The Daily Stoic - Control Your Emotions

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

In today's audiobook excerpt, Ryan presents his reading of the section of his own book The Obstacle is the Way entitled “Control Your Emotions,” in which he discusses why real strength lies in recognizing, understanding, and controlling one’s emotions.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including The Obstacle is the Way.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today It's funny. I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people Haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading They're reading more than ever and I go let me guess you listen audio books, don't you? And it's true and almost invari, they listen to them on Audible. That's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audio books across every genre from best sellers

and new releases to celebrity memoirs. And of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app, you'll always find the best of what you love or something new to discover. And as an Audible member,

you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest best sellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness is the key, the daily dad I just recorded. So that's up on Audible now coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audio books. So all those are available, and new members can try audible for free for 30 days.

Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

Control your emotions. Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. Publius Cirrus. When America race to send the first men into space, they train the astronauts in one scale more than any other. The art of not panicking. When people panic, they make mistakes. They override systems.

They disregard procedures and ignore rules. They deviate from the plan. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They just react. Not to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins. Welcome to the source of most of the problems down here on Earth. Everything is planned down to the letter, then something goes wrong, and the first thing we do is trade in our plan for a good, all-emotional freak out. Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm, because it's easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face. At 150 miles above Earth, in a spaceship smaller than a VW, this is death. Panic is suicide, so the panic has to be trained out, and it does not go easily. Before the first launch, NASA recreated the fateful day for the astronauts over and over,

step by step, hundreds of times, from what they'd have for breakfast to the ride to the airfield. Slowly and a graded series of exposures, the astronauts were introduced to every sight and sound of the experience of their firing into space. They did it so many times that it became as natural and familiar as breathing. They'd practice all the way through, holding nothing back but the lift off itself, making sure to solve for every variable and remove all uncertainty.

Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It's a release valve. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary even-in-eight fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity. Fortunately, unfamiliarity is simple to fix, again not easy, which makes it possible to increase our tolerance for stress and uncertainty. John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, spent nearly a day in space still keeping his heart rate under 100 beats per minute.

That's a man not simply sitting at the controls, but in control of his emotions. A man who had properly cultivated what Tom Wolf later called, the right stuff. But you confront a client or a stranger on the street and your heart is liable to burst out of your chest, or called on to address a crowd and your stomach crashes through the floor. It's time to realize that this is a luxury, and indulgence of our lesser self. In space, the difference between life and death lies in emotional regulation. Hitting the wrong button, reading the instrument panels incorrectly, engaging the sequence

too early, none of these could have been afforded on a successful Apollo mission. The consequences were too great. Thus the question for astronauts was not, how skilled a pilot are you, but can you keep an even strain? Can you fight the urge to panic and instead focus only on what you can change, on the task at hand? Life is really no different. Obstacles make us emotional, but the only way we will survive or overcome them is by

keeping those emotions in check. If we can keep steady no matter what happens, no matter how much external events may fluctuate. The Greeks had a word for this, apathya. It's the kind of emotional equanimity that comes from the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in. Don't let those emotions even get started. Just say, no, thank you.

I can't afford to panic. Life can get you down. I'm no stranger to that. When I find things are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously, I use my journal, obviously I turn to stochism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time, and has helped me through a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy remote, so I don't have to drive somewhere. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Toxbase makes it easy to find a therapist that you like.

It's convenient. It's affordable. By doing everything online, Talkspace makes getting the help you want easy and affordable, so why wait? And Talkspace can help with any specific challenge you might be facing. That's why it's the number one online therapy platform with license therapists and over 40 specialties. It's secure and private and in network with most major insurers.

As a listener of this podcast you can get 80 bucks off your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com.com. Stoic to match with a license therapist today go to Talkspace.com.com.com to get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the daily Stoic that's Talkspace.com. Slash Stoic. This is the skill that must be cultivated, freedom from disturbance and perturbation. So you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them.

A boss's urgent email, an asshole in a bar, a call from the bank, your financing has been pulled, a knock at the door, there's been an accident. As Gavin DeBecker writes in the gift of fear, when you worry, ask yourself, what am I choosing to not see right now? What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness, or wisdom?

Another way of putting it, does getting upset provide you with more options? Sometimes it does, but in this instance, no, I suppose not. Well then, if an emotion can't change the condition or the situation you're dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion, or quite possibly a destructive one. But it's what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it. No one ever said you can't cry, forget manliness, if you need to take a moment, by all means, go ahead. Real strength lies in the

control, or as the seem to let put it, the domestication of one's emotions, not in pretending they don't exist. So go ahead, feel it. Just don't lie to yourself by conflating a moding about a problem with dealing with it. Because there is different as sleeping and waking, you can always remind yourself, I am in control, not my emotions. I see what is really going on here. I am not going to get excited or upset. We defeat emotions with logic, or that's the idea. Logic is questions and statements. With enough of them, we get to root causes, which are always easier to deal with.

We lost money, but aren't losses a pretty common part of business? Yes, are these losses catastrophic? Not necessarily. So this is not totally unexpected. Is it? How could that be so bad? Why are you all worked up over something that is at least occasionally supposed to happen? Well, I, and not only that, but you've dealt with worse situations than this. Wouldn't you be better off applying some of that resourcefulness rather than anger?

Try having that conversation with yourself and see how these extreme emotions hold up. They won't last long. Trust that. After all, you're probably not going to die from any of this. It might help to say it over and over again whenever you feel the anxiety begin to come on. I am not going to die from this. I'm not going to to come on. I am not going to die from this. I'm not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. Or try Marcus' question.

Does what happen keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straight forwardness? Nope. Then get back to work. Subconsciously, we should be constantly asking ourselves this question, do I need to freak out about this? And the answer, like it is for astronauts, for soldiers, for doctors, and for so many other professionals, must be.

No, because I practiced for this situation and I can control myself. Or, no, because I caught myself and I'm able to realize that it doesn't add anything constructive. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The app goes away. You go as the enemy stillness is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music,

download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up.

Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how

I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.