What the Stoics taught about worry and anxiety

Try the Worry exercise

This is the Worry exercise from I Need Perspective in the Stoic Practice app, step for step and free. It has seven short steps and takes about three minutes. Every step is optional, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

The order is the point. You name the worry, list only what is true right now, and then name what you are picturing. With facts and guesses on separate lines, you can see how much of the weight comes from the second list. The sort asks which of these things is actually up to you, the line Epictetus draws in the passage that follows it. Then you choose one action you can take today. How things turn out, and what other people decide, you leave where they belong.

The exercise is for something that might happen. If what troubles you has already happened and can’t be changed, the Outside My Control exercise fits better.

Everyday worry, and when to get help

This page is about ordinary worry: the night before a hard conversation, the wait to hear about a job, a message from your manager that says only “Can we talk tomorrow?” The Stoics wrote about situations like these: a singer walking out in front of a crowd, a man about to face someone powerful, a friend waiting on a lawsuit. What they offer is a set of questions. What do I want here? What do I actually know? What is up to me?

Epictetus on anxiety: the singer and Zeno

Epictetus was a former slave who taught philosophy at Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece. His student Arrian wrote down the lectures we call the Discourses. One short discourse, headed “On Anxiety (Solicitude)” in George Long’s 1877 translation, begins with the question Epictetus asked whenever he saw someone anxious: what does this person want? (Those opening lines are the teaching in step five of the exercise.) Then come his examples.

The lute player singing by himself is calm. The same player in the theater is anxious, though his voice and his hands haven’t changed. What changed is what he wants. He still wants to sing well, and for that he has his training. In the theater he also wants applause, and applause is not in his power. The anxiety follows the second want. Where the skill is his, so is the steadiness: “where he has skill, there he has confidence” (Discourses 2.13).

The pattern is easy to recognize. The presentation you ran through alone went fine; in front of the leadership team it feels different, because now you want them to be impressed and you can’t make them. A job interview, a first date, a toast at your sister’s wedding: the part that makes your hands shake is usually the part someone else decides.

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, is Epictetus’s example of the alternative. He could go to meet King Antigonus without anxiety, because the king “had no power over any of the things which Zeno admired” (Discourses 2.13). It was Antigonus, the man with the power, who was anxious, because he wanted to please Zeno.

Later in the same discourse, Epictetus answers someone who is anxious about how he will speak to a powerful man. In our paraphrase: you aren’t afraid of fumbling when you write a name like Dion, because you have practiced writing it, and every skill carries its own confidence. So practice the thing you are anxious about.

That gives you the first Stoic question to put to a worry: what do I want here that is not in my power? Often the answer is a guarantee. You want the review to go well, the money to arrive on time, the people you love to be safe. Nobody gets the guarantee. What you can have is your own part: the effort you put into preparing and practicing, and how you conduct yourself. That is the part Epictetus counts as yours.

Separate what you know from what you imagine

Worry mixes facts about the present with stories about the future, and it delivers both in the same tone of voice.

Seneca made this point in Letter 13 to his friend Lucilius. The usual English translations of the Letters are still under copyright in many countries, so here is the app’s paraphrase, labeled as one:

The much-shared line about suffering more in imagination than in reality comes from this letter. Seneca’s sorting is worth borrowing. A fear can come too early: you are suffering now over something that, if it happens at all, happens in March. It can be too large: you are picturing a bigger loss than the facts support. Or it can be about something that never happens. His test is to ask whether the thing is certain or only possible.

Here is what that looks like with a real worry. Your manager has asked to meet tomorrow at ten and hasn’t said why.

The left column is three lines long. The right column is a story you wrote, and you could write a happier one from the same facts. Steps two and three of the exercise exist to make this table.

Marcus Aurelius recorded a day when he saw where his own trouble had been:

The trouble, he says, was “not outside, but within and in my opinions” (Meditations 9.13). The meeting is outside. The story about the meeting is an opinion, and opinions are the part of a worry you can work on. Epictetus makes the same point in Enchiridion 5: people are disturbed not by things but by their opinions about things.

What is up to you when the future is uncertain

Epictetus lists the questions worried people ask, and the list hasn’t aged.

Of those questions, “how will it turn out?” is the whole of worry in five words. Epictetus doesn’t answer it, because no one can. He replaces it with something you can count on: whatever the outcome, what you do with it is up to you, and for Epictetus that is where good and bad are found. In his words, “however it may be, you will dispose of it well” (Discourses 4.10).

This is the idea that opens the Enchiridion: some things are up to us and some are not. Its modern name is the dichotomy of control. Apply it to tomorrow’s meeting. What your manager decides is not up to you. How you prepare is: you can reread your last review, write down two questions you want answered, and decide what you would say if the news is bad. What you do with tonight is up to you as well. You can replay the worst version of the meeting until 1 a.m., or you can finish the preparation and go to bed.

Marcus wrote a version of this as a reminder to himself:

You won’t arrive at the future empty-handed. The good sense you bring to today will still be yours when tomorrow comes, so you don’t have to settle tomorrow’s problem tonight.

None of this means ignoring the future. Thinking a bad outcome through on purpose, the practice now usually called premeditatio malorum, ends in a verdict. Worry circles the same scene and starts again.

If your worry is about a specific danger, see what the Stoics said about fear. In the app, the guided Fear and Uncertainty exercises are part of Premium; the Worry exercise on this page is free.

Worry and the present

Worry happens in the future tense. The Stoics kept bringing attention back to the present, because that is the only place anything can be done.

Marcus starts with two instructions. Don’t take on all the troubles of your life at once. And of the one in front of you, ask: “What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing?” (Meditations 8.36). He expects you to be a little embarrassed by the answer. Marked off from everything you expect to follow it, the present difficulty is usually small. What feels unbearable is the pile of imagined weeks on top of it.

He makes a related, more technical point in Meditations 6.32: of the mind’s own activities, only those that concern the present are in its power. And when a worry has grown so big you can’t see around it, Marcus has a wider lens. In Meditations 9.30 he tells himself to look down on all of human life at once: the countless herds of people, the voyages in storm and calm, the newborn and the dying. The modern name for this is the view from above.

Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life is about the ways we lose our time, and fear of what is coming is on his list.

His phrase “forget the past, neglect the present, and dread the future” is a fair description of a bad night of worry. Earlier in the essay, in chapter 9, he names the habit behind it: putting off living for a future no one can promise. That passage is discussed in our guide to On the Shortness of Life. On a worried evening, the answer to that habit can be quite literal. Write down the two things you need to say tomorrow, put the list somewhere you will see it in the morning, then make dinner and pay attention to it.

If the same worries come back night after night, the Evening Examination will show it: one of its five questions asks what outside your control disturbed you today. A Stoic daily routine shows how a morning teaching, this exercise and that evening review fit into one day.

In their own words

Two more short passages for when worry starts. Seneca’s Letter 24 appears in the app’s labeled paraphrase, for the same copyright reason as Letter 13.

Lucilius’s lawsuit is a worry in the plain sense: something that might happen and hasn’t yet. Seneca begins by saying he won’t steady his friend with hopes of a good verdict; he will take another route. The route is to look straight at the outcome Lucilius dreads and size it up. That is the opposite of the sidelong glance that keeps worry going.

Marcus sorts what happens into two kinds. What comes from outside, such as the hiring decision, the exam grade or the reply that hasn’t come, he meets with “freedom from perturbations” (Meditations 9.31). What starts with him gets justice: acting well toward the people around him. Worry tends to reverse that, spending its attention on the first part and leaving little for the second.