Stoic tools for staying calm in chaotic, triggering times

Executive overview

Constant news consumption changes your mood — not the world. The Stoics, who lived under tyrants, famine, and collapsing empires, understood this distinction clearly.

Stoicism is not about eliminating emotion. It's about replacing destructive passions — anger, fear, resentment — with compassion, love, and clear-headed action.

The core insight: you are responsible for your own emotions. Nobody and nothing can make you feel anything — that is always a choice.

What the news actually costs you

• Doom scrolling disrupts focus, disturbs sanity, changes your mood.
• It rarely changes anything in the real world.
• Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius all lived under worse conditions — they knew when they'd heard enough.
• You probably already know enough. Put the phone down and do the work you can do.

Less emotion, not no emotion

• Stoicism is not emotionlessness — it is less destructive emotion.
• Marcus Aurelius: "The key to life is to be free of passion but full of love."
• The Stoics targeted anger, jealousy, and fear — and replaced them with compassion, empathy, and connection.
• Marcus grieved openly for a teacher he loved; the goal is to cut what harms, not what connects.
• James Baldwin: hatred destroys the person who hates — an immutable law.
• The Stoic concept of circles of concern asks us to pull the outer rings inward: care more, not less.

You choose to take offense

• Epictetus: if you are offended, you are complicit in taking offense.
• Things don't upset us — our opinions about them do.
• No one can make you angry, scared, or frustrated. That response is yours.
• Cato was punched in a bathhouse. When the man came to apologize, Cato said he didn't even remember being hit.
• Marcus: "It only harms you if it harms your character." Sinking to their level is the actual injury.
• The best revenge is to not become like that.

Anger: the consequences are always worse

• Marcus returns to anger more than any other topic in Meditations — he clearly struggled with it.
• Hadrian stabbed a secretary in the eye in a rage. The man's reply: "Can I have my eye back?" What anger destroys cannot be undone.
• Seneca: you wouldn't kick a mule back or bite a dog that bit you — yet we retaliate at the risk of our own health.
• An early Stoic adviser told Caesar: before acting in anger, repeat all the letters of the alphabet. Pause. Don't react.
• You are never glad you lost your temper. You almost always regret it.

Observing your emotions without being ruled by them

• The goal is not to repress emotions — repression fails, we are emotional animals.
• Observe emotions as they arise, with a degree of distance: "I am angry right now. Why?"
• Recognise the emotion → identify its source → decide what to do with it.
• Channelled anger can fuel performance (sports, competition). Sustained anger drains you and causes errors.
• Mastery means understanding and using emotions, not stripping them out.

Self-mastery and what controls you

• Seneca: everyone is a slave to something — a mistress, money, power, habit.
• Feynman felt a pull to drink at 10am and was disturbed by it; the pull came from somewhere he didn't control.
• Eisenhower was told to stop smoking. He smoked four packs a day for 40 years. He gave himself an order and stopped cold.
• The question is always: am I in charge, or is the habit in charge?
• Epictetus, literally a slave, called himself freer than his masters — because he controlled his own choices.

Staying steady in difficult times

• Every generation has lived through dysfunction, tyrants, and collapse — you are not the first.
• Marcus: be like the rock the waves crash over; eventually the sea falls still.
• General Mattis carried Meditations on deployments. His concern: leaders in the information age have no space for reflection.
• Kennedy during the missile crisis: didn't react immediately, let things settle, then acted decisively.
• Focus on what's in your control. Don't extrapolate every crisis into the end of the world.
• Stay good, stay decent, make a positive difference where you can.