The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks
You've read the books. You know what Marcus Aurelius would do. But when life gets hard, the philosophy disappears. This podcast is for people who want to close the gap between knowing Stoicism and actually living it. New episodes every Monday.
Episodes
162 episodes
The Manosphere Got Stoicism Backwards
The manosphere has spent years quoting the Stoics to young men. Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus. Seneca. The version they sell, anger as strength, dominance as virtue, emotion as weakness, is the opposite of what those philosophers actually wrote.
Overthinking Is Not a Thinking Problem
Most advice for overthinking points you at the thoughts themselves. Journal them. Replace the negative ones with positive ones. Breathe. Meditate. Run. But what if the thoughts were never the problem?Epictetus taught that it is not event...
The Anxiety Trap: Why Fighting Makes It Worse
For most of my adult life I had a low-level hypervigilance running in the background. I tried to fight it with books, breathwork, control techniques, willpower. The harder I fought, the worse it got.In this episode I share the breakthrou...
Why the Stoics Never Needed Willpower
You have quit every hard goal for the same reason, and it is not lack of willpower.The Stoics worked this out 2,000 years ago. Instead of fighting discomfort with more discipline, they asked one question that bypasses the willpower battl...
Stoic Morning Practice: Stop Dreading Day Before It Starts
Some mornings the dread arrives before the alarm. A tightness in the chest, a list already forming, a quiet resistance to the day ahead. This guided Stoic practice meets you there, not with forced optimism, but with honest preparation.Yo...
When the World Feels Unjust (A Stoic Response)
Most people hear focus on what you can control and assume Stoicism means stop caring about everything else. That is not what it means, and it might be one of the most misunderstood ideas in the whole philosophy.It starts with a line from...
Discipline Is a Skill, Not a Trait (5 Stoic Moves)
I used to think discipline was a character trait, like height or eye colour. Some people had it. I did not. That story is comfortable, and it is rubbish.The Stoics did not treat discipline as willpower. They treated it as a set of five t...
91% of Goals Fail: A Stoic Philosopher Explained Why 2,000 Years Ago
Most resolutions fail because they are built wrong, not because you lack willpower. Epictetus worked out why 2,000 years ago.In this episode I break down three tests from Stoic philosophy that expose whether your goal is real or just fan...
Stoic Morning Energy Boost: 5 Minutes To Wake Up Ready
Some mornings you do not need calm. You need to wake up. This 5-minute Stoic practice is built for the mornings when your body is out of bed but your mind has not followed.You will move through five rounds of power breathing to flood you...
Your Opinions Aren't Observations, They're Demands
You form hundreds of opinions a day. About the news, about your colleagues, about the person in front of you in the queue. They feel automatic, like seeing. But they are not observations. They are tiny laws you are writing inside your own skull...
"Remove Desire Entirely": What Epictetus Actually Meant
You read that line in the Discourses and your mind goes straight to cravings. Appetites. The stuff you are ashamed of. But that is not what Epictetus meant, and the real meaning is more useful than any advice about willpower.In this epis...
Marcus Aurelius Morning Meditation: Face The Day With Stoic Calm
You know the feeling. The alarm goes off and the day is already rushing at you. The emails, the conversations you are not ready for, the low-grade dread of what might go wrong.Marcus Aurelius knew it too. Every morning, before the weight...
Stoic Indifferents Explained: How to Want Without Suffering
If only virtue is good, why does anything else matter? Why go to the gym, build a career, or plan for the future?This is the question that confused me for about a year of reading Stoic texts, and the answer is one of the most useful dist...
Own What's Yours: The Dichotomy of Control (From The Vault)
This episode is a full lesson from one of the premium courses inside The Stoic Vault, my membership for people who practise Stoicism rather than just read about it.The lesson comes from the course Stoic Morning Routine: Start Calm and St...
The Stoic Vault: What I Built and Why
About two years ago, I hit a wall. I had been teaching Stoicism for years. Writing about it. Making podcasts about it. And I was still losing my temper. Still spiralling over emails. Still lying awake replaying conversations. I knew the philoso...
What the Stoics Actually Meant by Practice
Epictetus did not write books. He ran a school where students lived for years, practising responses to insults, hardship and loss. Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a daily training regimen, the same ideas over and over, drilling them in...
The Gap Between Knowing Stoicism and Living It
A few months ago I was in a conversation that started to go sideways. I could feel the tension rising, the tightening in my chest, my voice getting sharper. I knew exactly what was happening. I have studied this. I have taught this. I know what...
Release the Day: 15-Minute Deep Sleep Body Scan
A slow, Yoga Nidra-inspired body scan to help your body soften and your mind go quiet at the end of the day. You will move gently from head to toe, releasing tension as you go, then drift into a calm, spacious stillness that makes it easier to ...
The CCTV Thought Experiment: You Are What You Do, Not What You Say
Imagine aliens installed a silent CCTV camera over your shoulder for 30 days, then compiled a report on what you actually value, based only on your calendar, your screen time, your purchases, and how you spend your evenings. Would you recognise...
Morning Gratitude: A 10-Minute Stoic Practice
Start the day with a short gratitude practice rooted in Stoic thinking. In about ten minutes you will name three gratitudes, shift your attention from what is missing to what is already here, and set yourself up to notice what is going right ra...
Stoic Morning Practice: Let Go of What You Can’t Control
Start the day with the most useful Stoic distinction there is: what is up to you, and what is not.In this 6-minute guided morning practice you will gently name a current worry, notice where it sits in the body, and let go of everything o...
Psychedelics and Buddhism: Why Peak Experiences Aren't Enough (with Martijn Schirp)
Martijn Schirp and I have known each other for nearly a decade. He first reached out after reading a meditation article I posted on Reddit, a message that ended up changing my life and led to us co-founding HighExistence and running retreats to...
Make Your Time Count: Stoic Keys to Focus and Fulfillment
Most of us feel we have too much to do and not enough time to do it. The Stoics had a different diagnosis: the problem is rarely a shortage of time, it is how much of it we hand away without noticing.In this episode I draw on Marcus Aure...
What You'll Miss When It's Gone: A Stoic Gratitude Meditation (Premeditation of Adversity)
What if the way into real gratitude is not positive thinking, but imagining loss?In this 12-minute guided meditation I walk you through an old Stoic practice called praemeditatio malorum, the premeditation of adversity. Used by Marcus Au...
Stoicism Decoded: Your Guide to Ancient Wisdom in Plain English
The Greek terms are where a lot of people get stuck with Stoicism. This episode is a plain-English guide to the vocabulary that actually matters, so the ideas stop sounding academic and start being usable.I walk through the key Stoic wor...