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The Flinch: What to Do With the First Jolt of Anger or Anxiety · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Your face goes hot before you've decided anything.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Your stomach drops when a certain name shows up on your phone.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Your jaw sets the second someone interrupts you.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us treat that first jolt as the start of a fight.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: We either obey it or we stamp it out.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Stoics had a third option.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It starts by not being surprised by it.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is one passage, one passage from the Stoics, and one practice to take into your day.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: We start where it has to start, the moment you get hijacked.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's Seneca writing to his friend Lucilius about a man who blushed when he was caught off guard.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Letter eleven in the Gamer translation.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: For no wisdom can natural weakness of the body be removed.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: That which is implanted and inborn can be toned down by training, but not overcome.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then a little further on.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: The steadier speaker, when before the public, often breaks into perspiration, as if he had wearied or overheated himself, some tremble in the knees when they rise to speak.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Notice who Seneca is describing there.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: People who are good at this.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: The blush still comes, the sweat still comes.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Training turns it down.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: He says it does not switch off.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: That matters because of how the Stoics thought the mind worked.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Something appears, you agree or you don't.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: You either assent to the impression, you withhold it, or you disagree with it.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then comes the urge, then the action.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: The first jolt in your body belongs to that first step.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: It happens to you.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't something that you're agreeing to yet.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the flinch, that first movement, the jolt is not the problem.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is treating the flinch as a fully formed verdict.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: My heart's pounding, so this must be a threat.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wrong.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm furious, so therefore I must be right.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Wrong.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: That second part, that's the moment you sign for it, and that part is the thing that needs to be questioned.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I call this principle the gap.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Between the jolt and what you do next, there is a step, and that step is yours.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: But you can't use a gap that you can't see.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the first practice is simply about seeing it.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The practice is called the flinch.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: The trigger is your body moving first, heat in the face, a tight chest, a drop in the stomach, the instruction in one word.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: When you feel it, say to yourself, flinch.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's all.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Don't obey it, just name it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Flinch.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Today's rap is one flinch, named once.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: It still counts even if you name it after you've snapped.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It still counts as a rap.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just name the flinch, let it be there, don't try to change it.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: When you're done, make a mark, tick on a piece of paper, a note in your phone, somewhere you'll see it tonight.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: By this evening the question is simple.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Did I name one flinch?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes or no?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: You will never stop the jolt.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Seneca didn't, and he was trying a lot harder than most of us ever will.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: What you can stop is mistaking the flinch for a decision.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Next time, let's use that gap between the flinch and the verdict we make about it to do something productive.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let's use it to find a way back to our senses when we've become a little bit irrational.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Go well.