Four strategies for achieving calm in turbulent times

Executive overview

Constant news, packed schedules, and reactive mornings erode focus and compound stress. Ryan Holiday shares four practical strategies — drawn from Stoic philosophy — to reclaim calm amid external chaos.

Control your information diet, protect your relationships, say no relentlessly, and win the morning before the day wins you.

Curate your information diet

• Real-time news is engineered to keep you watching, not to inform you.
• Headlines speculate; outcomes resolve themselves — following daily adds no value.
• For big geopolitical questions, read history (e.g. Thucydides) over pundit Twitter.
• Prefer psychology, history, and political philosophy over the trivia of the present moment.

Invest in a core relationship

• A close partner provides perspective, stability, and honest challenge — not just support.
• Churchill's wife Clementine repeatedly talked him down from career-ending decisions during his wilderness years.
• Being an island is both ineffective and, if successful, ultimately pointless.

Say no to almost everything

• Early career: say yes to build opportunity. Once established, saying yes is the enemy of deep work.
• Oliver Sacks kept a framed "No!" on his office wall as a daily reminder.
• Baseball analogy: making the majors requires swinging at everything; staying great requires plate discipline.
• A calendar full of other people's priorities means you're not doing the main thing.
• Two to three items on a daily calendar is a success; more is a sign something went wrong.

Win the morning

• Wake before the house stirs — stillness is loudest before distractions arrive.
• Avoid breakfast meetings; protect the early hours for your most important work.
• Stay phone-free for the first 30–90 minutes. Use an accountability app (e.g. Spar) if needed.
• Go outside first — a walk or bike ride without the phone restores presence.
• Journal before screens: a free-writing notebook, a one-line-a-day journal, and a prompted philosophical journal (e.g. Daily Stoic Journal) each serve a different purpose.
• Journaling is a warm-up, not the main act — Marcus Aurelius' Meditations was a private journal, not a published text.
• Do the single most important task immediately after journaling, before entropy takes hold.
• Keep a to-do list of roughly six items; treat it as a maximum, not a target.
• Winning the early hours means the rest of the day is a bonus, not a deadline.