My Stoic Thoughts: Day Six Stoic Week 2020

Stoic Week 2020

Saturday, October 24th, 2020

Theme:  Resilience

Today’s theme and midday exercise reflected on resiliency training.  Stoics believed that we could practice our way into being more resilient.  They accomplished this by repeatedly facing that which brings up passions, either head on or through negative visualization.  It works in a way to inoculate the individual from negative situations and emotions.  The text for today implies that by thinking or facing certain situations we will reduce our experience of negative emotions in these specific situations, which is no doubt true.  For example, the more times I make a call to a potential client, the less anxiety I experience at each subsequent call.  (Phone calls are hard!  Extra points for resilience if you can do this!).

However, I believe this exercise’s effect goes far beyond stress inoculation for specific events but also toward reducing passions in general.  The more we experience anxiety or other negative emotions and allow it to pass on its own the less we feel controlled by them or that they will last long term.  With this understanding, we can prevent an emotional snowball effect by becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.  Additionally we can practice other vital Stoic practices in these moments to experience less bad emotions, practice reason and virtue, and learn to work through passings in order to experience the good emotions more frequently.  

In short, building resilience through the preparation of adversity by focusing on specific situations leads to building greater overall resilience which can help us when dealing with adversity we could not have predicted. 

(This is a brief summary of my thoughts inspired by prompts during Stoic Week and do not fully encompass everything on Stoic resilience.  I highly encourage you to learn more, leave comments, and add to this conversation!)