When Someone You Love Is Suffering: A Stoic Response (AMA)

Someone you love is suffering and you cannot fix it. What does the dichotomy of control ask you to do then? This episode is a preview of a longer listener Q&A covering that question, holiday indulgence without guilt, and the ways I have leaned on Stoicism in my own life. The final question is the one that matters most: how to stay useful, loving and steady when another person’s pain is outside your control. I do not have a neat answer. I work through the distinction the Stoics make between caring deeply and trying to control what was never yours to control.

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Welcome to the Stoic Handbook Podcast. This is John Brooks speaking. Today I'm going to be answering the question, why should I care about Stoicism? I was asked as part of the Stoic Handbook Premium, Ask Me Anything. If we can trust Stoicism, the person asking the question was very much into things like psychedelics, breath work, meditation, and while was curious about Stoicism, kind of put Stoicism in this category of a mind-based therapy. You know, it's all in the head. And this is my response. I'll also include the full question in it. If you would like to listen to the full 45-minute Ask Me Anything, as well as previous Ask Me Anything, multiple in-depth meditation courses, remastered Stoic Meditation Tracks, and unreleased workshops, you can sign up to Stoic Handbook Premium at stoichandbook.supercast.com. But for now, let's get into this question. Today we are going to be having another Ask Me Anything. This is the second one. But before we get into today's questions, I just want to share an idea that I had with you, an insight that I had that you might like to hear. I've met quite a few of the readers of the Stoic Handbook. I've ran online 10-week experiences with a schisis. I've done one-on-one coaching, stoic coaching. I've had over a hundred enrollments in Stoic Anxiety Mastery, and I also just get a lot of emails from people expressing gratitude and struggles that they're having. Maybe you yourself, as you listen to this, know that you've corresponded with me. The thing I'd like to share is that I have only ever met amazing individuals. I have not met anyone that I wouldn't like to hang out with and talk to. People from different backgrounds, different walks of lives, different careers, different families, different nationalities. And yet everyone I've spoken to, everyone I've interacted with has been the type of person that I actually would enjoy communicating with. And I don't like to take things for granted, and it got me thinking, you know, is this actually common? Do content creators in other niches also experience this? Maybe they do, I wouldn't know. But then I realized that we're all interested in living an examined life. We're all interested in stoic philosophy, self-improvement, interested in developing our character, living a life of more virtue, more courage, more justice, more integrity, more honesty, more empathy, checking in emotional awareness. And upon reflecting on this, I was just encouraged that, you know, stoicism is often talked about as this psychological operating system that can help you build more resilience, weather the storm, the obstacle is the way. And if you're familiar with my work, you know that I love this and I'm a big proponent of these tools that allow you to handle more stress, transmute setbacks into opportunities and so on. The therapeutic side of Stoicism. But it seems that stoicism can also help us to be better friends. And even other content creators in the stoic space have been nothing but amazing to interact with. There is no one-upmanship or competitiveness. Everyone is getting along and promoting this important message. I've collaborated quite a lot with Alan from the website what is stoicism.com, and Alan has interviewed me on his podcast. I'll be interviewing him soon. Alan's promoted my courses and my work, and I've done the same for him. Alan even created a bonus module in Stoic Anxiety Mastery, which was awesome. Really proud of that module. Donald Robertson is recommending my Substack where I release my Stoic Scroll. It's essentially a compilation of some of my most recent work and other things that I find interesting. And I'm recommending Donald back. And it's just this amazing community of people. And you are part of this. You're a member of the Stoic Handbook Premium. You're taking your philosophy of life seriously. You want to grow, you want to improve. And I'm excited to see what comes of this stoic community as it continues to flourish and we continue to bring people together, potentially having more online sessions, live sessions, if you'd be interested in that. I'd love to hear it. And also potentially an in-person retreat experience. That could be amazing. I've ran five retreats with my other company, High Existence, in Costa Rica and the Netherlands, but I've never created a stoic retreat. It's been on my mind. I've thought about it. What would that look like? And it does interest me. It's always in the background of my mind. I'm thinking about it. What would that look like? An in-person stoic training camp. So just some ideas that I hope you find inspiring. And let's get into today's QA. So the first question is why should I care about stoicism? I'm super into depth psychology, psychedelics, and other deep healing, esoteric modalities that work on releasing tension and trauma from our bodies and our deeper psyches. I haven't been drawn to most mind-based modalities out there due to a lack of confidence that they actually work. Do I have to keep reminding myself of the stoic virtues and wise quotes on a daily basis? Or do they eventually become part of who I am? I guess the ultimate question I'm trying to ask is, does this really work? And how and why? There are lots of different questions in here. So I'll do my best to answer these. So the first thing is I'd like to ask for some clarification. Okay, so you're super into depth psychology, psychedelics, and other deeper healing, esoteric modalities that work on releasing tension and trauma from your body, but you haven't been drawn to mind-based modalities. And so I'd like to start there with what do you mean by mind-based modalities? I often hear this distinction that people make body-based practices versus mind-based practices. And I understand the idea behind this distinction, but I think it's a false distinction. So a mind-based modality would be something like trying to think your way to a better emotion, and a body-based modality would be to try and feel your way or take physical action in a way that leads to a different state. So two different paths, two different schools of thought, both with the aim of attaining well-being. When we talk about the mind and the body as being these two separate things, we have to first recognize that we are using models in the way that we're speaking. We have this model that we call mind and this model that we call body. But they ultimately break down. And the reason for this is because if I were to inject you with adrenaline, you would have an increased heart rate, you'd have more arousal, and your thoughts would change. They've done experiments where they've had participants walk across a high bridge, and then an attractive woman at the end of the bridge gave her phone number to the participants as part of the experiment and told them to call them if they had any further questions. The participants who walked across the bridge before receiving the phone number were much more likely to call the woman back than people that were walking ground level. Why? Because they were more physiologically aroused and they either misinterpreted this physical signal as attraction or just exaggerated the initial attraction that was already there. A physiology impacts our thoughts. There's a sort of natural congruence between the two. When you're very tired and sleep deprived, pay attention to the kinds of thoughts you have. They're typically not relaxing and compassionate and full of empathy. If you read the work of Matthew Walker, who wrote Why We Sleep, he says that when you become sleep deprived, your empathy significantly drops your ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. That's why people that are sleep deprived are very agitated and angry. People that are severely sleep deprived don't necessarily experience an increase in negative emotion. What happens first is that they lose the ability to experience positive emotion. So the world becomes grey, it becomes harder to smile. This is anedonia. They can't find pleasure in simple things in a sunset and a meal, and it doesn't really please them as it normally would. And if I tell you to think of something terrifying, I get you to sit and meditate on something truly terrifying or past event in your life, your body will react to that. If I told you to fantasize about your perfect future, you'd probably get physiologically excited about that. If I told you to fantasize about your perfect partner or something like that, for example, you may physiologically respond to that. Thoughts are deeply entwined with the body. The body is deeply entwined with thoughts. When you're experiencing psychedelics during a psychedelic episode, sometimes there isn't much conscious thought happening, and sometimes the experience is all conscious thought. It's all different puzzles and visualizations and insights that are in the mind that can create a breakthrough physiologically for you. And then if you go further and you look at a Buddhist perspective from a matter of experience, they would claim that you are identical to your experience and your thoughts are arising in the exact same space as your tastes and as your feelings. There is just one open space of awareness in which everything is arising on its own in its proper place. And so here it wouldn't make sense to distinguish between mind-based modalities and body-based modalities from that paradigm. So it depends what paradigm you're operating within. But I'm telling you this because I want you to understand that it is just a model. When you start playing around with different frames and perspectives, you start to see that model disintegrate and become challenged. And so I would encourage you not to cling too tightly to the mind-based versus the body-based ways of approaching healing or therapy. With that said, I understand the utility of separating mind and body. And when it comes to healing, improving yourself, say working on anxiety or depression, negative thoughts, I learned something that I really liked from Tal Ben Shahar. He was a positive psychologist at Harvard. He calls it the ABC of change. A stands for effective, B stands for behavioral, and C stands for cognitive. And he argues that true change of any kind has to hit the A, the B, and the C of change. Now, if we do a really good breathwork session, we may hit the A. We may feel this big release of emotion. And that can be great. That can be a peak experience, that can feel very liberating. You can walk around with a skip in your step. I've done breathwork sessions and I've had physiological releases similar to getting a massage or something like that. But if your goal is transformation, the follow-up questions after the breathwork session would be: how is this going to change your behavior? And in what way has this changed your cognition? And if the breath work session gave you an insight, which then changed your behavior, we could say that that hit the ABC of change and therefore it was very useful as a transformative tool. Psychedelics can be very potent in this regard. During a psychedelic experience, you have the effective part, the emotion. You often have the cognitive part. Think certain thoughts have certain insights. But it's well known in psychedelic communities that if you don't have a daily practice or set yourself some goals after the psychedelic experience, all you've really had is an internal holiday. The true work post-psychedelic experience is in the B, the behavior. And they call that integration. That's why MDMA assisted psychotherapy is showing some very promising signs for helping trauma survivors and veterans with PTSD. But the key is MDMA assisted psychotherapy. There are three MDMA sessions with psychotherapy in between to help people integrate the ideas and the lessons and the new insights that they've had during the trip. The psychotherapy is just further reinforcement to help them stabilize a behavior and make sense of their new cognition. A practice that is also very powerful for the ABC of change is meditation of various kinds, stoic meditation, Buddhist meditation. Why is this? Well, when you sit to meditate, you're going to experience a lot of emotions. Frustration, boredom, anger, restlessness. Those are typical early things that can come up as you progress. You can start to experience sadness and traumas can be brought up from your past and things like that, depending on how much you practice. There's also the behavioral component. It's a physical practice. You sit, you meditate, and there's a cognitive element, either with visualizations or with training to let go of cognitions or become more aware of them. In the mind illuminated, Kuladasa calls this metacognitive introspection, the ability to become aware of your own cognitive introspection rather than being lost in it and identified with it. It's an incredible skill. So then that brings us back to the question of stoicism. Is Stoicism truly a mind-based practice? Well, I would argue that it's definitely not a purely mind-based practice. Because stoicism is not a philosophy degree where you just debate different ideas. The whole purpose of philosophy is the quest for character, and there's no way to develop or show character other than through the body. A brain in a vat is going to have a hard time knowing what they're made of. There's a quote I like by Epictetus. Difficulty shows what people are. Therefore, when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young opponent. Why? So that you may become an Olympic conqueror. But it is not accomplished without sweat. Does that sound like a mind-based way of living? Sounds very physical to me. Sounds very body-based. There certainly is a cognitive thought-based component to stoicism, because they recognize that human beings have the capacity for reason, which makes us distinct from other animals, and we should use that to better society because we are social animals too. To socialize is also a physical thing. It's an emotional thing. To socialize well, to converse, to communicate well, one has to let go to some extent and allow their intuition to guide them. Stoicism does a really good job at hitting the ABC of change. Let's look at something like a simple nightly reflection. You go through the day, you live your life. Inevitably, you make some mistakes. You reflect on those mistakes. You might feel a little bit of regret. You might feel a little sting of disappointment in yourself. You might also feel a sense of pride or accomplishment over how you've acted. You use your emotions to guide you in some sense about what you did, about what you did well and what you can do differently. But you reflect on it, you think about it. How would I like to act? Where would I like to go? What would I like to change? And then you try to actually act it out with the idea that over time you transform, you become someone else, you become better, you can lift more weight. Just like when you show up to the gym, over time you become stronger, you become fitter, and eventually you just change, you physically become different. That's transformation. And we know that cognitive behavioral therapy was based to some degree on stoic philosophy, but people sometimes miss the behavioral part of cognitive behavioral therapy. There are definitely very useful tools in CBT that are more mind-based journaling techniques and so on. I'm a big fan of the triple column technique that's included in Stoic Anxiety Mastery as a way to challenge irrational thoughts. But the B in CBT stands for behavioral. The whole point in true healing and true transformation is behaving differently. So using CBT for something like social anxiety, the point wouldn't be to think your way there. It would be a combination of challenging irrational thoughts, exposing yourself to the things that you're afraid of, learning new skills, and ultimately reconfiguring your identity. You also say, do I have to keep reminding myself of stoic virtues and wise quotes on a daily basis, or do they eventually become who I am? Well, one of the issues that I see with this question is that it's sort of like saying, so I want to be a better person, but before I commit to that, I need to know that it's not going to be too taxing. Can you tell me the trade-off beforehand? And I would say, well, what other way is there to become a better person? To do anything worthwhile, there is an element of work, whatever that is. And the truth is you don't have to do anything. You don't have to keep reminding yourself of stoic virtues or wise quotes. If you want, you can develop your own system for what it means to live a good life and live according to that. The Stoics have done their attempt, and it's there for us to look at and use as a starting point, and we can adapt it to our own life and make changes as we see fit. But ultimately, how can we become better people? What is the path to doing that? There has to be some element of skill building, of repetition, of study, of leaning into resistance, and you'll find that with the stoic virtues, you are stronger in some than in others. Let's just say that you are very just, very honest, you're very brave, but you just really struggle with discipline. Then that can be an area of focus for you for a month or two. The other thing with asking, do I have to keep reminding myself of the stoic virtues? is that it sort of makes it sound like it wouldn't be enjoyable to do. When we are interested in something and we enjoy it, we don't phrase things like, do I have to do this thing? You know, as if it's this kind of very unpleasant tasting medicine that we have to drink. You say that you get to do it. It's actually a bonus, it's a gift. And so you can find your own ways to make the process more fun, more joyful because what you're doing is incredible. You're becoming wiser, becoming the best version of yourself. And you can do that in creative, interesting ways. You're not shackled to one methodology. And this is something that I want to encourage people in general to be aware of. Nobody is forcing you or trying to seduce you to become a stoic or to live an examined life. If you're unsure about it, you can just read a good introduction to Stoicism. So you could read a book like How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Piccolucci or A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine, or Stoicism and the Art of Happiness by Donald Robertson. Each of these books would take you, let's say, a week to read. And very soon you'll get a sense of, oh, is this something that I actually want to dedicate more time to, more study to? And if the answer is no, that's fine. Maybe you want to look at Buddhism instead or something else. And so in summary, why should you personally care about Stoicism? Well, it's all about do you care about living the best possible life that you can? Do you care about maximizing your potential for flourishing? Do you want to develop your character and grow in wisdom? And if so, you should care about Stoicism, at least to some extent. Because Stoicism is a deeply thought out attempt to provide a philosophy of life that attempts to answer the question of how we ought to live. It's been used in multiple contexts over multiple millennia and doesn't require you to believe anything supernatural or to accept anything on blind faith. In fact, you are encouraged to test the ideas yourself in the laboratory of your life. The Stoap Puicle, the Painted Porch, is a place where people met to discuss philosophy and advance her ideas. It wasn't a place where a dictator told people what to think. And so if you like to think and you like to challenge the ideas in Stoicism, that's still very compatible with Stoicism. But that's a great question, and I hope that my answer got you thinking a little bit about different possibilities.