11 Stoic Strategies to Conquer Fear

Seneca wrote about fear more honestly than almost anyone. He knew it from the inside, the dread that arrives before the thing you dread ever does.

In this one I go through eleven of his lines on fear and anxiety and work out how to actually apply them, not just admire them. A note on credit: this audio includes a clip of Jocko Willink, and because it began life as a video where his accounts were on screen, the credit got lost in the audio version. So to be clear, that clip is his.

Jocko Willink: youtube.com/c/JockoPodcastOfficial

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The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

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Hello, John Brooks here. Today I want to talk to you about fear, anxiety, panic. Today I want to share with you some stoic advice from Seneca on how we should think about fear and anxiety and worry in a constructive way. And the cool thing about Stoicism is that Stoics are very rational, but I would say that they're so rational that many of their ideas seem counterintuitive. Like so rational to many of our irrational minds, they seem irrational. So I'd like to have you challenge some of these beliefs that you have around the current situation, the current fears you have. And let's crack into it. Here are eleven stoic principles on fear that can help you from Seneca. So principle one knowing that you can endure great pain reduces great suffering. Competence increases confidence. How do you get confident? I mean, you could be delusional and narcissistic and just walk around like you're the most confident person in the world. That's kind of shallow and kind of fake and not founded on anything. Real deep grounded confidence comes from competence, knowing that you are expert in something. So when you know that you can endure suffering, when you know that you can endure pain, when you know that you can endure setbacks and you can rise up, you can heal, you can fight to live another day, that increases your competence of resilience. That increases your confidence that you can handle whatever comes. When something happens and it kind of knocks you back or makes you feel really, really tested, and this can be trivial things like having a really good workout, or it can be having a really difficult breakup, or it could be, you know, experiencing real serious loss in your life. When this happens, you are showing to yourself that I have a limit here. You know, this is an area that I need to work on. This is an area that I can flesh out. This is an area where I can grow in. When you get broken in life, this is an opportunity to say thank you. Thank you for showing me where my limits are. No prize fighter can go with high spirits into the strife if he has never been beaten black and blue. The only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood. Principle number two. The ripple of fear far exceeds the wave of danger. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. The ripple of fear far exceeds the wave of danger. If you imagine a still lake and you're on a some sort of surfboard or you're just floating around in a still lake, and someone dropped a huge boulder into that lake near you, there would be a wave of danger. If you were close to where that boulder landed, you would probably be capsized and you'd flip into the water. If you were further away, the wave wouldn't hit you, but you'd see the ripple. You would still know the presence of the boulder that's been dropped. Many of us are reacting to the ripples, and we are nowhere near the wave. There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. Principle number three postpone unhappiness until its due date. You know it's funny how so many of us are procrastinators, we keep putting off the work that we should be doing, that project that we should be working on, the call that we need to make. But how many of us actually postpone and procrastinate on our own unhappiness, on our own fear? Seneca said What I advise you to do is not to be unhappy before the crisis comes, since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you will never come upon you. The future is uncertain, and that is both scary and incredible, because it tells us that we might actually be completely wrong about all of the bad things that we're imagining. What I would encourage you to do is to stop procrastinating on all of the projects that you have in this time, and to instead procrastinate on all of the fear and anxiety and misery that you are now inflicting upon yourself daily when there is not actually the threat here in this moment in your life. Principle number four, resist the urge to exaggerate your sorrow. It's such a poetically phrased uh principle. I mean, what Sandekar is saying here is do not victimize yourself, do not complain, do not think of yourself as someone who is the victim of the world, someone who needs to exaggerate everything that goes wrong, to catastrophize every misfortune. We are storytelling animals. This is amazing. This is how we learn. If I tell you that I tripped in a particular park at a particular location, that makes you watch out for that area so you don't trip. That story could have saved you from breaking your leg. But that same pattern, that same innate desire to tell stories, to make friends by telling stories, to relay information both dangerous and positive, can be our own trap. Because we start telling ourselves stories about areas of the woods that we should avoid ourselves when in fact we've never been there. Some things torment us more than they ought, some torment us before they ought. We are in the habit of exaggerating or imagining or anticipating sorrow. Principle number five. Shield yourself from negative narratives. Ah, there is so much on the news at the moment. There is such a narrative. Nothing is really objective and neither can it be. If I have the task of telling you a story in five minutes, I have to put my own spin on it. There is way too many facts, infinite amount of fact, actually, to be able to give it to you all in this objective way. So I frame things a certain way. I put a certain color on my text, I put a certain type of music on the things that I tell you, I get a certain type of news reporter to talk to you who dresses a certain way and speaks in a certain way, because I have a certain narrative that I want to give to you. Maybe that narrative is designed to capture your attention. Maybe it's designed to make you a little bit afraid so that you do the right thing. I ultimately would have some agenda behind giving you a narrative, whether that be benevolent for your own interests or for my own interests. That's a big discussion. The point is there are narratives, and many of these narratives are infectious, more infectious than a virus. And these narratives are often negative and they can steal your unhappiness and convince you of a certain reality, even though you didn't think of that reality or narrative yourself. When men surround you and try to talk you into believing that you are unhappy, consider not what you hear, but what you yourself feel, because you know your own affairs better than anyone else does. So what he's saying here is don't outsource all of your feelings to the TV or to podcasts or to people down the road from you. Check in. How do I feel? Am I okay? What do I think will happen here? It's not that you can't listen to experts, but realize that you are actually an expert. You're an expert of you. And that should not be forgotten. Principle six. Seek to falsify your own beliefs. We are irrational, emotional beings. This is fine, okay? We we have to be this way. It helps us survive and to reproduce and do all the human things. We are not like Mr. Spock. We are not hyperlogical. We can't be. We have to make decisions based on intuition. We have to read between the lines and think in metaphors. This is all fine. But in knowing that we are irrational and knowing that there are certain thinking traps that we fall into, we should try and protect ourselves from ourselves. And one of those irrational systems that we use is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one's prior personal beliefs or hypotheses. When we believe something, we start seeking evidence to validate that belief. So if I think that something is really scary and deadly, I'm going to start looking for evidence to prove myself right. If I think that someone is evil and there's a big conspiracy, I'm going to search for evidence that confirms that belief. Seneca warned us of this saying, We do not put to the test those things which cause our fear. We blench and retreat just like soldiers who are forced to abandon their camp because of a dust cloud raised by stampeding cattle. What Seneca is telling us here is that when we catch drift of a rumor or something that might be scary, the first thing that many of us do is we try to confirm the fear. We try to look for evidence as to why that dust cloud really is an army approaching us. What we should do is what poker players do when they are playing a game of poker and they want to read the behavior of their opponents. They try to falsify their own views. They actively seek to disprove themselves. So this is well known in the research on anxiety. If you're afraid of dogs, for example, what's going to happen? You are going to avoid dogs, and then dogs will become more scary to you, and you'll believe that dogs are even more scary because you avoid them, and because you avoid them, they'll seem more scary. And what you need to do is you need to actually approach dogs. You need to think about dogs, you need to walk up to dogs, you need to pet dogs, and you are, in effect, falsifying your own irrational fears, and this is how you overcome the fear. You can't actually just get rid of a fear like by thinking I shouldn't be afraid. You have to falsify the beliefs. So when you find in yourself an inclination to believe something or to search for something that makes you feel right, I would actually say look at the things you're afraid of and one by one try to disprove yourself. And if after that process of falsifying your cherished beliefs, you still find that they are right, fine. But until then, you cannot trust your own beliefs. Principle number seven, panic is almost never useful. Fear at times can be useful. Fear, let's say, is the rational knowing of a dangerous situation which has the effect of removing you from that. So if I'm in my room and a lion walks in and I feel fear, it makes sense that I would feel fear and I should leave. If I simply hear a roar in the background sitting in my house, and I jump up and I run away, that's anxiety. That's irrational fear. That's the kind of what if type of fear. There's very little evidence to support a lying would be here. It could easily be on the TV as a sound of a nature program, and the anxiety, the irrational fear, is causing me to flee. So anxiety is is typically something we want to get rid of. But panic is even worse. Seneca said of panic. And somehow or another it is the idle report that disturbs us most. That is why no fear is so ruinous and so uncontrollable as panic fear. For other fears are groundless, but panic is witless. When you are in a state of panic, you cannot be reasoned with, and therefore you are not reasonable. And why would you trust someone who is not reasonable, whether that be other people or yourself? So if you are feeling panicked right now, I'd like you to simply step back. It's okay to feel a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of nervousness, but panic is almost never useful. Principle number eight. Expect the unexpected good. If you think of anxiety, what it is is the expectation of something bad happening, something that could kill us or humiliate us. Okay. When we are afraid, we're expecting something bad to happen. You know, if there's a like a deadly virus going around, we're expecting that we might get it. Or we're expecting that someone close to us might get it. And then if we do get it, we might die. We're expecting this unexpected, terrible situation. But when you think about it, a lot of things happen that are unexpected and amazing. Absolutely amazing. Things you could never have thought about. Certain people that come into your life, certain opportunities that arise, certain good news and good fortune. Many, many things happen that are absolutely incredible and they are unexpected. If this is the case and you are only thinking about the bad things that might happen, then I mean it's pretty clear that you're not being very wise because there are so many good things that could happen that are also unexpected. Seneca said something that I really like. How often has the unexpected happened? How often has the expected never come to pass? Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not. In the meantime, it is not, so look forward to better things. You know many of us have got that friend who is very flaky. We can never seem to arrange a time to get coffee or lunch with. They're always making excuses or showing up late. Bad fortune is like that too. Bad fortune is never guaranteed. It might come, it might not. Same with good fortune. Might come, it might not. It's flaky, it's fickle. Keep that in mind. Principle number nine. Hope and fear make a mockery of us. How many things have you hoped for that have never came? How many times have you put on a lottery ticket or bought a scratch card or gambled? Or simply tried to get something and it didn't work? Hundreds and hundreds and thousands of times this has happened. Hope mocks us. Now it's not bad to have hope, but it does mock us when we hope for a sunny day tomorrow and it rains. Hope is laughing, going sorry. Well, fear does the same thing. The things that we're afraid of nearly always don't come true. Nearly always. It's not like you have a thousand times you were afraid and they came true. Came true, came true, came true. There's actually a thousand times that you thought something bad would happen, and it didn't. Seneca said Counter one weakness with another and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Principle ten observe with moderation. You know, if you have a fridge full of alcohol or cake or whatever food that you really like, guilty pleasure, and someone says, Do you think that you should indulge with moderation? You would likely say yes, because you are aware that if you don't use moderation and you just binge, it will seem okay now, it will seem okay in a few days, but that indulging that lack of moderation will lead to long term negative implications. Well, the question is do we have the same moderation with our observations? When we hear a piece of news, when we see something, when someone tells us something, do we restrain ourselves slightly? Do we go, I'm not gonna like fully feel into this now and just get swept up with it? I'm going to hold back a little bit. In the same way that you have a huge cake in the fridge and you just cut yourself off a small portion. Can you, when you hear news, cut off a small portion of the emotion that's being given to you, consume that, not be consumed by the news. Observe with moderation. This is very important. Restrain yourself, hold yourself back. Hear something terrifying? Hmm That's that's that's a bit scary. However, maybe it's not the whole picture. I'm going to use some moderation here and hold back. Seneca said on this topic We let ourselves drift with every breeze. We are frightened at uncertainties, just as if they were certain. We observe no moderation. The slightest thing turns the scales and throws us forthwith into a panic. Principle eleven the final principle The worst possible thing might be the best possible thing. This is a bitter pill to swallow. When we're in the midst of great suffering or panic or fear, it's very difficult to imagine that this thing that is so terrible might actually be the best thing ever. It's really hard to imagine that, but how true is that? That's the question. Because in my experience, it's very true. Now you might be thinking, yeah, well what if you die? What if you die? I mean, if I said to you that you know, you have the opportunity, you can save humanity from a global catastrophe, everyone you love and everyone you cherish, you can save them from great suffering if you sacrifice your own life. I'll give you five years to do it and you can you can do it. Many of us, if we have loved ones, will say, you know what, I I would sacrifice my own life to save humanity. I would do this. Well, we don't know what our death will lead to. We don't know what chain of events our death will generate. Maybe our death, the thing that we're so afraid of, could have an impact on someone that we love. It could drive them to doing something. Maybe we will be remembered. Maybe our story, when it's told, will save someone from suicide or bring someone back from the brink of destruction, and that someone is important and will go on to save more people and more people and more people, and you don't know it, and you'll never know it. Maybe the worst thing that you think could happen is the best thing that could happen, and maybe you would be proud of that. Perhaps the worst will not happen. But you yourself must say, well, what if it does happen? Let us see who wins. Perhaps it happens for my best interests. It may be that such a death will shed credit upon my life. So to conclude, I've shared with you a lot of direct quotes from Seneca. I hope that you found them useful, and I've given you some simple uh take-home messages, some some principles that you can start using. In summary, if we were to sum up everything there is a lot of uncertainty in fear, but in this uncertainty there is hope. Hope can lead us astray, fear can lead us astray, we do not know. We exaggerate, we fabricate, we follow the path of confirmation. We don't question ourselves, we don't observe with moderation, we are too easily swayed, and we don't protect ourselves from negative narratives. Learning how to manage the terrain of fear and anxiety is a skill. It's a life skill. It takes practice. The great Stoics like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, they were still practicing this even as old men. It's not just something that you could have figured out, but it is such an important skill, not just for yourself, not selfishly, because, you know, oh, I don't want to be anxious or I don't want to be afraid, but other people are looking in times of uncertainty for someone who is grounded and who can lead, someone that they can rely on. Now, I'm not talking about some arrogant, um, overly confident, narcissistic leader. I'm talking about someone who's wise and rational. And think of someone who you know who's amazing in a crisis. No matter what's going on, you can you can say to them, what should we do? I'd like you to rise up and become that person. Become that person for other people. Right now, people need someone strong, people need someone who can lead, people need someone who is wise and reasoned and calm. This doesn't mean being overly tranquil and just saying everything's going to be fine. It's saying there's an issue, I'm aware of the issue, let's think about the issue properly, and let's take the steps to rectify the issue.