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What Stoicism Actually Teaches About Emotion (Episode 1)
3.2k Plays2 years ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Stoicism offers the promise of emotional tranquility. But what does this mean? And should we even want to eliminate our negative emotions?
In this conversation, Michael and Caleb discuss the Stoic account of emotions: what emotions are and how to manage them.
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
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/
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Stowe Conversations'
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome, you are listening to Stowe Conversations, a discussion between myself, Caleb Antaveros, and Michael Trombley about the theory and practice of stoicism. We discuss what we've learned about building resilience and developing virtue through our philosophical studies. We're not sages, so we'll also touch on how we are or have approached obstacles in our own lives, with the hope that hearing these stories will be useful to others.
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome. My name's Caleb. Yeah, woohoo. My name's Michael. Hi, everybody. So today
Why Choose Stoicism for Emotional Regulation?
00:00:34
Speaker
we're going to talk about stoicism and emotions. Do you want to kick us off?
00:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So excited to talk about this topic. I think it's a really important topic, an interesting one. And I think a lot of people get into stoicism because they're interested in regulating their emotional life or more importantly, there's something wrong with their emotional life. Like you think people get into fitness because they want to be fitter. They want to either look a different way or be able to do something differently. And people typically are attracted to stoicism.
00:01:01
Speaker
because they want to, they want to respond to situations differently, whether that's excessive anger, excessive kind of fear or anxiety or poor emotional regulation or things like this. People tend to say the emotional part of my life is one that I want to improve. It's one that I want to work on. And they see stoicism as a way to do that. It was that way for myself too. One of the things that attracted me is I saw a good emotional life as being a really important part of a good life.
00:01:26
Speaker
And I saw stoicism as a way to help with that, but stoicism of emotions is really complicated and maybe not really, there's certainly more complicated parts of the philosophy, but it's not as simple as just don't worry about it or don't care about the things outside of your control.
Deep Dive into Stoic Emotional Theory
00:01:40
Speaker
That that's a part of it, but that's a kind of surface level part of it. And the theory is, I think more robust. And when you understand it in a more robust way, it's more helpful. It's more, it can respond to more situations. So I really wanted to dig into this and jump into it.
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, let's go for it. What do you got? Yeah, sweet. So first thing I want to start with is just the cognitive view of emotions. So when we're thinking about stoicism, when you say, where do we start with stoicism and emotions? Where do we start with, again, anger, fear, love, grief, these core things? I think the cognitive view of emotions is the first thing you need to understand when you're thinking about stoicism and emotions.
00:02:18
Speaker
And the cognitive view of emotions in its simplest form is the view that cognition or the thoughts, the judgments that we make are really causally linked with emotions or if not the emotions themselves. And so the stoic view is that emotions and the feelings that we associate with them are just value judgments. So.
00:02:45
Speaker
Any example of this, I was thinking of this example, either World Cup's on right now. So you have something like a soccer game. You have one specific situation, right? So you have the outgoing soccer game. I'm Canadian. Canada just lost to Belgium won nothing. So this is a single event. And if you're a Canadian and you really care about soccer and you've observed this event, you go Canada lost. You get really upset. You get really maybe angry, maybe just sad about it. If you're from Belgium and you observe the event and you get really happy. And if you're someone who doesn't really care about soccer at all, you feel nothing.
00:03:15
Speaker
And so the stoicism makes this really interesting insight even 2000 years ago that look, the same event can produce a different response than three different people, a positive emotion and negative emotion and indifference. And the difference there is not the event. The difference there is the way that we perceive the events, the way that it.
00:03:35
Speaker
matches with our values or whether or not it corresponds to what we want to have happened. So whether or not we think it's a good thing or we think it's a bad thing or we don't care about it at all. And so that's the kind of view of emotion is that when you're making a kind of a value judgment about the situation, you're saying Canada losing is a bad thing or Belgium winning is a good thing. It's that value judgment that is the emotion. It's that value judgment that corresponds with the feelings we associate with happiness or grief.
Understanding Emotions as Value Judgments
00:04:01
Speaker
If you haven't thought much about emotions,
00:04:04
Speaker
is a really interesting insight and really a change in perspective. Because I know for someone like me, I had this view for a long time that emotions were kind of things that happened to you. Things that you experience, things that you handle emotions. I love that this view of anger is just something that happens and you handle, hang, handle anger well by adjusting to it, by riding the wave correctly, so to speak. But it wasn't something that you had a part in.
00:04:34
Speaker
And so the cognitive emotion, cognitive view emotion flips that and say, look, your judgment is what's producing that. Yeah, that's in a nutshell. What are your thoughts? This, of course, brings up the common stoic line that it's not things in themselves that harm us, but our opinion of them.
00:04:51
Speaker
And I think common view of emotions is that they are almost like physical sensations in the sense that they arise whether or not we think about them in a specific way, but how we think about the world shapes how we experience it. And this is one of the most solid and useful stoic ideas, certainly.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah. And as I said, I get that sensation, like something like hunger or something like tiredness, it's the thing that is connected to this animal part of you, right? It's this thing that, I don't know, this kind of lower part of you. And maybe this, because there's this stereotype of the cold, rational person.
00:05:35
Speaker
Right. And that rational person is not emotional. And then you have the kind of emotional, you think of like a child and the child is, they're not intelligent. They're not cognitively developed, but they're being pulled around by their feelings. But there's still a few is to say, look like it's a false dichotomy or this is the false way of dividing it.
00:05:50
Speaker
And the child is in a sense, children are not as, they're still growing up, right? So they're still developing mentally. The kid is still getting upset over the things that they value, right? They're still getting upset. They're like, I know they want free time or they want to do what they want to do, or they want a treat and they can't have it, or you're making them go to bed when they don't want to go to bed. And it's still these kinds of judgments that are producing these responses. They're not just, again, as you were pointing out, they're not just things that occur. And it's a really paradigm shift when I started thinking about it.
00:06:19
Speaker
And it had a huge impact on my thinking. But I think sometimes, like sometimes when I read about stoicism or I go on Reddit or the internet, I can still see people looking at stoicism as this thing of accept what's not up to you and your emotions are not up to you. So you just need to ride them out or you can not judge the situation. And.
00:06:40
Speaker
I think that it's, you don't want to add a negative emotion onto a negative emotion. So if you're being angry or you're getting upset, anything I would say, you don't want to be upset about being upset. You don't want to like really judge yourself in the moment, but you do want to take responsibility and you do want to take accountability for those feelings. Yeah.
00:07:00
Speaker
And so yeah, no, I think that's a really interesting and really important part of it. And as you said, it connects back to Epictetus really well. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You always want to break negative cycles whenever you can. And part of that is thinking better. That's the central upshot of the cognitive model of emotion, both in stoicism, but it's also different forms of therapy. The other part that I was thinking about that I want to talk about. So you have this kind of first distinction, which is this idea that what you think determines how you feel.
00:07:28
Speaker
And if you think better, you can feel
Emotions: Information vs. Manipulation
00:07:30
Speaker
better. And that's the cognitive view of emotions. And that's really powerful. But another thing that I've been writing about or thinking about that I think stoicism teaches that's really important in the sphere is that's just a descriptive view. That's not telling you what to do with your or how to feel about them. That's just saying the kinds of things they are. And then I think stoicism goes a step further and says, given this fact, the way that you should treat your emotions, the way that you should relate to them,
00:07:55
Speaker
is as pieces of information.
00:07:59
Speaker
about your thought processes and about the quality of your thought processes, not as tools to be harnessed. And this is, I think, something that I see or something that I used to do. So I did a lot of sports. I do Brazilian jitsu primarily. That's, again, my primary sport. And you have this view of I need to get in the right head space or I need to get angry or I need to get motivated. And you're trying to incite these feelings in yourself as tools and as ways of motivating myself. And the problem with that is that if you see emotion as a tool,
00:08:28
Speaker
you'll start telling yourself lies, you'll start convincing yourself things, you'll start entering these kind of unhelpful thought processes or the incorrect false thought processes just to produce the feeling you want. The opposite end of this would be something like toxic positivity which has come up which is this people that are
00:08:46
Speaker
not willing to let in any sort of bad fact about the world into their consciousness. So they're not willing to think about it or relate to it. And that's an example of using these emotions as tools that you're saying, look, I want to feel a certain way. And I'm going to think what I have to think to feel that way. And I think so. You've got that all wrong, right? What you want to do is you want to think of the right way.
00:09:08
Speaker
And when you think the right way, you will also happen to feel good, but you can't skip it. You can't flip the order like that, right? You got to really get the foundation of relating to situations, relating to things appropriately, maturely, thinking about things in the right way, not catastrophizing.
00:09:25
Speaker
not blowing things out of proportion, not ruminating and things like this. And if you're able to do that, then the proper feeling will come. And so instead you stop, when I started practicing stoicism, instead I stopped looking at these emotions as things to be harnessed, to get a result I wanted. And I started looking at them as pieces of information, right? So while I'm feeling acutely stressed about a situation.
00:09:48
Speaker
And I don't want to be stressed. I don't think perhaps the situation warrants me being stressed. So then I started thinking or started adopting this kind of stoke wave thinking. And then I started going, why am I stressed? What do I value that I think is in jeopardy? Is it actually in jeopardy? Do I actually value it? I started using these kinds of questions.
00:10:08
Speaker
And that was really helpful because sometimes what happens is you think the emotion then is totally reasonable, even though it feels bad, sad. But when you interrogate your, this is a bad thing that happened. I should be sad. And you stop trying to make the feeling go away and just ride it out. And that's that, that's the second kind of paradigm shift that I think comes from.
00:10:25
Speaker
adopting this cognitive view of emotions and then saying, what does that tell us?
Rationality and the Role of Beliefs in Emotions
00:10:29
Speaker
What that tells us? We should be looking at the way we feel as information about how we think, as a feedback process about how we think. So how do you think about the response that people often push, which is that sometimes particular feelings are just useful, whether it's in the sports context or whether it's in the boardroom, it can be useful to adopt almost, even if not explicitly false beliefs, beliefs that one isn't certain are true.
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. You can raise an example of somebody who's in like a terrible situation, like they're in, they've been kidnapped or something and they're just like, somebody's going to come save me. And it's this kind of, you don't really have evidence of that. And you think of the, the hyper-rational person be like, what's your proof of this? But it just, it's like a life raft, right? It's like a, it's like an incorrect belief. One, I would think I'm interested in what you think, Caleb, I think in like.
00:11:19
Speaker
life or death situations or these kind of extreme like situations where you will emotionally break. I think sometimes you can put on a piece of armor and be like, okay, this is not necessarily true, but you can believe it for now. And if that serves a function, but I think those kinds of situations are really uncommon. And I think those would be really extreme situations.
00:11:37
Speaker
And 90% of the time, 95% of the time you're doing yourself a disservice because you're not confronting the world as it is. And you're not learning to adapt or adjust around the world as it is with those facts in mind. That's what I would say. I would say, look, I'm not going to blame somebody who's been in a worse situation than me for adopting a belief that allows them to survive. But I don't think that applies. And I don't think that's healthy in situations beyond that. What do you think?
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, so another context might be sometimes people talk about entrepreneurship. It's useful to have a sort of unreasonable belief in oneself, a nearly delusional sort of belief that one will succeed or something of this sort. And I think one thing that one can say about that sort of thing is
00:12:28
Speaker
First, many entrepreneurs who have this sort of attitude initially might be paid off in the short term, but not in the long term. And that's one quick note to make. The more substantive issue though is I think when
00:12:45
Speaker
always needs to be careful and see like what are the actual beliefs that are held by the person and in some cases you might find that the person has a very strong sense of self-confidence but their belief that their project will work is actually not so high so I think there are say stories of
00:13:09
Speaker
Maybe take someone like Jeff Bezos who was asked by some initial investor about how likely thought it would be that Amazon was successful and he said maybe 33% or something like that. Which, I mean, he's still someone who gives off a sense of confidence, but if you're able to hold perhaps an accurate belief about how likely you are to succeed, that actually tears apart from
00:13:34
Speaker
beliefs about your own ability or beliefs about how good you are at the task at hand.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, so what I'm hearing from that is, can you achieve the results, which is this drive, this grit, this dictativeness, this, this effort, can you achieve that result with as few false beliefs as possible or as less, least destructive false beliefs as possible? And yeah, so what comes to mind when you say that is something like a growth mindset, right? So maybe you have confidence or belief in yourself to succeed over time.
00:14:05
Speaker
And that allows you to really commit to things, but it doesn't involve a blindness to the market conditions of Amazon or the potential of its success, right? And I think that would be a better way of approaching it, I agree. So there's always another kind of fun philosophical argument here, which is that sometimes it's rational to be irrational. So in particular situations,
00:14:29
Speaker
say odd game theoretic type situation where you need to strap into a car and the other person is also going to strap into a car. For some strange reason, you need to win some contest of nerves of you two facing off against each other and the cars going towards one another. In that case, if you really need to win in this hypothetical experiment, it might be useful adopting some sort of false beliefs.
00:14:55
Speaker
I think it's just connect, I think it was getting back to ethics here, right? It's like the thing is like, what is the end goal? And if the end goal is to win this contest, then yeah, and to achieve that end goal, you're going to have to adopt whatever beliefs that you fulfill that goal.
00:15:09
Speaker
But the stoic, I guess you just, everything's interconnected. You can't get away from that core stoic proposition, which is that the good life is the rational life. The good life is the one where you live with knowledge, you accept the world as it is. And in that case, there's never going, I don't think there's really going to be a situation that
00:15:28
Speaker
On the hard line stoic view, there's not going to be a situation that supersedes that. In off your stoic position, I think maybe those extreme situations I was bringing up, but this kind of rational position or this kind of game theory position you're talking about, if you're playing chicken, the two cars are driving at each other. What was the example? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's it. That's the case.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in that it's yeah, it would be rational if the end goal is to win that game, then your irrationality becomes like a way to win the game. But that's, I guess, a bit too abstracted out from life, right? Or from, or think that it's an example of
00:16:04
Speaker
Just to give a more concrete example of that sort of thing is that it's an example of a principle to be taken seriously in one's commitments. Sometimes one should show that one will stick to those commitments even if maybe in that particular world one is going to be made worse off.
00:16:25
Speaker
So the sort of thing one might do is just always refuse to negotiate with terrorists, even if there's some sense in which it might be rational to negotiate with them under circumstances, just because in order to have that sort of character, having the character that you don't negotiate with them means that over the longer run, that you'll be less likely to fall for their schemes.
00:16:50
Speaker
But I think the point that you make about the ethical, always going back to the ethical questions of these sorts of things, is useful. And to maybe become a little bit less abstract, the question is, what sort of game are you playing? And in that case, it's typically important to have the beliefs that are good rather than are instrumental to some other purpose. Yeah, I think that's right. If your game is to make as much money as possible,
00:17:19
Speaker
then there, there might be some sort of cuts that we might have to actually look, you know, what entrepreneurs or more make more money. Is it the really rational ones or is it the Jeff Bezos who are able to maintain a grip on their likelihood of success or not? But that's a different question from the stoic question. And I guess the first part is that even if you just want to make as much money as possible, or even if you just want to be successful, sometimes just taking that, that Jeff Bezos approach that you mentioned, that approach on like,
00:17:49
Speaker
Finding a way to stay motivated while not diluting yourself. I think that should get more credit than it does because I think people tend to go far down that other side of the spectrum in entrepreneurial ship, but also in kind of arts or anything that's really difficult. People tend to lean into that kind of distortion.
00:18:07
Speaker
But then that's one view. But then the other picture is that the game isn't to be as successful as possible or the game isn't to win as much money as possible. The game is to live well. And under that view, there's much, much less pictures where lying to yourself or accepting like thinking things that are false to feel a certain way.
Emotions as Data for Situational Awareness
00:18:26
Speaker
There's many less cases where that's good. Maybe some one other.
00:18:30
Speaker
frame one can put on the sort of issue of emotions as information versus emotions as tools is that in a way treating emotions or feelings as information is more direct to your current aims and you're not thinking about
00:18:50
Speaker
something like, how can I reduce all these feelings that feel bad? Instead, you're thinking about what do these feelings say about what I'm trying to do in this current situation, whether it's with some project or with your relationships. And it's those things that are out there that really matter, not so much your machinations with your interior feelings.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't thought about that way. That's a great point. So the idea being that, what does it matter how you're feeling? You're getting focused on yourself. What matters is how you're relating to the world around you. So don't get caught up in, in regulating the feelings, moderating the feelings, focus on how am I relating to the actual, the relationships, my goals. And if that's good, the kind of the feelings will put themselves in line too.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. I find that kind of pumps me. One thing, another part that I was talking about, which is one of my, I mean, we've already hit on it a bit, but another upside to this cognitive view of emotions is that now
00:19:55
Speaker
there becomes a responsibility that you have for your emotional life. I always remember it would be very funny when you'd hear, or you'd see some bully or something and you'd be like in elementary school, middle school, high school. And you'd be like, that guy's, she would be like, that person's just like an angry person. Like there'd be like, I guess this kind of loss of responsibility. They'd be like, that person just is the way they are. And it's your job to kind of move around them or navigate around them.
00:20:16
Speaker
And that's not bad from your perspective, but from their perspective, it's fundamentally untrue, right? Because in a sense, they are an angry person or a vengeful person or a mean person, but all of these aspects of themselves are not things they can't control. They're all parts that they're participating in by their judgments, by the way they value the world, by the way they think about the world. And so that's the bully, but then that also applies to yourself.
00:20:42
Speaker
If you have gone, it's your responsibility to have a good emotional life because the way you think about the world, the judgments you form are up to you. You're the one that can change them. Not somebody else can change them. And that really puts the onus on you. And I remember the stoic metaphor, I think this is Chrysopus. He talks about the cylinder versus the cube, right? And the idea is that.
00:21:05
Speaker
If somebody comes along and they push the cylinder and it rolls and they push the cube and it doesn't, and the cylinder rolling, that can be a metaphor for a reaction to the stimulus, the push, right? The cylinder is that person that gets angry. The cube is the person that stays calm. And you say, what was the cause of the anger? What was the cause of the movement? Was it the push? And Chris, if this is responses, it can't be the push because one thing rolled and one thing didn't. It has to be the shape of the object. The shape is the cause.
00:21:33
Speaker
Right? So if you're quick to anger, you have these emotional turmoil. It is, I'm not to say you can snap out of it and change it immediately. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of practice, but at the end of the day, it's not the push, it's not the stimulus, it's the shape. And you have a responsibility and an ability to change your shape so that it's able to succeed in the environment you're in and also be the shape you want it to be. And I find that really empowering. I know some people can, I think it's important to
00:22:01
Speaker
recognize that this is hard and this is a long process. I think people can feel like it's the judgy part of stoicism if you should just be able to control that right away. And that's not what stoicism says. But what it does say is that this is something that you can work on and you can change over time and you can improve. And I find that really empowering.
00:22:19
Speaker
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00:22:39
Speaker
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00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah, the point about how people think about stoicism being judgy is worth returning to, but more directly on this line, there's the psychologist Albert Ellis, who was heavily influenced by the Stoics and created rational emotive behavioral therapy.
00:23:28
Speaker
talks about how often patients would come in and they describe some less than ideal behavior, whether it's, say, maybe drinking too much or reacting in some way that hurt their loved ones. And quite often, Alice might just ask some probing questions about that experience and the patient would respond with some line eventually. It's just how I feel. That's why I reacted in that certain way, just because of how I felt.
00:23:56
Speaker
And what he would ask as a follow-up is, but isn't it also how you think?
00:24:04
Speaker
where I found that framing is always very useful because often, of course, we do find ourselves in situations where we initially react because of some feeling and if one can pause and note, oh, I actually have some belief. If it's in the case of anger about people doing some perceived wrong that needs to be righted, is this belief actually correct? And addressing those beliefs is very useful for thinking about things like anger, especially.
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I like also how you think. And I think coming back to the judgy part or coming back to why I think that person might say it's just how I feel is that often we can feel, or often people feel shame for how they feel, right? So it's like, if you're just in this state.
00:24:52
Speaker
If you think your emotions aren't something you can control and change, then you feel this kind of shame for who you are. And so I think the first step people take is, I shouldn't feel shame for that. That's who I am. I'm going to love myself. And I think that's not a bad move, but you don't want to stop there.
Emotional Responsibility and Judgment
00:25:09
Speaker
Right? You want to accept yourself as you are, but you don't want that to be the final step. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's also a separation between the ideas that are useful to apply to oneself and also the ideas or ways one might interact with others. So I think the line take responsibility for your own emotions is useful to apply to yourself as you're planning.
00:25:38
Speaker
and going about your own life. But it is true that that very same line can be misused when it's applied to other people, especially in conversation. If you just insist that the other person take responsibility for the fact that they feel bad and overlook the things that you are doing that is causing them to react in that way. So there's always an additional complication here.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, and I feel like that's such a superficial way of, there's these layers to stoicism and I think that's like a superficial way that ends up. You see that person, they open stoicism, they start reading stoicism for the first time and they're like, oh, other people's emotions are their problems. This is great news. I don't have to feel, I don't have to worry about me causing anything because as Epictetus says, it's nothing I'm doing that's wrong. It's their judgment of me that's wrong.
00:26:27
Speaker
And I'm being a bit like I'm being silly there, but you can stop there. And that's not a great spot to stop in. I mean, people using stoicism or kind of stoic like thinking or distorting the dichotomy of control to be like, everything you're feeling is your problem.
Misinterpretations of Stoicism and Relationships
00:26:40
Speaker
That's your baggage. It's not something I have to deal with. And yeah, not only is it judgy, I think that's pretty unhealthy way to relate to other people as well. And the reverse mistake is also made, I think what might be.
00:26:50
Speaker
more polite or more caring ways of interacting with others isn't always the same way one should relate to oneself. So I think as you mentioned a little bit earlier, often some people might make the move to self-acceptance when really they shouldn't be accepting whatever is currently bothering them and it's better to change it.
00:27:11
Speaker
Totally. I think a good point here, if it's okay with you, I want to segue into kind of some Greek terms, which is always my favorite. And to get a little bit technical in the Stoic language, because I think it, it will be really helpful and really clarifying. So one thing that I wanted to talk about. So I think there's like a big picture paradigm that we've talked about, which is that your thinking determines how you feel. So A,
00:27:34
Speaker
How you feel gives you information about your thought processes. And B, you should use that information to evaluate. Am I thinking the right way? Am I relating to the world in the right way? Am I valuing the right thing? Am I having, am I thinking about things in ways I'd rather not? I'd rather change my perspective. So that's all a really kind of big picture perspective on the paradigm that stoicism takes towards motion.
Stoicism's Distinction between Passions and Good Feelings
00:27:54
Speaker
And I think that's all really helpful.
00:27:56
Speaker
But one thing that's really helpful too is clarifying getting a little bit technical into the Greek because it can give you, it can really help push the thinking deeper. And so when we use the word emotion, the Greeks didn't have the stoics.
00:28:12
Speaker
didn't have a word that was encapsulated in emotions in the way that we use it. What they were using instead were these subtypes. So they had a distinction between pathé, which sometimes gets called passions, and you-pathé.
00:28:27
Speaker
And so pathae is passions, and then u is that's the Greek word for good. So one is these emotions and these passions, and then upathae is the kind of the good version of them, the good feelings. And I think that distinction is really important because we often, the Stoics' goal, the Stoic ideal of kind of emotional therapy was to eliminate pathae, was to eliminate passion. But the Stoics were entirely fine with upathae or good feelings.
00:28:55
Speaker
So we, I think it often gets misrepresented that the stoic goal was to eliminate all of your feelings. That's not the case. Uh, it's the case is not to become indifferent to everything. The goal was to eliminate these, what I sometimes call unhealthy, negative emotions. And what determines if something is a pathway, something is a passion versus a good feeling is the pathways were those that were built on false judgments. They were those that the result of mistaken judgments.
00:29:23
Speaker
I always go back to the example, if someone insults you in public and you think your life is ruined or you think your honor is in question, so you have to slack them across the face and you're super angry about it. These are passions not just because they can be unpleasant feelings, but they're passions because they're based on mistaken judgment. There's false beliefs underlying them.
00:29:45
Speaker
And it's those that were really dangerous. It was those emotions that, that, that followed from irrational thinking from incorrect thinking. Not, not all feelings. The stoics were totally open to other kinds of feelings. And I think sometimes that distinction gets lost. What are your thoughts on that? I suppose what I would add to that is in a sense.
00:30:03
Speaker
Stoicism isn't even about reducing negative emotion. I think often what people describe as negative emotions are grounded in true beliefs. Take something like remorse for mistakes that one has made in the past or an appropriate level of sadness.
00:30:23
Speaker
I think there's also this point that the framing should always be a little bit more direct. Initially it might be useful to use the tools of stoic philosophy to address whatever crisis you might be in. And that may be a matter of many negative feelings and emotions, but.
00:30:38
Speaker
the ultimate goal of stoicism is serving as a life philosophy and that involves acting well, making good decisions and having correct judgments.
Stoicism as a Comprehensive Life Philosophy
00:30:48
Speaker
I sound like I'm getting a little bit too preachy, but the general line that I think it can be useful to think a reframe instead of thinking about stoicism as reducing negative emotions to thinking about it as a complete system for acting well. Totally. Because that's believing in acting well, I should say.
00:31:09
Speaker
Because that's Epicureanism, right? I think a lot of modern Stoics are Epicureans. Nothing wrong with that. I'm not trying to sit here.
00:31:17
Speaker
And also be on a high horse and be like, oh, you're not even real stoics. You're Epicureans. It's some kind of bad thing. I think anybody that lives, that's like living intentional, I think is totally on the right path. And I think that's great. But Epicureanism is about reducing suffering. And they said, look, if you're a good person, if you think about things the right way, you're going to suffer a lot less because as you said, you're going to have a lot less remorse.
00:31:39
Speaker
You're going to feel a lot less angry. You're going to have a lot less fear and anxiety. You're going to reduce bad feelings that are unpleasurable feelings by being a good person.
00:31:52
Speaker
And I think a lot of people get into Stosons for that reason. They say, look, I want to reduce unpleasurable feelings. But as you point out, Seneca talked about this a lot, right? There's nothing wrong with the appropriate amount of grief, right? There's nothing wrong with, if you allow something like grief to be a life shattering moment because you didn't accept the possibility that people you care about.
00:32:12
Speaker
for life is temporary or things like this. I'm talking about this very big picture. Obviously these things are difficult to move through, but that's where you run into a problem, right? When it starts to go beyond, go beyond its appropriate length and its appropriate intensity. But as you said, like even a stoic will feel when something bad happens, an appropriate amount of bad feelings. And yeah, I think that's quite, I'm not sure if you're under the same impression. I think that's quite peculiar to some people who are starting to get into stoicism and starting to understand it.
00:32:41
Speaker
Yeah, Seneca said you may weep, but you must not wail. That's an exceptionally useful line for remembering the position. Yeah, and the you-path, the kind of good feelings. Again,
00:32:59
Speaker
not necessarily good because they're immediately pleasurable, but good because they're based on true judgments. They're like the result of thinking well or relating to the world properly. The advancing stoic feels a range of these, right? So the common example is something like a caution, right? That's a really easy one, even the same with feel caution, because even the perfect stoic
00:33:22
Speaker
is not going to foolheartedly. They're not going to walk off a cliff and say, Jeff, it's nothing to me. And they're not going to put their hand in a meat grinder or do these kinds of things. And that's extreme situations. They probably wouldn't even try to insult people or try to make a scene, right? They would display the appropriate amount of caution, the appropriate amount of concern.
00:33:42
Speaker
about not doing harmful things and that's totally and then that's totally fine and then if you take this into the passion version so either exaggerated for the wrong reasons this would be fear or anxiety so there there's i think in one sense they're based on their passions are based on false judgments but in another thing they're they're also there is also a intensity difference or at least
00:34:07
Speaker
false judgments lend themselves to being more intense because you're opening up yourself to unlimited intensity. If you're not confined to reality, if you can think whatever you want to think, there's way more opportunities to experience way more unpleasurable feelings about the world.
00:34:24
Speaker
To paraphrase Seneca, you could say, passions are that which over-leap reason and carry it away. They have some distorting effects on how you see the world, whereas positive emotions or u-pathae don't have the same drive to distort one's thinking.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, in a way they can't destroy your thinking because they're not distorting, they're not out, they're not wrong with the world, they're corresponding with the world. Yeah, exactly. So you're not holding a wrong direction. One thing that I wanted to bring up was this kind of Epictetus part because you talked about the distorted, the distorting nature of passions. Epictetus was really big on preventing passions from the get-go. So part of his therapeutic program was like, look,
00:35:11
Speaker
Passions, if you get angry, you can't even think properly until you calm down. It totally changes the way that you interpret new information, that you deal with new situations.
00:35:23
Speaker
passions have this negative compounding effect. You think something incorrect, you feel a passion and now you're more likely to make incorrect passion inducing kind of judgments as you go along. And so one of Epictetus's therapeutic things which I always thought was really smart was to just abstain. Just take a step back and go okay all these kind of strong judgments that I have about I need to be successful or I need people to like me or I need to need to
00:35:47
Speaker
have a certain amount of, I don't know, achievement by a certain age, or I can't have these things happen to me because of the rule of my life. We ought to just abstain from all those things. Take a step back because you can't even start practicing stoicism properly if you're being constantly tossed around by these feelings. But I always thought that was a funny part to his kind of start of philosophy was just like, just work on abstaining from these extreme judgments altogether because you can't even handle them yet. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. It's like a way before trying the harder stuff or something like that is a general thought.
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Often wise. What are your thoughts? Did you say much about pre-pathae? Oh no, I'll jump into pre-pathae. So yeah, so this is another, this is the third of the pathae, which is great. The third one. The third one. So, all right.
00:36:31
Speaker
It's like a pre-passion. So what this, this third category, and this is this idea that we didn't talk much about stoic psychology. Basic stoic psychology is that you experience an impression, you deliberate upon that impression. So something happens, you see a snake, you think, you deliberate on that vision of a snake. You say that that's a fake snake. My friend put it out to scare me. So I'm not afraid. I'm watching a TV show about snakes. So nothing can hurt me. Or you go, wow, that's actually a real snake in front of me. I'm in real danger.
00:37:00
Speaker
And depending on how you deliberate on this impression, you then get a response indifference or fear. If it's a real snake, not for the picture, but the stoic view was that there are certain sensations that you'll experience just from confronting certain kinds of impressions. And then
Managing Immediate Reactions and Triggers
00:37:16
Speaker
this can, this, this was related to our animal nature. So animals, they don't have this deliberation. It's input output. They receive an impression. They experienced something. You put food in front of a dog, the dog's hungry, wants the food.
00:37:27
Speaker
And we're still like that with certain things. And the famous example was with Seneca was that even a sage, even the perfect stoic would flinch thunder, right? And add lightning. There's nothing you can do about it. It's just an animal response that you're going to have to certain kinds of intense impressions. But they were saying the important part there is to not run with it, to not add a judgment to it. You're going to flinch at lightning, but if you go, oh, silly me, it's just lightning. I'm in my house. I'm not, there's no issue here. Then that's going to immediately go away.
00:37:55
Speaker
And so the idea was that like, look, it's okay if certain things disturb you or surprise you immediately. Certain impressions are just going to be this strong. They're just going to have that immediate impression. What you don't want to do is add to it. You don't want to feed into it with unhealthy or incorrect thinking.
00:38:13
Speaker
And that's just the third type that's just interesting because again, it's just, look, there's this degree of forgiveness. You're not the stone, you're not the statue. There's going to be certain kinds of fluctuations when extreme things happen. What matters is, okay, how do you respond to those impressions? Do you let them become full passions or do you respond to them appropriately? And that's just kind of an interesting third category. I don't know if I experienced too much of that in my own life, these pre-passions. I don't know if, if, I guess you think of a horror movie, right? It's full of that, like jump scares.
00:38:50
Speaker
I often make the division between feelings and emotions where feelings are closer to the initial impression and it's emotion that includes the full judgment about the situation. You might feel if someone says something and you think you're insulted, you might have some initial feeling of rage, then you might realize, oh wait, they're not, they're actually insulting someone else and that's okay. Your judgment shifts that initial feeling.
00:39:08
Speaker
I don't know how much that's a good third category to think about.
00:39:19
Speaker
I think that's a distinction I've found quite useful for thinking about this sort of thing. And I guess maybe you can say why you found it useful, but I guess the therapeutic insight would be something like you don't have to lean into it. You don't just because you felt that way doesn't mean that has to be your emotion. It doesn't have to continue. But what did you find in your own life? What did you find useful about it? So I think it's useful because
00:39:43
Speaker
The focus is less on feelings, which are out of one's control to a large degree and more on the judgments one is making. I think it's just a tool or maybe not a tool, but a reminder to return to how you think and not be so concerned about whether you would initially feel a particular way when you do some action.
00:40:13
Speaker
So whether it's nervousness about some initial call that you think you need to make, maybe train myself to not just lean into that initial feeling and said, as the feeling is giving me any useful information, maybe I need to prepare more or something like that, but that it's not a reason to avoid the call if it's something that I already came to. The judgment about it being a good idea.
00:40:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think anxiety is a really good example of that because I think anxiety is or fear or the kind of nervousness because I think that's something that I've really been able to work on training myself to be like, I'll still feel it before I do almost anything. I'll still have that kind of pre-sensation, anything that's like public speaking oriented or in front of people. But I've forgotten to this point where I think I'm able to do some stochotherapy myself and be like, well,
00:40:59
Speaker
I'm not going to be harmed in any way. I think bad is going to happen. Even the worst case scenario is not going to be something I'll really remember a year or two from now. And that really helps me get out of that spiraling. That's something I use all the time. Yeah, absolutely. That's a useful example. Good example.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so, so we take all this, we take all this information and we say, okay, so what do we do with it? So how do we have a good emotional life? And then I think there's kind of two aspects of it. One is we already talked about is there's a preventative aspect. There's a avoiding extreme emotions, and then there's the aspirational aspect. And this, I take a lot from Epictetus because Epictetus is the stoic that I studied most deeply. But Epictetus thing is to say, first you need to do when you're trying to regulate your emotions, you need to be honest with yourself.
00:41:47
Speaker
And I think this is a big problem a lot of people make is they say, Oh, dichotomy of control, it's up to me. So now I can go and I can do this thing. That's really hard for me. Or that is too emotionally difficult for me. It's like, no, it's not the case. You have to meet yourself where you are at that point.
00:42:00
Speaker
So one thing I picked here is what he talks about is because emotions have this distorting effect, the passions have this distorting effect, where they lead to more passion, they lead to negative spiraling. The first thing to do is actually to what you can control is your environment, right? Take accountability for your environment to the extent that you can and try to remove triggers, remove things that kind of incite these feelings.
00:42:23
Speaker
get out of this negative spiraling. And then when you're out of that negative spiraling, you can start to reintroduce these things carefully and slowly. So I'm trying to think of a
00:42:35
Speaker
I'm trying to think of an example like this, but I think of something like social anxiety or something as an example. You want to be able to talk to people comfortably. The example is not going to be some major public speaking event or some major social activity. You want to remove yourself from these environments that throw you off and you want to slowly reintroduce, try sparking up a conversation with a stranger that you may start talking to somebody that you share an interest with or something like this. And you start to gain this confidence talking to people and you do that really slowly. It's this kind of.
00:43:03
Speaker
slow exposure method, and I find that really helpful. Another aspect is just this kind of, it's just nerdier, but it has been helpful for me, which is a real clarification of value, a real kind of, so that's the kind of preventative thing. We don't want things to happen, so we don't want to feel extreme passion, so we avoid the situations that cause them, and then the other part is this kind of aspirational, we want to think correctly, and so
00:43:27
Speaker
Taking our emotions as information, we start to think, what do I value that's causing this emotional life that I don't necessarily want? And are those values I want to hold to? And if they are, accept the feelings that come with them. And if they're not, work on changing them, work on reconceptualizing them. And another is working on minimizing what CBT calls cognitive distortions.
00:43:49
Speaker
So working on minimizing situations where you just think incorrectly, something like catastrophizing. If this happens, it's going to ruin my life or things are never going to be the same, or a kind of a distortion of the importance or the significance of things. Another aspect, I guess this kind of third tip or third tool is one of focus. And that's a really important one that comes down to the dichotomy of control.
00:44:15
Speaker
The economy of control is this view that some things are up to you, some things aren't, but it's this other picture that you should focus on the things that are up to you. So there's this, when we're doing emotional work,
00:44:26
Speaker
Part of that is, yeah, don't think that thing is scary or don't think that bad thing can happen. But another part is just shift your attention elsewhere, right? Try to get into the zone, try to shift your attention onto you, what you're doing in the moment, how you're functioning in the moment. I think athletically, and all these examples to me are sport, but I think athletically that really helped me because once I started thinking just about my performance and I stopped thinking about
00:44:50
Speaker
what other people thought of it, what it meant about how good I was and things like that. I started losing a lot of kind of the anxiety or the fear or the anger or the sadness that came with it. The three ones that I think I use the most or think about the most. What are your thoughts?
00:45:06
Speaker
Yeah, those are all excellent. Just to add some items to that list, I think mindfulness meditation is useful as a way to internalize or illustrate the cognitive theory of emotion. So by paying careful attention to one's sensations and thoughts, one can clarify how, in fact, how we feel and how we think are often quite separate and some feeling of discomfort might
00:45:33
Speaker
to be a constellation of different sensations or thoughts instead of some intrinsically bad thing. So that's one item I'd add to your list. Yeah, I think that there's a- It's very exhaustive.
00:45:51
Speaker
There's kind of an internal literacy. I don't know if there's a better metaphor for that. That mindfulness really helps pull up this kind of idea of, okay, because I've been talking about what's obvious, right? Your thoughts determine your feelings, so just think about your thoughts. But that's not really obvious. And sometimes, as you said, there can be a constellation of thoughts. It can be things that you haven't articulated. It can be things that you don't really have the language for yet. And sitting down and checking into those, spending some time getting
00:46:20
Speaker
familiar with the shape of your mind and your thinking is really a helpful tool yet to be able to navigate this space successfully. Yeah. I think it's always useful to pick one of these techniques and focus on it for a period of time. For me, I think that's diving back into doing some simple meditation. Whenever I've lost a habit or something of that sort, and then down the line, I had some focus on some additional technique.
00:46:46
Speaker
Yeah, whichever one works for you. I think that the point of a toolkit is that you pull the one out that's appropriate, right? And the one that's well suited to your disposition and in your current position. So what I've used has changed over time. I think that's totally.
00:46:58
Speaker
Absolutely. There's so much more to talk about here and we'll definitely open up some more boxes, address some of these questions that we may have dropped a little bit over the course of the series. So thanks so much for listening. Please reach out to us if you have any thoughts or feedback. Yeah, that's it. And you want anything else to add to that, Mike? No, great. I just, as I said, depends on other things you'd like to see us talk about, any sort of feedback, always appreciated. And yeah, great talking to you. Super fun.
00:47:29
Speaker
All right, let's do it again soon. Thanks for listening to stoic conversations. If you found this podcast useful, please subscribe, share with a friend, and give us a rating on your podcast player. All of these things are preferred indifference, of course, but each goes a long way in supporting our efforts.
00:47:54
Speaker
and please reach out to us with any feedback or questions. Stoa at stomeditation.com. Until next time.