I need perspective

How these exercises work

Each exercise is a short sequence of steps taken from the Stoics’ own method, and every step is optional.

• Say what happened. Write it plainly, the way a camera would have recorded it.
• Find what you added. Epictetus’s point is that events reach us through our judgments about them; the exercise asks you to separate the two.
• Sort what is up to you. Your choices, your effort and your response are; other people, the past and the outcome are not.
• Read one passage. Each exercise includes a short passage from Epictetus, checked against the public-domain translation.
• Choose one next action. Something concrete you can do today, so the exercise ends in a decision rather than a mood.

Writing helps, but you can move through every step without typing a word.

The nine other situations

Setback, Difficult Person, Procrastination, Fear, Overwhelm, Jealousy, Loss, Uncertainty and Difficult Decision have guided exercises in the app’s Premium tier. Each of their cards above points to the closest free step you can take here: Fear and Uncertainty to the Worry exercise, a setback or too much at once to Outside My Control, a difficult person to Anger, and jealousy or a hard choice to the Four Virtues check. Where we have written a guide to the situation, the card links to it too, with the passages the Stoics wrote about it.