their arms and leg, the cognitively, the amount of time that you spend ruminating or worrying about the ideas triggered by anxiety is one of the main things that maintains generalized anxiety disorder.
00:39:06
Speaker
So there's a difference between automatic thoughts and voluntary thinking. Automatic thoughts tend to be fast, they pop into your mind, they're triggered by external events or things that other people say, or they just seem to happen kind of spontaneously. Like you suddenly think of something or you're reminded of something.
00:39:25
Speaker
voluntary thinking is slower and sign what tells us that is voluntary in part is that it consists of a sequence of thoughts that are chained together so you're reasoning so people who worry feel like are trying to prepare for a problem or they'd often describe it as problem solving i'm trying to solve a problem here i'm trying to figure out what to do like so they're following steps in their head and because the the fact that they're following a sequence of
00:39:52
Speaker
Steps is a clue that this is a voluntary cognitive process. If nothing else, it follows a sequence that takes place over time that could be interrupted if you chose to do so.
Stoicism's Superiority in Emotional Resilience
00:40:05
Speaker
So it's not just random automatic thoughts or interested thoughts. You push one down, another one pops up over here. This is a sequence that could be interrupted or redirected. You can take control over it.
00:40:18
Speaker
But clients tend not to, and in fact, we've got direct evidence of that. Because if you ask, if you get them to do a questionnaire, or just ask them to rate from zero to 100%, how strongly do you agree with the statement, my worrying is uncontrollable? Most people with GAD will say 100%, like 100%, my worrying is uncontrollable. But usually within 15, 20 minutes, you can teach them to figure out ways of control.
00:40:47
Speaker
They say we know that they typically underestimate how much voluntary control that they have over that aspect of their emotional experience. So, I mean, I really think if we want to dig back and go, what's at the root of this? It's just in our culture, we have a very naive, overly simplistic
00:41:07
Speaker
understanding, a primitive understanding of what an emotion consists of. We don't even distinguish between the different aspects of it, but the Stoics did, as you alluded to earlier, they understood that they were involuntary aspects of emotion. So
00:41:24
Speaker
The propathy eye, the involuntary aspects of emotion and stoicism are not bad, they're not good, indifferent, naturally occurring and morally indifferent. The voluntary components the stoics might say are potentially bad and so far
00:41:42
Speaker
is we're voluntarily choosing to think about or ruminate about something in a way that places too much value on external things or that is irrational or self-contradictory. So the Stoics would say that aspect is bad in that sense, but we could just stop doing it if we wanted
00:42:02
Speaker
So there's a real kind of mess here that we find ourselves in, often in therapy, where the process begins by helping people to disentangle these things. This is one of the areas where I think Stoicism really is. I don't say this lightly, way ahead of its time. You just have to stop for a minute and remind yourself that Sigmund Freud
00:42:24
Speaker
And Carl Jung and these guys dominated psychotherapy for most of the 20th century, and they didn't have the faintest idea of some of these kind of nuanced distinctions that were taken for granted in ancient Stoicism. So, you know, ancient Stoicism is more consistent with modern evidence-based psychotherapy than anything Sigmund Freud ever said. How weird is that?
00:42:48
Speaker
So I'd say that to justify my seemingly hyperbolic claim that 2000 years ago, the Stoics were way ahead of their game in terms of psychotherapy.
00:43:01
Speaker
One thing I've been wondering about recently is related to your point about salience. So one problem with Epicureanism, not just Epicureanism is that it makes the internal more salient and that can have all sorts of effects. One in the example you gave would be the anxious person focusing on their feelings and thoughts over what they might be doing in the world or something of that sort.
00:43:29
Speaker
Do you think that the emphasis that at least quite a bit of culture has on mental health, it can backfire in a way because it does cause people to focus more on their internal states? So whether it's new different advertisements from some therapeutic company or different sorts of awareness type weeks, what's your thought on that?
Modern Self-Help Culture and Mental Health Challenges
00:43:53
Speaker
Yeah. I'm not sure there must be research that would support conclusions about that, but off the top of my head, I can't think of an example. So I'll just speak anecdotally from personal experience, right? An obvious example of that would be sometimes who join support groups for people with similar types of problems can benefit from it. There are obvious ways that people can benefit from talking to the peers. Sometimes, however, they get worse.
00:44:22
Speaker
So some individuals who have generalized anxiety disorder or OCD, if they speak to other people who have GAD or OCD, it just gives them more things to worry about. And they start to develop symptoms that they didn't even have to begin with. And sometimes you'll find people who come into therapy, another just an anecdotal observation, but a really obvious, simple observation. And I think any therapist would agree with us. Therapists talk about self-help junkies.
00:44:48
Speaker
A lot of the clients that come into therapy and the initial consultation will tell you they have a bookcase full of self-help books, they've been on every yoga and meditation retreat under the sun, so they're completely immersed in wellness culture and self-improvement culture. But weirdly, and they may even believe it helps them in some ways.
00:45:10
Speaker
But at the same time, if you say so, like, over the past year, do you feel that you've been getting worse or getting better? They'll say, oh, I'm getting worse. I mean, like, that's why I'm here. And they'll look slightly confused about the kind of contradiction that they find themselves in. So they're doing loads of self-help and self-improvement stuff, but the condition's getting worse, right? And actually, at the beginning of cognitive therapy, what we often do, and I think,
00:45:37
Speaker
This would be interesting to try and measure. I don't know if there's an easy way we can measure. The impression that I get is that over the even the last 20 years or so, psychotherapists have found themselves spending more time in the initial sessions, getting clients to abandon maladaptive coping strategies that they're already using. That's the impression that I get anyway, that this has got worse, that people read self-help books and
00:46:07
Speaker
They maybe even contain what could be good advice for some people in some situations, but the clients that we see in therapy are often applying that advice in a way that's making them worse. I'll give you an example, I mean there's many examples, I'll give you the favorite example of most cognitive behavioral therapists and that would be we used to believe that relaxation techniques were really useful.
00:46:29
Speaker
And I still think they are actually, I'm a big fan of relaxation technique, but for some clients, they caused a kind of unexpected problem. So clients who have panic attacks, for example, have overwhelming anxiety and a very common type of panic attack is the belief that you're having a heart attack.
00:46:49
Speaker
So people often go to A&E because they think they're dying, and it turns out they're just having a panic attack. So the belief that you're dying is obviously going to make you anxious. So it becomes like a vicious cycle. The more intense the anxiety is, the more you feel you're going to die, and then the more that fuels the anxiety. So the anxiety spirals, goes through the roof very quickly, and it can feel very overwhelming.
00:47:13
Speaker
In the past people used relaxation techniques to try and suppress the feelings of panic attack and that had kind of mixed results for them. But what we tend to do, there was a huge advance in the treatment of panic disorder in the 1980s because cognitive therapists started to kind of do the opposite and induced
00:47:33
Speaker
feelings of panic so that the clients could practice writing them out and proving to themselves that the feelings were harmless and that they weren't one in signs of a heart attack. And so in order to prove to yourself that those feelings are completely harmless, you have to be willing to experience them.
00:47:53
Speaker
ironically, you've got to be open to the feeling. And so using relaxation techniques can be a form of what we call experiential avoidance today. It's a way of preventing yourself from experiencing feelings that you would have to experience in order to discover that those feelings are in fact, harmless.
00:48:11
Speaker
And so it's very common now for psychotherapists to, they would say they identify the client's coping strategies that might include self-help strategies or even strategies they've got from other forms of psychotherapy sometimes and to reevaluate whether those are actually helping or whether they might actually be standing in the way of them making progress.
00:48:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Techniques are always sensitive to a given person and circumstance. And what technique can be useful for some, be useful for some at some points in their life, or it might have a different kind of effect later on. So one always needs to be careful with that. I think a lot of people who take the self-help junky route are always looking for that one thing.
00:48:53
Speaker
that will make it much, much easier. I'm not sure if that's your impression as well. There's another problem I would identify with the self-help junkie approach. So one is that sometimes people will use strategies in a way that's actually counterproductive in ways that we've described. Another problem that's more subtle
00:49:09
Speaker
is suppose that you get advice and techniques that are good. You may nevertheless face the problem of selective thinking. So it might be that you've got some techniques that are really helping you in terms of your anxiety and strategies that kind of help you with your anxiety. And you do courses and you read books and you listen to podcasts and you're doing loads and loads of self-help. But maybe that's not your problem. Maybe your problem is anger.
00:49:38
Speaker
and you lack social skills and you're doing absolutely zero to address self-improvement in those areas where the real problem is located. So another problem is that self-help might potentially focus us in the wrong direction and I think that happens a lot.
00:49:57
Speaker
There's very little discourse online about self-improvement that addresses anger. And there are reasons why that would be the case. Because anger is an externalizing emotion. When people get angry, they tend to think everyone else needs therapy, except them. So angry people tend not to self-repair for treatment.
00:50:15
Speaker
they're more likely to be referred by a spouse or by an institution. Like if they're in the military, they might be sent for anger management. Or if it's a child in school, they might be sent by the teacher for anger management. Or someone, a prison inmate, might be told that they need anger management. But it's very rare for someone to present in therapy voluntarily and say that their main problem is anger. They might come for depression and say they've also got some anger as well.
00:50:42
Speaker
So anger is a massively under-addressed psychological problem in society because of its very nature. And if you allow people to choose their own self-help, angry people will typically choose self-help that focuses on other aspects of their life. And that becomes a kind of diversion from tackling their real problem.
Therapists vs. Self-Help: Addressing Core Issues
00:51:04
Speaker
And if you want evidence of that,
00:51:06
Speaker
just go online and you know look at popular self-help and self-improvement gurus and see how many really angry young men there are following them and commenting on their videos and things like that and the language that they use and the aggression that they exhibit and think you know you might think to yourself you guys don't really seem to be improving psychologically you're getting worse
00:51:31
Speaker
although you claim to be doing a lot of self-improvement stuff and reading a lot of self-improvement books. So that's a more subtle problem because something can seem beneficial but it may be that focusing on it is preventing us from addressing another area where we have maybe an even deeper problem.
00:51:50
Speaker
Right. It could be a distraction or even an avoidant behavior in therapy. It's easier because you have a psychotherapist and we can assess you, you know, and we can get you to fill out questionnaires so we can paint a more rounded picture of some of these situation and target areas. I'm very often this.
00:52:08
Speaker
therapists might listen to a client, giving them a long story about all the therapy and self-improvement they've been doing. The therapist might think that there's obviously other stuff here that you haven't done anything to address that's maybe the real problem. The presenting problem often isn't the real problem, as we see. Yeah, that's right.
00:52:29
Speaker
Do you have a view on, so I think in the Stoic community there's a decent amount of evidence that people tend to be happy in your work, at least with Stoic Week and so on. But in the broader scheme of things, in the States at least, it doesn't seem like people become significantly happier over time despite their being.
00:52:49
Speaker
more therapists available, some amount of economic growth. A very big question, of course, but I'm just curious what some of your thoughts are on why is mental health at best stable over time? Prevalence.
00:53:05
Speaker
I would say that the evidence suggests that prevalence of mental health problems in countries like America and the UK has increased gradually over time since we began measuring it anyway. And that's a tricky, it's a complicated question because it raises all sorts of issues about research artifacts, the way that we're measuring it and stuff. There's problems with the way that we
00:53:27
Speaker
classifying in measures that made to health problems. But nevertheless, famously, the National Institute for Health's prevalence study, which is the main body of research that we use for this in the US a number of years ago, found that something like it was at 52%.
00:53:44
Speaker
all Americans had a history of meeting psychiatric diagnoses, having symptoms that would meet psychiatric diagnoses. And the reason that that's kind of weird is that psychiatry used to be referred to as a branch of abnormal psychology.
00:54:01
Speaker
But if 52% of the population, as many people know to have a history of meeting diagnostic criteria, then it's normal. And it would be abnormal never to have had something strange about you. You're too happy. Yeah, we've crossed the line now, whereas the majority of us might have a history of mental health problems.
00:54:25
Speaker
So there might be reasons for that, like I say, it raises questions about the way research is conducted. But it does look in some ways as if in particular we're facing an epidemic of depression. I mean, my understanding is that social anxiety, a number of mental health problems really do look like they're becoming more prevalent. Just anecdotally, I really get the impression that social anxiety disorder is far more common now than it was in the past.
00:54:48
Speaker
And maybe that's not surprising because of certain changes in society and the way that people live. People spending more time online and maybe less time socialising face to face and stuff like that would potentially make them more vulnerable to social anxiety issues. But dude, it's long been observed that they were facing a kind of epidemic of clinical depression as well. And that's been a concern, for instance, in the UK with the British government.
00:55:13
Speaker
as one of the motivations for the what they call the AI program in the UK. The government poured a lot of money into research on introducing an old army of clinicians to do CBT to address depression. Why is that happening? That's a hard question to answer, but just for the sake of putting something out there to get a conversation
Societal Alienation and Depression Trends
00:55:33
Speaker
going,
00:55:34
Speaker
One of the leading evidence-based treatments for depression is a thing called behavioral activation. Now, we used to believe that if someone was depressed, what you should do is get them to brainstorm a list of things that they find pleasurable.
00:55:55
Speaker
and have them schedule doing more of those things. So to make time in their daily routine to do more activities they find pleasurable. If that sounds a little bit odd at first, it's obvious if you speak to people and assess people with clinical depression. Like if you say, hey, you list all the things that you over the years that you find most enjoyable in life. And then you say, hey, how many of those things have we done over the past week?
00:56:19
Speaker
Most clinically depressed clients will say, well, none of them. And then the therapist should say, if I made a list of all the things I most enjoy in life, and then I quit doing all of them permanently, I'd probably start to feel kind of down after a while. So there's an obvious sense in which we're behaving that we're coping could be contributing to our depression. So it used to be believed though that we should
00:56:42
Speaker
identify pleasurable activities in part of the treatment. But now we know that it's more about meaningful activities, valued activities. So now we tend to say to clients, what are your core values? What are the things that you want your life to stand for ultimately? And that means the therapy gets a little bit more sopratic, like a little bit more philosophical in its nature.
00:57:07
Speaker
Now, if you want to flip that around, I don't know, it's a bit of a stretch to infer something about society from that, you know, but I certainly think it's a good springboard for it to be. Is it possible? I'll pose it as a question that modern society has changed in such a way that people feel more out of touch with their core values than they did in the past. Are we living in a more alienated society?
00:57:30
Speaker
where people feel more lost and more confused about what their core values might be. And then you might want to dig deeper and go, why would that have happened? What is it about society that could potentially have caused that? I certainly find it strange people don't talk about their values much
00:57:49
Speaker
You know, although they talk about politics and they argue about ethics and stuff like that, for most people, if you ask them, you know, what do you want your life to stand for? You know, what do you really believe is the most important thing? And like, this is like a novel conversation. Even people that are self-help junkies, they'll usually be like, I don't know. I've not really thought about that before. First, they're usually stuck for an answer. They give very superficial answers. So again, it shows there's a kind of deficit in their self-improvement and their self-understanding.
00:58:18
Speaker
But I think it could be that societies somehow led us to a point where we're all out of touch with our core moral values. Yeah, it's a big question. It's always hard to, on one hand, make the judgment which directions things are going because questions about, you know, depression, as you know, have all these measurement type issues.
00:58:36
Speaker
The definition of depression changes through time. People are responding to surveys versus people being diagnosed and so on. But it does seem at least anecdotally that at least in some pockets, that's such a good spot. Complicated question. We have to be cautious about what they need to see. But I think it's fair to have a conversation about it and say, yeah, it kind of looks like maybe depression is becoming more of a problem.
00:58:58
Speaker
it looks like it might be connected to this and at least then we can talk about it. Have you looked at research suggesting that depression has social contagion type effects? I don't think I remember specifically looking at that. What sort of research did you have in mind? What were the findings? So the findings would be that
00:59:17
Speaker
If, you know, say they look at a high school, the number of, they can make predict reasonably well the number of depressed people from a year's time based off of the current number of depressed people and they'll try tease out other factors that might be influencing.
00:59:36
Speaker
the judgment. Of course, the factors relate to the external environments and try the best explanation plausibly. Some people have argued are looking at people's relations to depress people and how tight those communities might be. I guess this is just, again, an anecdotal observation
00:59:55
Speaker
from clinical practice. But I think many clinicians would say, I think there's some research that would support this indirectly as well, that depression is one of the psychological conditions that often puts or overall puts more strain on relationships. So, you know, people have panic attacks or, you know, they've got
01:00:21
Speaker
OCD it can put strain on their relationship. But depression seems more consistently to put a lot of strain. A lot of marriages end because one of the partners suffers from depression. It can really affect people's performance and motivation at work. So depression I think has more of a kind of social impact.
01:00:41
Speaker
than people tend to assume. As I could easily see, there might be ways in which it's contagious, it strains relationships. It really even affects the way that people communicate, and actually it does one of the worst things to communication. Even if people are communicating in a way that's strained, at least they're communicating, whereas what depression does is
01:01:02
Speaker
reduce or eliminate communication with other people.
Stoicism as Lifelong Practice for Resilience
01:01:06
Speaker
So there's not even an opportunity to kind of improve in that regard. If we're just not talking to people at all and we become completely withdrawn. So that's partly why it can be quite problematic, definitely. And, you know, it may be, funnily enough, one of the things that Tim Le Bon's research on stoicism is just from pilot studies. So very early, you need to replicate this. Tim Le Bon's the research director.
01:01:29
Speaker
of modern stoicism. And he said he'd been gathering data for like a decade, thousands and thousands of participants online, and also working with other researchers around the world. You know, one of his favorite things to point out to people was that they found measures of zest that were correlated with stoicism and improved. And by zest as a construct, we kind of enjoy enthusiasm for life. And that surprised people to find that seemed to be improved by training in stoicism.
01:01:58
Speaker
You know, so maybe, who knows? I'm very keen that we do more research in this area, but it could be that by training people in stoicism we could help to reduce the prevalence of depression, and certainly in a number of ways I think we can improve emotional resilience generally. One of those reasons, incidentally, is that
01:02:20
Speaker
What you said reminds me, this is slightly at a tangent, but it's related enough, I think, to point this out, and it's interesting. Resilience building is a kind of emerging field, so we know that there are psychological techniques from positive psychology and CBT that can help people build their emotional resilience. But what studies have tended to find so far is that it's temporary.
01:02:45
Speaker
So if you train people in resilience skills, they might benefit for a few years, like a couple of years, but then the effect tends to wear off. That happens often with skills training. There's certain things that you can teach people that stick in or permanent. And then there's other things that you train them in and it lasts a few years and then they're back to square one again. And so, you know, that suggests
01:03:09
Speaker
Resilience training would have potential, but you'd have to keep doing booster sessions, a bit like the COVID vaccine or something like that. You kind of think, oh, great, we've got a violin. We're going to have to keep getting another one. So resilience building's a bit like that. At first, we thought, oh, we're here. This worked. Oh, and it worked for a couple of years. So you're going to have to keep doing this training course every couple of years potentially to benefit long-term permanently, which would be the goal. But stoicism,
01:03:33
Speaker
we believe could perhaps be sticky. Like, because people who get into stoicism very often remain in to stoicism for the rest of their life, because it's not just a bunch of techniques. It's a philosophy of life and a set of moral values. Like, so it's more like, like yoga in that regard, people who get into yoga often remain in the yoga for the rest of their life. Whereas, you know, the research from back pain,
01:04:03
Speaker
shows that if you get people to do physiotherapy exercises for the bat, they do them and they benefit from them, but often they get bored with them and stop doing them after a while. Whereas yoga maybe benefits some people that'll get back pain, but they do it for the rest of their life. So it's stickier, and that's really important. And it may be that stoicism provides as a way of training people in CBT techniques, or positive psychology techniques, or techniques that are similar to those, that gives them a framework that would make it.
01:04:31
Speaker
permanent or long term. And that's the holy grail of mental health research, is to come up with a preventative psychological training that would have stickiness. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Like, stoicism attaches to people's identities and having something attached to your identity means that you're more likely to keep it up. The way I like to illustrate that is I've never met any, I mean, I keep throwing down this gun and I've been doing this for like
01:05:00
Speaker
I've been saying this for well over a decade and I've still never met a single person who has an Albert Ellis tattoo, or an R&T Beck tattoo, or really any cognitive therapy quote tattooed on them. I've seen people with serenity, I've never seen anybody with a CBT tattoo, but I have seen many people, including Ryan Holiday, who have stoicism tattoos. And it might seem like a good thing to say, I'm half joking.
01:05:29
Speaker
But the point I'm making is that people identify with stoicism to the extent that they'd get tattoos. It's not just a bunch of techniques. It's something that becomes part of their self-image in a way that cognitive therapy never could. And another way of putting that would be people read Feeling Good by David Burns or other bestselling books on CBT. And usually, they read it once.
01:05:57
Speaker
And then, you know, maybe they go back to it a bit, but I don't meet people who say that they read a book on CBT and they reread it every year. Like they carry on, go back to it for the rest of life. But people who read the meditations of Marx Aurelius often keep returning to the text, like people with the scripture, like the Bible or something, they reread it and dip back into it repeatedly.
01:06:23
Speaker
for the rest of their life. You know, they don't do that with books on CBT. So of course the benefits of a book you read once are going to be less long lasting than the benefits of a book that you keep rereading.
Resources and Future of Stoic Engagement
01:06:35
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I've got probably got four or five translations behind me. That's a good example. That's another good example.
01:06:44
Speaker
Do people have multiple copies? Absolutely. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add, Donald? About stoicism. I guess in general. Life in general. I think if people want to get into stoicism a good resource, apart from your own, is that they may want to check out modern stoicism, nonprofit organization. It's a philanthropic nonprofit organization. It's been around for a long time since the kind of beginning of the LEDs or the modern stoicism revival, if you like.
01:07:12
Speaker
and we run Stoicon the conference every year and there are many other conferences around the world the Stoic Week every year and lots of other resources like on the website and events that people can get involved with if they you know it's again it's a sign of Stoicism evolving as a community and around the world
01:07:33
Speaker
So that's something that I'd point people towards if they're interested. And also, I should mention my own. I'm one of the founding members of the Modern Stoicism organization. I'm also the founder and president of a nonprofit in Greece called the Plato's Academy Center. And the goal of that organization, its main goal is to raise funds to build a conference center at the original location of Plato's Academy in Athens. Not on top of it, but beside it, right? So a judge, he said, don't worry.
01:08:01
Speaker
Like beside it, it's a poor suburb of Athens. There's lots of derelict buildings and office blocks and things like that. We think there should be a conference center there so people could come and practice the Socratic method and do philosophy and read Xenophon and Plato and stuff like that there. And we've run some events there already. We had a big event there last year.
01:08:23
Speaker
And we got a lot of support from the Greek government. The mayor of Athens was there. And the minister for development and investment was there. And the US ambassador to Greece was there. And we got a letter of support from the minister for culture. We've got a lot of government support behind it.
01:08:39
Speaker
and now we're going to be running another event in Athens I think this October although it's early days yet but yeah the Plato's Academy Center is again a kind of philanthropic non-profit project that I'd encourage people to check out. If they're interested in Stoicism but then maybe they want to kind of like dig a little bit deeper into this tradition Stoicism stands within. Absolutely, it's nice to go to Athens. It's awesome and you know even beyond Athens they're kind of secret
01:09:07
Speaker
is you can go outside Athens as Elephsina or ancient Eleusis or the Eleusinian mysteries were carried out that's an amazing archaeological site it's like half an hour's drive from Athens but tucked away in the mountains a couple hours drive outside Athens as Delphi
01:09:24
Speaker
which is a phenomenal archeological site. So our dream is kind of also to run conference as a conference center there, like to run. It's just, it's kind of tricky to get transport people there, but to run events and Delphi in the future where the Oracle, the Pythia said that no man is wiser than Socrates. And, you know, the Pythias kind of planted the seeds of much of ancient philosophy. That's where the inscription
01:09:51
Speaker
was on the entrance to the Temple of Apollo, or made in Aghan, nothing in excess. All things in moderation was also inscribed there. So it's kind of like these little koans or sayings that were the seeds of much of ancient philosophy originates in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. So we'd like to see events happening there in the future as well. Yeah, the ruins of Delphi are beautiful. And there's a nearby town called Arakiva, which I'm sure you've been to. And it's a very beautiful spot.
01:10:22
Speaker
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Always good to talk to you. Been a pleasure. Thanks very much. Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:10:44
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.