The Daily Stoic - How To Use Stoicism To Control Your Anger

Episode Date: February 7, 2021

Anger is antithetical to Stoicism, so naturally, the Stoics had methods of dealing with it. In this video, Ryan Holiday walks us through the various tools Marcus Aurelius used to avoid anger. If you'd like to learn more, go to https://dailystoic.com/angerThis episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. With Talkspace, you set goals with your therapist and they hold you accountable and make sure you’re really progressing. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. And we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of Diz Dog. It must have been, of course, stressful to be Marcus

really. It must have been stressful to be Seneca. These were people with a lot on their shoulders who were brilliant, who had things they were trying to do. And so, like the rest of us, they would have gotten frustrated. They would have gotten upset. And I think it's impossible to dance around. The fact that Marcus really has clearly had a temper.

How could he not have had a temper when you read meditations and you see how much he talks about managing your temper. People who never get angry don't have to talk about why you shouldn't get angry. And so with Seneca, I mean, Seneca even writes an essay on anger and in some respects this is a warning to the young Emperor Nero, but clearly he's drawing on personal experience. This is a man who'd been in leadership for decades, who'd been at the whim of anger, who'd clearly lost his temper in his own life, and was talking from experience about the

perils of temper and anger and the passions. We've said before we have this challenge, the team, your temper challenge, we say like, just because you don't have an anger problem, doesn't mean anger is not a problem in your life. Of course, it's a problem. It's a problem for everyone. No one is glad after they lose their temper, right? I've never gotten angry, said something out of anger

and been like, I am so glad I did that. And honestly, you know, you tell yourself that you feel better, but like, do you ever actually feel better? Like, when you go punch a pillow because you're so upset, and you scream, you know, that's sort of one of those primal yells, you know, after you get away from something that's really driving you nuts, does it actually let anything out? No, it didn't.

The anger is still there, so eating you. Anger is a toxic emotion to the stokes. It's one of the main emotions they were trying to work really hard to be free of, to get to a place of apotheo or adoraxia where they were not, you know, they did not have that coursing through their veins. So in today's episode, we're gonna look at some of the Stoke strategies for taming your temper, for controlling your anger, and for getting to that place of peace and stillness and that's not to say there aren't going to be things in the world that you should be upset about.

But being angry, being driven by anger is not where the Stokes wanted to come from. So today here we go, how to use Stoicism to control your anger. And of course, if this video is a good starting point for you and you want to go deeper down this rabbit hole, be sure to check out our team, your Tempert Challenge, you can do it dailystow.com slash Tempert. [♪ Music playing in background, you can imagine that for someone like Marcus Relius,

Tempert and Anger are going to be things he's really thinking about, concerned about, because he's overseeing an empire of millions of people, the stakes are constantly high. He's overseeing court cases, he's building projects, he's leading an army. In some cases, it's the worst, most frustrating problems that make their way up to his level. And so he does, in meditations, he talks about sort of the importance of controlling one's temper, of managing our anger, because it was such a critical part of the importance of controlling one's temper of managing our anger

because it was such a critical part of the reality of his life. He says how much more harmful the consequences of anger are than the thing that causes it. What he means is that when you get upset about something, when you get angry about it, what you do in response is often worse than whatever the consequences of the thing that caused the problem were in the first place. At one point in meditation, he actually quotes Europeans, the playwright who said something like, why give in to anger as if the world would notice. He's basically saying like, our anger is impotent and totally pointless. And so he talks constantly about anger and there's a bunch of proven strategies,

a bunch of ideas that we get from Marcus Aure Relius, that I think we can apply in our lives to make us not only less angry but to reduce the consequences or cost of anger in our life. The first thing we get from Marcus is just accept responsibility. Whatever the problem is, whoever causes it, you have to accept responsibility. It's when you're blaming other people you get really mad. So he says, like, blame yourself or blame no one. So if you've decided early on, I'm not going to make this other people's problem.

My wife says to me, like, someone can't make you frustrated. Right? You have to own the fact that you don't control other people, but you always control how you respond. Right? So at the core of stoicism is an acceptance of responsibility, right, which reduces the amount of people that you're able to get angry at.

You can't get angry at anyone but yourself, and we also, we obviously know being angry at yourself doesn't accomplish anything. Another idea that the stokes get about anger, this actually comes from Socrates. He says like, nobody does wrong on purpose. What he means is that almost nobody, obviously I think, Socrates is wrong when it comes to say, like, psychopaths, or sociopaths. The vast majority of people, when they wrong you, when they're rude to you, when they mess something up, when they do things in a way that's different than the way you would do them, it's not because they're trying to hurt

you, it's because they think that that's the best thing to do. And so this reminder, and actually Marx really opens meditations with this sort of meditation on all the frustrating things He's going to experience in the upcoming day, but he says the people who do this they do this because they don't know the difference between right and wrong They don't know the right way to do things and so he wants to go through the day with some sympathy for the fact that people are not doing Things to upset you personally. It's that your interpretation of them is what's upsetting you. Marcus is obviously a big fan of Epicetus, and what Epicetus would say, it's not things that upset us,

it's our judgment about things. So Marcus would try to remind himself that the event itself is objective, right? Somebody just said something to you. We decide to interpret that as rude or as offensive or as outrageous or as an attack, right? So, you know, your car runs out of gas. You decide to tell yourself that that is incredibly unfortunate, that that is really annoying, that it's so insesful. The events are objective, we decide

what story we're going to tell ourselves about them, and when we realize this we can decide not to get upset we can decide to tell ourselves that it's not a bad thing. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the show stay tuned. Is this thing all? Check one two one two. Hey y'all I'm Kiki Palmer I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur and a Virgo just the name of you.

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I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know, so I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you.

Because on Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby, this is Kiki Palmer no topic is off limits. Follow baby this is Kiki Palmer whatever you get your podcast. Hey prime members you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Another thing Marcus talks about in meditations he talks about reminding yourself when you have done that. So when somebody does something to you that's upsetting you don't think how egregious is this, how offensive is this, how annoying is this, how totally uncalled for this is,

what a monster this person is. Instead, you wanna think about when have I done something similar to other people? And this is a way to remind yourself what we're talking about earlier, which is that most people are not doing wrong on purpose. It's like when we mess up, we know that we weren't being a monster,

that we weren't intentionally in flicking harm, that was an accident, that we didn't know better, we didn't even think about it, so on and so forth. And so it's important to remind yourself about this when it comes to other people. I think probably the funniest lesson from Marcus about anger is just this idea of reminding yourself that there's gonna be stupid annoying Incomponent frustrating people in the world. Marcus says like look when you bump up against someone else's shamelessness Ask yourself is a world without shamelessness possible We know that that's not true like a certain small percentage of the population is going to suck They're going to mess up. They're gonna be deadbeats

They're gonna be annoying and so what Marcus says is when you bump into one of those people, instead of being surprised, instead of being angry, go, oh, this is just one of those people. If 1% of the population is a bad driver, or if 1% of the population talks too loudly on their cell phone in restaurants, instead of getting angry when you experience those things, you go, oh, this is that one out of a hundred people. And in fact, maybe you try to remind yourself that it's good that there's only one out of a hundred instead of ten out of a hundred. I think this is more in line with modern thinking is the idea of using gratitude as a check against anger. I think it was Tony Robbins who said it's impossible to be angry and grateful at the same time.

But when you read meditations, when you read Marcus Reyes, you see him constantly remind himself of the beauty of life, the wonder of life, how grateful he should be for things. And in this gratitude, I think he is checking himself against the tendency to be upset at how imperfect things are or frustrating they are or how aggravating they happen to be. And then the final, final lesson as far as managing our temper, this is the thing that the stokes return to over and over again, it's kind of their magical cure all to all problems. It's just a meditation on our mortality on how insignificant we are.

Marcus says like, it's so silly to be angry about things as if any of this is lasting, right? We're not lasting, the event is not lasting. We're all going to die soon and no one will remember any of this. And so to hang on to grudges, to rage about something for three or four days, or even to yell about it for 20 minutes, is in a way like a delusional idea that you know for certain that you have 20 minutes to waste, that you have two hours to waste or two years to waste. To not talk to your sister for 20 years because you know she messed up Thanksgiving dinner is to assume that you have 21 years with your

sister left to gamble with, you know to not reconcile with your father or your mother is to say oh I know I'll be able to do this before they die or before you die and that's not true. So Memento Mor you know, you could leave life right now He says let that determine what you do and say and think and that's kind of the core ultimate check against anger So anyone who's in a position of leadership and a position of power But also just in a position of powerlessness Anger is going to make things worse according to the stillelix, and that's why we want to work these strategies to reduce our anger before it takes things that are already

bad and makes them worse. Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks for listening to The Daily Stowed Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in The Daily Stowed Store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. Whatever you want, we'd love for you to have a copy.

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