Voluntary discomfort, without the bravado

What it is, and what it isn’t

Voluntary discomfort means going without something you could easily have, on purpose, for a short time. You eat plainly for a day with a full fridge. You go out on a cold morning without your warmest coat. You let a craving pass. The phrase is modern. The ancient writers called this kind of thing exercise, or training.

The aim is practical. A comfort you have every day stops feeling like a choice. Going without it for a while shows you what it is: something pleasant that you can live without. That knowledge is worth having before life takes the comfort away, rather than after.

Three things it is not:

• Not punishment. You aren’t paying for a lapse or earning a reward. Nothing about the practice looks backward.
• Not a toughness contest. The online version of Stoicism, with ice baths at dawn and the photos to prove it, is closer to what Epictetus warned against than to what he taught. (More on that in toxic Stoicism.)
• Not good in itself. For the Stoics, comfort and hardship are both indifferent: neither one makes you a better person. What the practice trains is your judgment about them.

What the Stoics said

A handful of short texts carry the idea. Three of them appear here in paraphrase: the usual English translations of Seneca’s Letters and of Musonius Rufus’s lectures are still under copyright in many countries, so this page shows the app’s labeled summaries instead.

Seneca: practice going without while times are good

Seneca wrote Letter 18 to his friend Lucilius in December, during the Saturnalia, Rome’s midwinter festival of feasting.

The rest of the letter, in our words, keeps this from becoming a gimmick. The days should run three or four at a time, sometimes more. The hard bed and the coarse cloak should be real, and Seneca says plainly that he doesn’t mean the playacted poverty that bored rich Romans staged for amusement. He also tells Lucilius not to feel heroic about it: thousands of slaves and poor people live this way every day, and the only difference is that Lucilius chose it. Even Epicurus, he adds, the founder of a rival school, kept days of meager eating to see whether his happiness suffered for it.

Seneca could afford the experiment. His fortune was among the largest in Rome (opens in a new tab), and he wrote as a comfortable man to a comfortable friend.

Musonius Rufus: two kinds of training

Musonius Rufus taught philosophy in Rome in the first century and was Epictetus’s teacher. His lecture on training sets the practice inside a larger plan.

One kind of training is for the mind alone: keeping true principles about good and bad in view and applying them. The other works on mind and body together, and only there do cold, heat, hunger and hard beds come in. Musonius gives the mind the greater share of attention, and the hardship is there to strengthen it. The result he wants is a steady person who acts well, not a person who is good at being cold.

Epictetus: for yourself, not for others

Epictetus, Musonius’s student, kept the training and threw out the showmanship.

“Do not embrace statues” is usually taken as a reference to Diogenes the Cynic: the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius (6.23) reports that the Cynic hugged snow-covered statues in winter to toughen himself. Epictetus’s alternative is almost comically small. A drink of cold water when you are very thirsty, spat out instead of swallowed, “and tell no man.” Nobody sees it, so nobody can admire it. The only person the exercise can change is you.

The chapter opens with a warning about pride. Living cheaply is nothing to boast of, because the poor already do far more of it than you do. Seneca makes the same point from another side in Letter 5:

Rough clothes and a hard bed worn as a badge are a costume. A cold plunge filmed for an audience is the modern version.

Epictetus: train against your own habits

Epictetus also gave a whole discourse to training, headed “About exercise” in George Long’s translation.

Epictetus doesn’t ask what is hardest. He asks what the training is for: wanting and avoiding things without being tripped up by what isn’t in your power. So you choose the exercise by your own weak spot, and answer a habit with “a contrary habit” (Discourses 3.12). Someone who can’t stand a slow line practices standing in one. Someone who reaches for a snack whenever they are bored lets the urge pass, once. A cold plunge does nothing for a person whose real habit is needing to be admired. For that person, the exercise is keeping quiet.

Safety first

Epictetus is clearer about this than many of his modern fans. In the same discourse:

Walking a rope is hard and would impress a crowd, and Epictetus rules it out anyway: difficulty and danger are no reason to practice something. Training is chosen for what it builds. The rules we suggest, in our own words, follow from his:

• Keep it small. The right size is something you could stop at any moment without consequence: one plain day, not a week of hunger; ten cool minutes outdoors, not an hour in the cold.
• Check with a doctor first before anything involving cold, heat, food or hard exertion if you have a health condition, are pregnant, or are under a doctor’s care. If food has ever been a struggle for you, leave food out of this practice entirely.
• No fasting regimes, ice baths or endurance stunts. A plain-food day still means eating enough. Cold means a cool walk, not an ice bath.
• Stop when it stops being mild. If you feel pain, dizziness or numbness, or start shivering and can’t stop, end the exercise. These are signals to stop, not tests to pass.
• Do it for yourself, and only to yourself. Don’t put your family on your plain-food week, and don’t use the practice to make up for a bad day.

Ideas from the sources

Each idea below comes from one of the texts on this page. None needs equipment, and each fits into an ordinary day.

Plain-food days (Seneca, Letter 18). For one day, eat the cheapest, plainest food you have, such as oatmeal, bread, rice and beans, and water. Eat enough; just choose nothing for pleasure. Seneca’s version ran three or four days. One is plenty to start.

The old clothes (Seneca, Letter 18). Wear the worn-out jacket and the faded shirt for a weekend of errands, and notice how little anyone cares.

A little weather (Musonius, Lecture 6). On a cool day, take a short walk without your warmest layer. On a warm evening, leave the air conditioning off for an hour. Stay well within what is safe for your health.

A hard bed (Seneca, Letter 18; Musonius, Lecture 6). If your back allows, sleep one night on a camping mat on the floor.

The spat-out water (Epictetus, Enchiridion 47). Pass up one thing you want and are free to have, such as the second helping or the dessert you would order without thinking. Don’t mention it, then or later.

Unannounced (Enchiridion 47; Seneca, Letter 5). If you already run in the rain or take cold showers, stop telling people. For some of us this is the hardest item on the list.

Your own slippery spot (Epictetus, Discourses 3.12). Find the comfort you would complain about most if it disappeared: your usual chair, the quick checkout, the dish cooked just so. Go without it for a day. The longest line at the grocery store is a fine place to train.

A seven-day start

In the same discourse, Epictetus has a proverb for beginners about an earthen pitcher and a rock (Discourses 3.12). The pitcher shouldn’t go looking for the rock. So this first week starts well below what you could manage. Skip any day that doesn’t suit your health.

1. Take inventory. Change nothing. Write down three comforts you use without deciding to, and circle the one you would most resent losing.
2. Eat plainly. One plain-food day, as above.
3. Meet the weather. Ten minutes outdoors a little underdressed for the day, or one evening without the heat or air conditioning turned up.
4. Spit out the water. Pass up one small thing you want, and tell no one.
5. Go against your habit. Do without the comfort you circled on the first day, for one day.
6. Enjoy something fully. Take a day off from the practice. Have a meal you love and pay attention to it. The ability to enjoy is half of what the practice protects, as the last section explains.
7. Look back. Which comforts turned out to be habits rather than needs? Which day was easier than you thought? Keep one practice for the month ahead, such as a plain-food day every couple of weeks.

The Evening Examination is a good place for that last step, and for noticing, during the week, when a missing comfort spoiled your mood.

The point is freedom

Seneca wrote the Consolation to Helvia from exile on Corsica to comfort his mother, and one of the things he tells her not to fear on his behalf is poverty.

The last line is the one to keep. The rich men Seneca describes go through the motions of voluntary discomfort: they eat off earthenware and dine on the ground. And they are still “always afraid of this for which they sometimes wish” (Consolation to Helvia 12). Poverty staged as a holiday changed nothing, because the judgment underneath it, that being poor would be a disaster, was never examined. That is why Letter 18 insists on a real pallet and hard bread rather than the rich man’s playacting, and why its test is a question about fear, not a feeling of accomplishment.

What the practice is after appears in Marcus Aurelius’s portrait of Antoninus Pius, the emperor who adopted him and whom he succeeded:

“When he had them not, he did not want them” (Meditations 1.16). That is the aim: not to learn to like hardship, and not to distrust comfort, but to be able to go either way, like the Socrates Marcus recalls, who could both do without and enjoy the things most people can only overdo. In Stoic terms, comfort stays a preference and stops being a need. That is temperance, the virtue of right measure, and one of the four virtues the practice serves. A plain day now and then is a way to check that it still holds.