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Why You Still Feel Anxious When You Know the Stoic Advice · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: A few years ago I was invited to speak on the Stoa about my own specific approach to Stoicism, and I said yes right away.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then I spent the following week quietly overthinking it.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: What if the technology fails?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: What if I forget my material halfway through?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: What if everyone listening works out that I'm a complete phony who reads books, pretend to be wise, and really I don't know what the heck I'm doing?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: The talk went well, I want to be clear, because it's the part that matters the least, right?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: The week before it cost me a whole week.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: The talk a couple of hours.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I couldn't get past afterwards.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the answer, I'd read the answer, I could have told you in some detail what Seneca says about this exact problem.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: There are more things lucidious that frighten us than affect us.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: We suffer more often in conjecture than in reality.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Notice he says more often, not always.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Seneca was more careful than the posters that quote him.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the sentence.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'd probably quoted it a bunch of times, said it to myself as a mantra, and then at 11 o'clock the night before, staring at the ceiling, it did nothing for me.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that gap is what this episode is about.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the gap.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've read a lot about anxiety.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know the vocabulary, you could explain the difference between a thought and a fact.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know that panic, by definition, peaks within mere minutes, and you've probably read more about this than your GP who has had time to.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's four in the morning and none of it is there.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: That isn't a failure of intelligence.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't really a failure of understanding either.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: You do understand it.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's what makes it so infuriating.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: What you've got is a gap between knowing and doing.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: That gap isn't made of more information.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So more information cannot close it.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I ran a small reader survey recently and one question asked, what gets in the way of actually using stoic ideas?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And most people who answered it picked the same thing.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not I don't understand it, not I don't believe it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's more about forgetting it in the moment.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a reason for that.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Army Arnstein, a neuroscientist at Yale, has spent years studying what stress does to the front of the brain, the part that holds plans and advice in mind.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Her conclusion is that even quite mild stress, the kind you feel like you can control, can knock that part offline rapidly and dramatically.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the advice didn't fail you at four in the morning.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The part of you that was meant to hold it had just gone quiet.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't rely on remembering.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have practiced it first.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the most under-discussed problem in the whole self-improvement world.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's certainly the one that I spent the most years on and failed.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, why more reading can make it worse?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the uncomfortable bit.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Reading about anxiety feels like doing something about anxiety.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: You finish the chapter and something in you settles.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: You've taken action.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I was doing a jujitsu competition and I was starting to feel anxious about it, and I read a book on confidence, and it had a lot of good advice, but it also had a lot of exercises and practices, and I didn't do any of them.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the book made basically no difference to me.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So action is key, okay?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is you haven't been anywhere near the thing that you're afraid of if you're afraid of it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's the definition of anxiety.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to read about things, and we get relief when we read, but the relief itself is the problem.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Relief is what teaches avoidance to stay.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiety is kept alive to a large degree by the things we do to make it stop.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you an example.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You escape a situation, right?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then you feel better, and the escape gets reinforced.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Not the fear, but the escape.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system learns that leaving actually works.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So leaving becomes the plan in all future situations.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Psychologists call the little versions of this safety behaviors.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Gripping the trolley, sitting near the door, checking the phone so nobody talks to you.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: In one well-known study, Paul Solfkovkis and colleagues at Oxford had people with panic disorder face the situations they feared.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: The ones who actually dropped their safety behaviors saw their frightening beliefs shrink a lot more than the ones who kept them.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that makes you feel safe can be the thing that stops you learning you were safe all along.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Just think of the person with social anxiety who never makes eye contact.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's a safety behavior.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: If they start looking up and looking at people directly, they're gonna become less anxious naturally because they're letting go of their safety behaviors.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, reading can be a form of safety behavior.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sophisticated one, and I want to be fair because reading isn't the problem.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Self-help books have had a decent track record in trials, and I've built a working life out of reading, so it would make me a fraud twice over to tell you to stop.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: I love reading.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I do think it is very useful.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: The problem, and this is the nuance, the problem is when reading becomes the thing you do instead of practicing.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you notice your reading to calm down rather than to learn something, you'll actually go and try.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's the old loop, and it's just wearing a clever disguise.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've trained jujitsu for seven, going on eight years now.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Watching an instructional absolutely helps.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you're getting a new piece of technology.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: But when someone's actually pinning you and on top of you, what comes out isn't what was watched.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's what you've drilled, it's what you've tried in the practice room.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to take the information that you learn in the instructionals, and then you have to apply it and practice it under different degrees of resistance and pressure until it becomes internalized so that when you are tired and flustered and you're acting on instinct, which a lot of us are when we are in a distressed state in life, that's when the technique will actually show up.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: You have to drill it so many times it becomes almost boring.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So knowing the escape and having the escape are always two different things, and anxiety works the same way.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Problem is most of us are trying to learn how to escape things from the comfort of an armchair.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to tell you now about what I got wrong for a long time.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: My working model was that I was trying to get rid of anxiety.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: That model produces a very specific kind of failure.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: If it's yours, you'll recognize it immediately.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: You do a practice, you feel calmer, great, the practice worked.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Then one day you do the practice and you don't feel calmer.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And now you've got two problems.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the original anxiety and you've got the fact that the thing was supposed to fix it had just failed, which is another form of anxiety because that's kind of alarming.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: So you go looking for a better practice, and the search for a better practice turns into another version of the same avoidance, just one level up.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: The practices were never the problem.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was the container in which they were being practiced, the model.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: If the aim is to feel calm, then every moment of not feeling calm is a failure.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when someone meditates for enlightenment.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Every moment they don't feel enlightenment, subtly they believe they are a failure.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: You've built a system that punishes you exactly when you needed support the most.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a study I think a lot about here.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: In 2004, a team at Boston University took 60 people with panic disorder and had them breathe air with extra carbon dioxide in it.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that reliably brings on panic sensations.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Before they did it, one group was taught to accept whatever they felt.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Another was taught to try and suppress it.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you might be able to guess what happened, okay?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The acceptance group weren't calmer in their bodies.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Their physical symptoms were about the same, but they felt less anxious and more of them were willing to do it again.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Calm wasn't the win.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Willingness was the win.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: When the shift came, for me, it wasn't dramatic.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't feel like a huge, life-changing breakthrough.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was closer to giving up on something.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped trying to make anxiety go away.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I started to ask a simpler question.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not how do I stop feeling this, but what am I going to do while I'm feeling this?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's an entirely different question, and you can answer it.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can answer it at four in the morning, which you can't say about the first one.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: The aim is never to stop feeling anxiety.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's to stop being so easily recruited and overridden by it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Recruited is a nice word that I often use in relation to anxiety.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Anxiety doesn't force you to do anything.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: What it does is it makes a very persuasive case.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: It turns up with a plan, and that plan seems almost fully thought out.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the plan is nearly always some version of leave, check, avoid, or go over it one more time, think about it more, research it more.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can turn down the plan and still have the feeling.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the entire skill.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds pretty normal, but it's far from normal.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say it again.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: We need to turn down the plan that anxiety gives us without trying to get rid of the feeling.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's talk about Stoicism.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Stoicism is currently sold as the cure for everything.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I think it does genuinely have.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Stoics were extremely clear that the disturbance isn't in the event.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Epictetus puts it as plainly as it can be put by anyone.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: In Tony Long's translation of the Encharidium, Epictetus says, it is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinions about things.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now that line gets used like a magic spell, almost as a way to dismiss emotion.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: As if noticing that distinction is the same as doing it mentally, but it isn't the same.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is a description of what to work on.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it is very accurate.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the people who built modern talking therapy knew all about this.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Albert Ellis, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, quoted that exact line from Epictetus in his 1962 book and taught it to his clients.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Beck, the other big name, wrote in his 1979 treatment manual that the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy go back to the Stoics.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't rediscovering this by accident, they went and they intentionally read it.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So what did the Stoics offer specifically?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's not just a set of techniques for feeling a bit nicer, feeling a bit better.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: They are giving you practices, they are making claims about where the real work on yourself happens.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it happens in what you agree to and in what you do next.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a much smaller promise than the marble bust social media version of Stoicism.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I also think it's much more true.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now let's get practical.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: I said I wouldn't just describe the problem.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the smallest useful piece of what I'm talking about.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Next time the anxiety, however you experience it, shows up, just try separating two things that normally come to you stuck together.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, first of all, you have the sensation, you have a tight chest, a quick pulse, the feeling of something being wrong.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: It just comes to you like this is wrong, something's not right.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's the instruction, the bit that says, and therefore you should cancel, or check, or leave, or think about this for another hour.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Feeling, sensation, and then instruction.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: They arrive together, but they aren't actually one thing.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can have the sensation and then turn down the instruction.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to argue with it, because arguing with it is just another form of thinking.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want you to do is just notice the instruction as a suggestion, and then you do the next thing you are going to do anyway.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't just a stoic idea, by the way.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the active ingredient in the main treatment for OCD, exposure, and response prevention.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: You feel the urge to check, you don't check.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you let the urge rise and fall on its own.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's it.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's the practice for this week.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: It won't feel like much.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't supposed to feel magical.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Practices that feel dramatic are usually doing something for your self-image rather than your nervous system.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or just give you a big spike of dopamine, which can feel good, but is it actually making you better?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And closing this out, that week before the talk cost me a whole week, right?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't get that week back.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a catch with what I've just given you.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Turning down the instruction works well when the instruction is leave or check.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's much harder when the instruction is a thought, a thought that keeps coming back, keeps arguing, and sounds completely reasonable every single time.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Funny how anxiety can somehow seem so reasonable to us, to everyone else, it doesn't seem so reasonable.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you think, right, if I ask that question, they'll think I'm useless, right?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of thought feels so real.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you do with that thought that you can't put down?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a different problem, and that's what we're going to be looking at next in this series.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.