The Daily Stoic - You’ll Be Stressed Either Way | Impulse Control

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Ryan talks about the inevitability of stress and anxiety, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal.For Stoicism-based guidance on how to tackle your anger problem or manage your anxiety, Daily Stoic offers a series of great courses. Our 11-day Tame Your Temper challenge will give you the tools you need to keep anger from getting in your way. And our 13-day Slay Your Stress course will help you keep stress out of your life and out of your way.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it. You will be stressed either way. We'd like to think that if we become rich, our lives will be easier and we will have less to be stressed about.

It's a reasonable assumption given the fact that anyone who has ever been short of money has felt how stressful that can be. Yet anyone who has ever had money, as Seneca did, as Marcus Aurelius did, quickly finds that it too brings its own kind of stress. You're stressed because you're keeping up with the Joneses. You're stressed as many rich people are because, despite your ample income, it's still easy to live beyond your means. You're stressed, even if you do have a surplus of funds, because you always wonder if you're

putting it to work effectively enough, or you're worried that someone is going to steal it from you or mismanage it for you. What does it mean then to discover that you'll be stressed either way? Stress that you have too little, stress that you have too much, stress that you could have more. It means the same thing that Marcus really has discovered when it came to his anxiety. I escaped anxiety today. He writes for correcting himself, no, I discarded it because it was within me. The stress is always there because no matter the situation, there is always one commonality. You. It's your mind that's doing this, the wanting, the comparing, the catastrophizing, the worrying, the scheming, the striving, that's your mind at work.

That's you who is choosing not to be happy, to torture yourself, to waste time on what you don't control. Plenty of people with less have been content. Plenty of people with more have been a lot more miserable. You can lead a good life anywhere. The Stoics remind us you can be stress free and self-contained, or at least not a mess on any bank balance, because these things have nothing to do with money and everything to do with you.

We've built out and we've been working on the daily Stoic Slay, your stress challenges about exactly this. How do we manage our stress? How do we realize that it's coming from inside the house, as they say. How do we work on discarding it, managing it, channeling it? Well, we did a bunch of the best stoic strategies for dealing with stress, getting to a better place of equilibrium and poise and peace and stillness. I'd love for you to check it out.

You can sign up at dailystowic.com slash stress. And remember that this challenge, along with all the other stoic challenges, and we have a bunch of new ones coming this year, you get totally for free. If you sign up as part of daily stoic life, plus a bunch of other cool bonuses. But if you sign up for daily stoic life at dailystowclif.com, you can join right now. Our daily stoic slay your stress challenge. I think it will make a difference for you. But if you sign up for DailyStokeLife at DailyStokeLife.com, you can join right now. Our DailyStoke Slayer Stress Challenge. I think it will make a difference for you. I know it made a difference for me.

I'd love to have you join us. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair.

Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freeed. Follow Spellcaster, wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to episodes

ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Steal of Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Steve Enhancelman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, and then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night, we keep thoughts like this in hand, write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself, and others about them. You can check out the Daily Stoke Journal anywhere, books are sold. You can also get a signed

personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoke store at store.dailystoke.com. If something is making you upset, write it down and look at it. What happened? Who caused it? Now think about your reaction. What did you say? What did you feel? Did this make it better or worse? Marcus Aurelius' emperor clearly had many people and causes to be upset. He also had real power and authority. Even so, we find that he would tell himself you have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. So too, with what has happened to you, you did not control what happened, but you do control

which impulses you will follow in the wake of it. And this is this week's meditation in the Daily Stereocturnal titled Impulse Control. I do hope you check out the journal. It's a little journal I do every morning. We have three quotes here to go along with it. Epictetus says we must discover the missing art of ascent and pay special attention to the sphere of our impulses that they are subject to reservations, to the common good, and that they are in proportion to actual worth. It's Marcus Realius' meditation, 1137. I just

love that it marks Realis quoting Epictetus. You say, good fortune used to meet you at every corner, but the fortunate person is the one who gives themselves a good fortune, and good fortunes are a well-tuned soul, good impulses, and good actions. It's Marcus Realius's Meditations 536. Frame your thoughts like this. You're an old person. You won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer. No longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse

and you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future. To me, journaling is just such a great way to do this exercise of impulse control. I usually do it in the morning, but you could do journaling at any time, but I think, what are you upset about? Why are you angry? What are you holding on to?

What's the thing inside you that you really want to say to that person? Say it on the page first. And Frank talks about how paper is more patient than people. Sometimes I find that the thing that I was writing down, I hadn't quite worked it out yet. And if I had said it the way I was thinking on the paper, it would not go well. Or I find that having said it once, I'm done. I don't need to mention this to anyone. It's probably better that I keep it to myself. So to me journaling is really a way to work out

some of those urges. Just because you think something doesn't mean you need to say it. I'm always amazed at these athletes who, you know, after a loss rushing the locker room and tweet something, as if, dude, you're not gonna be in a small metal tube with the person you just talk shit about for the next eight hours, as if you don't have the show to work with them every single day. You need to develop this emotional impulse control, but that doesn't mean you just stuff it down

and you don't deal with it. You got to deal with it on the pages in the journal. That's the idea. You let it out. It's a place to do some spiritual combat, but it's also a place for your ideas. You're competing impulse, you're competing opinions to battle themselves out, to fight for that limited space. So spend some time with your journal as therapy. That's what it's there for.

And if you're not taking advantage of it, chances are you are just taking those feelings out on other people or you're taking them out on yourself and that's not a good way to go through life. So use the journal as an instrument of impulse control. It's gotten me out of trouble time and time again. I can think of a moment when one of my books was coming out and I got sort of royally

screwed over by a journalist. I wouldn't even say screwed over anymore. Let's just say someone did something to me that was quite unethical and quite petty and annoying and actually the prompts in the Daily Stoke Journal. It caught me day after it was like three prompts in a row. I didn't rush into saying something I was gonna wait a few days and at the end of the three days at the end of the journaling, kept it to myself and even now I don't need to tell you the specifics I've moved on and it saved me some headache probably saved me creating an enemy for no reason and then I can move on and I

hope you can do the same. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy

from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app.