Practice like a Stoic: Conclusion

Stoicism is still your best bet for happiness

The Boxer, National Roman Museum, Rome. Photo by the Author.

If you made it this far in this 54-week marathon, Congratulations on completing our curriculum! You’ve put in a lot of hard work. While I hope you’ve learned a great deal from using this series and the accompanying book, the Handbook for New Stoics (co-written with my friend Greg Lopez), chances are you are not yet a Stoic sage. If that’s the case, then the next question is: What should you do now? This final installment (and corresponding book chapter) will help you answer this question. When you’re ready, let’s get started.

Design Your Own Stoic Curriculum

At this point, you have a choice to make. During your exploration of Stoicism, you may have experienced the benefits of Stoic practice and would now like to continue with it. Or, you may have found that Stoic practice isn’t for you. If that’s the case, that’s fine! While I believe that having some kind of philosophy of life is useful to most people, I also know that Stoicism isn’t necessarily a good fit for everyone. Before proceeding, take some time to think about whether you’d like to continue your Stoic practice, and answer honestly.

If you’d like to continue your journey as a proficiens (one of those who makes progress), read on. I realize that not every exercise is a good fit for everyone, and that people will wind up in different places while working through this series and book. Because Stoic practice is not one-size-fits-all, the rest of this entry is dedicated to helping you design your own personalized Stoic curriculum.

Step 1: Review which exercises worked for you

I have listed all the exercises from this book in the following tables. Take some time to go back and find which exercises were helpful for you, and note them down.

I have sorted the exercises into themes, which will be useful in the next few steps of designing your own curriculum. (I’ll come back to themes in Step 3.) After all the exercises that you wished to come back to are noted in the table, it may help to cross out the ones you didn’t find helpful.

[Key: S = Set time; O = Occasionally, when the opportunity arises; C = Constantly, as often as possible.]

Discipline of Desire and Aversion:

Discipline of Action:

Discipline of Assent:

Step 2: Determine which discipline to start from

Our main goal in this Series and book was to provide an adequate sampling of Stoic practices. Now the question remains: Which discipline should you start from? While no hard-and-fast rules exist, Epictetus clearly states that the Discipline of Desire is meant to progress in this discipline is a necessary precondition for the other two disciplines. If you are not well practiced in the Discipline of Desire, then your mind will be ruled more by passions than by reason, making intentional, prosocial action and clear, logical thinking much more difficult—if not impossible.

That said, if you strongly believe that you’d benefit from starting with the Discipline of Action or of Assent, feel free to do so. Keep in mind that you can always take the Discipline of Desire for a quick spin. If you choose to start elsewhere, be absolutely sure that you have strong reasons for doing so, and that you’re not simply averse to our suggestion of starting at the beginning, or givin to your desire to be thought of as an advanced Stoic—those are clear signs that you need more work in the first discipline!

Step 3: Design your initial practice

Now that you’ve chosen a discipline to work with further, you can choose the exercises you’d like to practice within that discipline. In the tables you filled out in Step 1, you’ll have noticed that each exercise is labeled with letters.

S: The exercise is meant to be done intentionally at a set time. For example, imaginative premeditation, described in Week 6, requires you to set time aside to practice. This can be daily, but it doesn’t have to be.

O: These exercises are done when the occasion arises for which they are relevant. Keep these exercises in mind, and when the opportunity to practice them comes about, you can do so. Using Week 6 again as an example, premeditating on others’ adversity requires encountering (or reading or hearing about) a person who is struggling with something. You would use this cue as a reminder to tell yourself that something similar could happen to you. Since some of the exercises in Week 6 are practiced at a set time, while others are done occasionally, the chapter is labeled with both an S and an O.

C: These exercises (or aspects of them) are practiced constantly, or as often as possible. For example, the final exercise, in Week 52, requires applying the dichotomy of control to as many externals you encounter throughout the day as you can. You may not be doing these exercises every single waking moment, but you will be applying them much more throughout your day, compared with the other two types. These exercises tend to have broad application. You also don’t set time aside to do them; you integrate them into your life. They don’t take more time out of your day, but they do require quite a bit of mental effort.

When exercises are labeled with multiple tags, either multiple forms of the exercise were presented in the chapter and they can be used in different cases, or components of the exercise have different timing. For example, Week 36 is (O, C) because you must watch for impressions constantly (C), but only counter harsh ones, which arise occasionally (O).

With that out of the way, it’s time to design a practice within your chosen discipline. Turn back to the tables in Step 1 and look at which practices worked for you, then choose which you’d like to work with for now. Here are some recommendations.

• Keep it simple. Only choose one or two practices to work with at a time. Many people get overwhelmed when confronted with too much choice, so narrowing your practice may be useful.

• For most people, I recommend having one practice that is done at a set time and one done occasionally. Practices at a set time give consistency, and practices done occasionally help you practice in daily life.

• If you struggle with one area in particular within a given discipline, choose an exercise relevant to that particular issue to start out with. Begin with a less challenging aspect of your chosen area and increase difficulty with time.

• Stay within your chosen discipline until you are ready to move on.

To give you an example of how to think about choosing your initial practice, let’s turn to Alice, whom we first met in Week 1 (see the book version of the exercise). Alice had anxiety around her job performance. Working with anxiety lies squarely within the Discipline of Desire. From there, Alice can keep things simple by choosing just a couple of exercises to work with that apply directly to that issue. She might choose acting the opposite to her anxiety when it arises at work (Week 10) for her occasional exercise and imaginative premeditation (Week 6) for her set time exercise. She can limit acting the opposite only to work anxiety, to keep things simple. She can always broaden the exercise to other situations and passions later. When she does imaginative premeditation, she may start by imagining herself fifteen minutes before a performance review. When imagining that it doesn’t yield much anxiety, she can move on to visualizing the actual performance review. Over time, she’ll move on to imagining worst-case scenarios, such as being chewed out by her boss, or being fired. But she wouldn’t start out with those; she’d work her way toward them only after imagining easier scenarios that don’t yield much anxiety.

One final note before you sketch out your initial practice: Take my advice lightly! If you’ve worked your way through this entire series / book, you likely have a pretty good idea of what will work for you and what won’t. Feel free to design a practice that you think will best suit you.

Write down which practices you’d like to start out with, choosing ones from the tables in Step 1. You may also wish to write out the specifics of how you’ll practice them.

Step 4: Know when and how to progress

You won’t be using your initial practice forever. So, how will you know when it’s time to move on? Here are two ways:

Proceeding to the next discipline: Epictetus laid out some general ways to know how you are progressing in Discourses, 4. I suggest you give this a read every now and again. Unfortunately, there aren’t many specifics in there about figuring out exactly when to move between disciplines. While Epictetus’s words may be enough for some, I’ll offer additional suggestions for those who would like further guidance.

The most important idea to keep in mind is that individual Stoic exercises have only one goal: to help you improve your character through fulfilling the goals of each discipline. Recall the goals of the first two disciplines:

• Discipline of Desire: to reduce desires and transfer aversions from externals to internals (i.e., to be less averse to external circumstances and instead concern yourself with how you handle them).

• Discipline of Action: to act intentionally (not at random, or impelled by circumstance) and prosocially (keeping others’ well-being in mind).

You can use these as signposts of whether to proceed to the next discipline, perhaps by journaling about your progress every few months and comparing where you are to the goals of the discipline you are practicing. If you’re working with the Discipline of Desire, and don’t have many strong aversions or desires for externals, you can move on to the Discipline of Action. And if you’re working with that discipline and find that you often act intentionally and with others in mind, then you can move on to the Discipline of Assent. You don’t have to be perfect in the first two disciplines to move on (indeed, perfecting the practice is the goal of the Discipline of Assent), but you shouldn’t have many big issues in those areas before proceeding.

If you prefer quantitative guidance over the qualitative criteria given above, you can revisit the quizzes Greg and I provided for each section (in the book) to occasionally rate yourself in each discipline—and perhaps have another person you trust rate you, too, just to be sure. Then, if you reach a certain self-rating in all three questions for the part quiz, you can move on to the next discipline. If you like this approach, I have reproduced the section quiz questions below. For the Discipline you’ve chosen to work on, write down what rating you’d like to reach before moving on to the next discipline (there are no questions for the Discipline of Assent, since that’s the end of the line!). While you can choose any rating, I suggest striving for 3 or above, since, again, you don’t need to be perfect before proceeding!

Once you meet your goals in one discipline, you can then use the tools and suggestions in Step 3 to help guide you in creating a new initial curriculum for the next discipline. If and when you reach the Discipline of Assent, you can take a look at whether you are weaker in the Discipline of Desire or Discipline of Action, and choose exercises from the appropriate column within the Discipline of Assent that you feel best address what you’d like to work on.

Moving on to other exercises within a discipline. Here are some cues to let you know that it may be time to change exercises within a discipline:

• If a given practice does not seem to be working;

• If circumstances change and another exercise seems more relevant;

• If your overall progress within the discipline seems stagnant, but you haven’t met your goals for the discipline;

• If you’d like to explore new exercises that worked for you in the past;

• If the practice has become second nature to you and you’re ready to add a new one within the same discipline;

• If you’ve made significant progress in the area addressed by the exercise, and want to try a new exercise for a different area of your life.

I suggest not rotating exercises too frequently in order to give them sufficient time to have an effect. I also recommend switching to practices that can be done constantly (marked with a C in the tables) when you are closer to your goals within a discipline, as these tend to be harder but also more beneficial. Your own personalized Stoic curriculum can last months, years, or even a lifetime.

In the book, Greg and I also provide readers with some additional resources to help supplement your study of Stoic philosophy, suggesting the best available translations of the ancient texts, new commentaries on classic Stoic authors and themes, books on contemporary Stoicism, and both online and offline resources. The journey continues, happy practice!