Stoicism when you’re overwhelmed

What is actually past bearing

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as private notes to himself while he was Roman emperor, a job that never came with a short list. Several entries are about the feeling of having too much to carry. This is the most direct.

Overwhelm is mostly a problem of addition. Take an ordinary bad week: a report due Friday, your father’s hospital appointment on Wednesday, a car repair you can’t pay for until the end of the month, a child home sick, two hundred unread emails. Each of those fits inside a day. What doesn’t fit is the total, and the total is what your mind keeps handing you, usually around two in the morning. Marcus tells himself not to let his thoughts “at once embrace all the various troubles” (Meditations 8.36). Nobody can hold that armful, and nobody is asked to.

His question is meant for each occasion, not for the week: “What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing?” Put it to the call with the insurance company, the email to the landlord, the hour at the kitchen table with the report. Tedious, often. Uncomfortable, sometimes. Past bearing, rarely.

The point about time does the rest. On Monday, Wednesday’s appointment can’t hurt you; what hurts on Monday is your picture of Wednesday. Marcus reminds himself that “neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present,” and the present is a much smaller thing than the week. In the sentence that follows our excerpt, he adds (in our paraphrase) that the present shrinks to very little once you mark off where it ends, and he tells himself to scold his mind if it can’t hold out against even that.

None of this means pretending Friday isn’t coming. Working on the report on Tuesday is work done in the present, and it is exactly the kind of occasion Marcus means. What he tells himself to set down is everything else: carrying Friday, Wednesday and the end of the month through every hour before they arrive.

Necessary, not few

Marcus didn’t only collect maxims; sometimes he argued with them. In 4.24 he quotes a well-worn piece of advice and corrects it in his own notebook.

The philosopher Marcus has in mind is probably Democritus. Seneca quotes a version of the same maxim under Democritus’s name in On Tranquility of Mind (13), and he too reads it as advice about unnecessary business, since necessary business has to be done however much of it there is.

Taken literally, the maxim is no help to plenty of people. A nurse covering a double shift, a parent of three, someone caring for a sick partner: their days are full, and very little of what fills them is optional. Marcus moves the test from quantity to necessity, and he defines necessity by what “the reason of the animal which is naturally social requires.” The people who depend on you are part of that. This is not a license to go quiet and decline everything.

What gets cut is the surplus, and Marcus thinks it is most of the pile: “the greatest part of what we say and do being unnecessary.” The meeting you attend so that you are seen there. The third look at a shared document nobody has touched. The reply-all. The argument you rehearse with someone who isn’t in the room.

The last line matters most for overwhelm, because so much of the load is mental. Going over the list again, picturing how badly Friday could go, drafting replies in the shower: none of that moves anything, and Marcus’s point is that it doesn’t stay mental for long. Cut the thought and “superfluous acts will not follow after.” The anxious thought that your manager thinks you’re behind becomes a status update nobody asked for, the update starts a thread, and the thread takes an hour. His question works on a thought as well as on a task: “Is this one of the unnecessary things?”

If what remains really is all necessary, 4.24 has done its job and 8.36 takes over: the list is long, and you will still meet it item by item. Saying so, and asking for help or for more time, is often part of what is necessary. If the trouble has turned into not starting at all, the guide to procrastination picks up there.

Busy is not the same as purposeful

Not all overwhelm comes from a long list. Some of it comes from motion. Seneca describes Romans who spend the whole day hurrying between houses, theaters and market-places, always looking as if they had something to do and getting nowhere.

The ants are the memorable image, climbing to the top of the bush and back down again. The sharper observation comes just before them. These people don’t do what they decided to do; they do “what has casually fallen in their way” (On Tranquility of Mind 12). An inbox, a team chat and a phone are three machines for putting things in your way. A day spent answering them can leave you exhausted and still end with nothing you set out to do. Seneca’s name for that state, “restless indolence,” describes it exactly: tired from moving, idle where it counts.

He does want the running about limited, but the advice he draws from it is to know what the work is for: “keep some object in view.” It pairs well with Marcus’s question. Marcus asks whether a thing is necessary; Seneca asks whether it has a point. For the version of this that lives in an office, see Stoicism at work.

A short life and a crowded day

When there is too much, the shortness of life sounds like an argument for hurrying. In 4.26, a run of quick reminders to himself, Marcus draws a different conclusion.

Marcus writes that “thy life is short,” and what follows is not so do more. It is to “turn to profit the present” with reason and justice: use this stretch of time with good sense and fairness. Speed is not on the list. “Make thyself all simplicity” comes at the same problem from the other side: fewer layers, fewer performances, fewer plans about plans.

Another entry gives a measure for a day that won’t fit.

Marcus asks that each act be done “as far as is possible,” and tells himself to “be content” with that. On an overloaded day this changes the standard. Did I get through everything? depends on how much the day threw at you. Was each thing I did done properly and fairly? is up to you. When something breaks the plan, such as a meeting that runs long or a call from the school, Marcus’s answer is not to write off the rest of the day. The effort moves to “that which is allowed,” and that is where the next good act is.

The closest free practice

In the Stoic Practice app, Overwhelm is one of the twelve exercises in I Need Perspective. The guided Overwhelm exercise is part of Premium. The closest free practice is the dichotomy of control, the modern name for the division that opens Epictetus’s Enchiridion: some things are up to us and some are not. It takes about two minutes. You name what is bothering you, sort its parts into what is up to you and what is not, and choose one action for the part that is yours.

It fits overwhelm because so much of what crowds the mind belongs on Epictetus’s other side. His list of things not up to us includes reputation and office (Enchiridion 1), and a heavy week is full of both: whether the client will like the draft, what your brother will say at dinner, the rumor about the reorganization. Each feels like one more item, but none of them is yours to do. Sorting them out leaves the week as long as it was, but it shows you which part of it was ever your work. If the weight is mostly dread about what might go wrong rather than how much there is to do, the guide to worry is the better fit.