How to talk to your emotions

Use a basic Stoic technique to take charge of your emotional life

Testosterone, an hormone involved in sexual arousal and a number of other emotional states. Image from Wikimedia.

A central tenet of Stoic psychology (which happens to be supported by modern research) is that emotions are, in part, a matter of cognition. Specifically, the Stoics developed the following model for how to arrive at good decisions and actions, despite experiencing an initially problematic emotional reaction to a situation:

Impression > Assent > Impulse to Action

The above are technical terms, and should not be understood according to their modern English meanings. Margaret Graver, in her excellent Stoicism and Emotion, provides the following definitions:

An “impression” (Greek, phantasia) is an alteration of the mind through which something seems to be present or to be the case. In having an impression, the mind registers some state of affairs prior to forming an opinion about it one way or another.

An “assent” is what converts thought into belief. It is also referred to as ‘judgment’ (krisis), or ‘forming an opinion’ (doxazein). Assent is defined in intentional terms: it is that event in which one either accepts an impression as true or rejects it as false.

An “impulse” (hormai) is a tendency to action, generated by the assent that one has given to an impression.

For instance, I may have the impression (convened to me by internal sensations) that I am thirsty. If I assent to such an impression, I may then develop an impulse to act: I get up, go to the refrigerator, and get myself a beer.

This is way of framing things is crucial to Stoic practice because it means that we have a way to argue with, so to speak, our emotions. Impressions simply come to us, by way of sensorial inputs (from the outside) or thoughts floating by (from the inside). There is no controlling them. But assent, as Epictetus puts it, is “up to us” (Enchiridion 1.1). And since assent is the gateway to impulse (again, in the Stoic sense of the word), this means that our actions are also up to us, no matter how much our judgment may be influenced by external circumstances, including other people’s opinions.

Take again my example above: even though there is no denying my impression that I am thirsty, I can decide not to assent to the notion that now is a good time to quell my thirst, and therefore not to generate the action, for instance because I’m in the middle of doing some writing, and I’m afraid that I may lose my focus. I’m first going to finish this paragraph, then I will get up and walk to the refrigerator.

All of the above should be rather uncontroversial, and yet we hear all the time phrases like “I couldn’t help act that way,” or “I can’t help my feelings.” Actually, you can. Though the second type of control requires a bit more effort (and explanation) than the first.

Let’s start with actions, which are simpler to handle. Everything you do is literally, entirely, up to you. No matter what the external circumstances. Here is how Epictetus articulates the thought, with his characteristic bluntness:

‘But the tyrant will chain –’ What will he chain? Your leg. ‘He will chop off –’ What? Your head. What he will never chain or chop off is your integrity. (Discourses I, 18.17)

Even in the extreme cases Epictetus describes—a tyrant putting you in chain, or threatening to kill you—you are free to decide how to act. If you abide by what the tyrant wants in order to avoid prison or save your life, that’s fine, it’s a decision that most of us would make. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that you had no other option. You could have accepted prison, or faced execution. Other people have. Which is why Epictetus also says:

Consider at what price you sell your integrity; but please, for God’s sake, don’t sell it cheap. (Discourses I, 2.33)

Okay, so maybe we really do have complete control of our decisions to act, but surely not of our emotions? Well, not on the spot, necessarily, but with training, yes. It’s not just Stoicism that argues this way, but cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the best evidence-based types of modern psychotherapy.

Every time I mention this, though, I’m met with a rather skeptical look, as if I had clearly swallowed the Epictetean equivalent of kool-aid and was therefore deserving of pity. But think about it, there is at least one very obvious, and very commonly experienced, type of emotive reaction that is very much under our control, so much so that even people with little training can turn it on and off at will: sexual arousal.

Human beings, both males and females, can be aroused by a variety of stimuli, including visual (obviously), tactual (also obviously), olfactory (a perfume or natural skin smell), and auditory (an evocative piece of music) ones. But sexual arousal can also be triggered entirely voluntarily, by simply thinking about an erotically charged situation. Under such circumstances, we experience the very same physiological reactions, including the triggering of the proper hormones, that we would if we were in the midst of an actual sexual encounter. Heck, even roughly the same neural pathways are going to be activated!