Is Anxiety Ever Useful? Donald Robertson On Derren Brown

The Stoics can sound as if they want you to feel nothing. Donald Robertson, who has spent his career bridging Stoicism and modern therapy, takes that head on in this conversation.

We talk through the book Happy by Derren Brown and the questions it raises. Is anxiety ever useful? Were the Stoics too hard on it? I came in with my own doubts and Donald gave me a more careful way to hold them.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

One of my favorite authors when it comes to Stoicism and self-improvement in general is Donald Robertson, the author of Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Donald has a very unique perspective because he spent decades as a clinical psychologist. Donald is not only trained in practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, but he actually taught other therapists how to use these types of interventions. But what makes Donald unique is that even though he has this scientific therapy background, he is deeply fascinated by philosophy and understands the Stoics, in my opinion, like nobody else. I was privileged enough to sit down and speak to Donald Robertson not too long ago, and I want to share with you over the next few weeks a few of the important clips from our discussion. In this episode we talk about the psychological illusionist Darren Brown's book, Happy, and also the Stoics' view on anxiety, and whether the Stoics got it wrong when it came to emotions like anxiety. I hope you find as much value in Donald's answer as I did. I first heard about you in a book by the psychological illusionist Darren Brown. He wrote a book called Happy. He covers all the different ideas on happiness, and he's a big advocate of Stoicism. That's a really, really good, good read. But he does mention that one of the issues he has, it's only a small issue, is that he thinks that the Stoics saw anxiety in these sort of like anxious emotions. They demonize them a little bit too much, and anxiety is actually useful for growth, and we need to feel a little bit anxious and afraid at times to help us grow. So I just wanted to ask you, do you agree with this? And in a more general sense, do you see any weaknesses with the Stoic philosophy?

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Well, actually, first of all, like I would say I I have to read a lot of self-help and personal development books for a number of reasons. Like, um, and you know, Darren Brown's book Happy is one of the best books that I've read in a long time. And I thought it was beautifully written. I think he's a talented writer, and also many of these books are formulaic as hell, right? And his isn't, I would describe it as a very reflective book, and he's very considered in the things that he has to say about different psychological techniques and philosophical concepts. You can tell he's kind of working them out in his own mind, and he brings the reader into that kind of internal dialogue in a very interesting way. I thought that was a great book, and I'm I'm sure it's never going to reach the audience it it deserves, sadly. You know, although I'm sure many, many people will read it, but I think I really think it should be you know top of the bestseller list in the US, for example, um, for self-help books. It's much better than most of the other books that I've read recently. And actually, I'd like I speak to Darren a little bit, he came to one of our conferences, so like I I should say, like, yeah, I think he's a good guy. Um, but also uh the what he says in that book, I I tend to say when people criticize stoicism like that, I'll often respond by saying, Look, I think you're more of a stoic than you realise, buddy. Right? And so I wrote a review of his book, and I I if I remember rightly, that was kind of the angle that I took. And I said, I actually disagree with you, and I think you probably are more into stoicism than you realise. Like, so this thing about the Stoics being negative about anxiety, the Stoics distinguish between three types of emotion. So it's highly systematic philosophy, we have an unsystematic account of it. Uh, they had a classificatory system where they distinguished between good, bad, and different emotions. So we talked a moment ago uh about the good emotions, the eupithaei. They also have a system for classifying unhealthy emotions, the passions they call them, and that leads to a lot of confusion because some people have assumed that the Stoics are condemning all emotion, whereas really they specifically say that they're concerned with negative emotions that are irrational, excessive, and unhealthy. Um the Greek word for passion is related to our word pathology, as in psychopathology, and it implies suffering. Like so the the Greeks and the Romans were very aware that when they talk about passions, they're they're talking about pathological emotions mainly, although their definition of that is broader than ours would be today, um, to be fair. But they're also talking about emotions that are in a sense voluntary or potentially under our control, because the Stoics think that we need to distinguish carefully, as we we talked about earlier, uh, between what's up to us and what's not. So you might think, well, surely our are our negative emotions up to us? I thought the Stoics said we we should kind of be indifferent towards things that aren't under our control. But we don't normally think of our emotions as being up to us. Well, the Stoics are talking about a type of emotion, a passion, an unhealthy passion, that's in a sense under voluntary control, and they say so. And in fact, in modern cognitive psychotherapy, it's very important that we distinguish between voluntary and involuntary aspects of emotions. And people, I would say, are very often suffer and experience mental health problems in part because they take too much responsibility and struggle too much with aspects of emotion that aren't under their control, and whereas they should learn to accept those and view them as inevitable and treat them with greater indifference. And at the same time, they often neglect and fail to take responsibility or ownership for aspects of emotion that are under their voluntary control. So this is a kind of the paradox of control, if you like, when it comes to emotion. Um and it really often requires the help of a psychotherapist to get people to more clearly distinguish between what bits of their emotion are under their control and what bits aren't. It's certainly not true that none of our emotions are under our control. There are certainly aspects that are under direct voluntary control. And so the Stoics also have a term uh propathei, which is kind of tricky to translate, but it basically means involuntary emotional reactions, or it it could be translated as proto-passions, or uh Seneca calls them the first movements of the soul. But basically they're ref they're clearly referring to our initial physiological emotional reactions. So the the examples they give, for example, for instance, are if someone is startled that they might jump, their heart rate might increase, they might begin to shake, they might turn pale. And so those kind of initial autonomic responses, if you like, physiological responses, the Stoics said, well, those aren't under voluntary control, right? Um, those just happen to us. Like it's kind of a physical reaction, but they're part of what we mean by emotion. And certainly when we talk about anxiety, often a lot of it consists in these physiological and also to some extent some psychological uh responses, automatic thoughts and impressions, which are clearly not under voluntary control. And so the Stoics think that those propathei and automatic impressions should not we should learn not to view them as bad or negative, but actually to view them with indifference, studied indifference, and to gain greater detachment from them and to be more accepting towards them. And so sometimes people think the Stoics are overly negative about anxiety and other unpleasant emotions. But I would say, no, no, no, if you dig deeper, what they're really saying is that you should be more accepting towards what you're perhaps referring to there, and more discriminating, or to distinguish more carefully the voluntary aspects of those emotions and to take greater ownership for those. So the the the heart racing, the Stoics would say, that's not voluntary, you just have to accept that. In fact, you're crazy if you try to struggle against it, you'll probably make it worse. Um, however, some of the stuff you're saying to yourself in response to that is probably under your voluntary control, and you could do that differently.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Wow, that's a powerful distinction. Okay, yeah, you completely cleared that up for me. Um so yeah, I would I would love to see you and Darren actually discuss these um i in a kind of like a back and forth.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

There's a blog article I wrote about it, and I he he's read it, I think I sent it to him. Um but yeah, I I'm always happy to discuss these things with people. Just as an aside, there's a famous passage in a fragment from Epictetus that is referred to it's in a story by a Roman author called Aulus Gellius, who was a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius. So it's one of the more obscure stoic fragments, if you like, but it happens to really clearly explain this point, and uh he tells a story about a stoic teacher who was on a ship going from Greece to Italy, and he was caught in a storm, and Aulus saw, um, Alus Gellius saw this Stoic teacher turn pale, but he remained silent, and his hands were shaking, and everyone else was freaking out and screaming because they all thought they were going to die, and then eventually they survived, and they get to shore, and they were kind of offloading the ship, and they were they were they were sitting um um in the by the in the dock and talking and stuff, and people were complaining about it and going, Oh my god, I can't believe we survived this and still freaking out and stuff. And the Stoic could calm down and and Olus Gellius approached him and said, Listen, I hope you don't mind me asking, but I noticed you you looked as scared as everyone else, although you weren't really kind of running around and freaking out and stuff like they were. He said, like, so I thought Stoics were meant to be kind of uh impassive and unaffected by stress, and the guy pulled out of his satchel one of the lost books of Epictetus and gave it to Gellius to read, and he explained to him that the founders of Stoicism, Zeno and Chrysopus and Cleanthes, had taught this distinction between involuntary and voluntary aspects of emotion. So he said, just like everyone else, even he says, even like the most hardened sailors, in the middle of a storm like that, where it looks like you might die, of course I turn pale and my hands shake, just like everyone else. Those are propathei, there are involuntary natural emotional reactions, and we should accept those as natural and inevitable. Even an animal would experience those emotions in a stressful situation like that. But what Stoic doesn't do is add to them by dwelling on them, perpetuating them and amplifying them, and by projecting or imposing value judgments on top of them. So Stoic should regain his composure more quickly afterwards, and so he wasn't running around screaming and stuff like other people, and he'd calm down more quickly afterwards. And he said that that's the difference. We're not like stoke, we're not made from stone, like we have feelings and stuff, but we're careful not to perpetuate them and make them worse, which is what you saw those other people doing.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Right, yeah, that actually reminds me of like uh something that the Buddha talked about with the the two arrows. Uh so the first arrow is just the pain, and then the second arrow is the thoughts you have about the pain, and that you know you can't avoid you can't avoid the first arrow, but you should you can can avoid the second.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

Yeah, that's exactly the point. Seneca says something similar where he talks about how animals like deer, if they're startled by a predator, their heart will race and they'll run away in fear, but then when the threat has gone, they calm down quickly and they just return to grazing as normal. And he said so humans have these emotions as well, but because we can reason and think about the past and the future, we carry on worrying about it afterwards. So he says reason, our greatest gift, is also our greatest burden, like because it allows us to perpetuate anxiety, which for animals would be you know done and dusted and over with once the threat's gone away. Um so the Stoics would say the animal part of emotion is natural and we should accept it with indifference, um, but we've just got to be careful that we don't misuse reason to amplify it or perpetuate it in an unhealthy way.