SolutionsCBT

Someone asked me this a few days ago on a podcast. I think, to be completely blunt, Marcus would think that our society has become much stupider and more gullible. I mean that very seriously. Marcus, like most Stoics, had studied logic in depth. He also spent decades, almost daily, training himself in classical rhetoric, in both Greek and Latin, under the tuition of the finest scholars in the empire. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion but it also teaches us how to avoid being duped by other people's persuasion strategies. Rhetoric and logic are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. For instance, we have to understand logical fallacies to avoid them, in logic, but in rhetoric they are sometimes used on purpose to manipulate others. Educated Romans would wipe the floor with us in this regard. I think Marcus would take one look at the Internet, and modern news media, and think we're already living in a kind of idiocracy where logic has gone out of the window and crazy rhetoric proliferates, with obvious fallacies being used to manipulate the audience in an hourly basis. I really think, because of his training and education, that he'd see through a lot of this manipulation a lot more easily than most people today.

We have some answers to that scattered throughout ancient sources. First, as a (former) evidence-based clinician, I have to say that people should go to a qualified professional first for assessment, and an evidence-based treatment plan for clinical depression. That said, Stoicism can probably also help many people - ideally in addition to modern scientific psychology. The Stoics would advise us to separate our value judgments from the external events to which they refer. That's a tricky concept to describe but it's the basis of one of the most successful modern techniques "cognitive distancing" - it's best to read up on that to find out more about how it works. The Stoics have about 18 distinct psychological strategies so it's hard to summarize them all here. (See my Stoicism and the Art of Happiness for an in-depth explanation.) Another common strategy that helps many people is the View from Above, which involves training yourself to broaden the scope of your perspective in both space and time. Again, you'd be best to look that up, as it's tricky to describe in a few sentences, but, for instance, when people are depressed they typically narrow their scope of attention to focus on negative experiences and exclude other experiences that provide context that could moderate their (depressed) emotions. So the Stoics were on the right track.

That's a really good question. We'd have infer that to some extent but I think there's good evidence. In the Meditations we can clearly see him criticizing his own character. To cut a long story short, the Stoics think we need to learn to talk to ourselves, and befriend ourselves, so that we can become our own inner mentor and teacher. Marcus is doing that in the Meditations. He tells himself not to be ashamed, for instance, to ask for help, as long as he's trying his best. Stoics reviewed their behaviour using a method described in the Golden Verses of Pythagoras. If Marcus followed this - found in Epictetus, Galen and Seneca - he would review his actions three times each evening and ask himself three questions: What did I do well? What did I do wrong? What could I do differently next time? (To paraphrase slightly.) He'd try to learn from his failures, in other words, quite systematically, and commit to improving the next day. Stoics do not blame themselves, for their failures, though. What's beyond remedy is beyond regret! We should learn from mistakes not dwell morbidly on them. We have to move forward, in life, not get stuck looking backwards.

That's tricky, and to be honest, it's not my area of expertise. My specialism was in treating anxiety disorders, particularly social phobia. Maybe this article on Stoicism and ADHD is helpful, though. Stoicism can probably help with emotional stress associated with ADHD symptoms much in the same way that it's applied to emotions in general. You'll find lots of detailed discussions of how to do that online. It may be that, if you find audio recordings a useful way to do exercises, the Stoic Week course run by Modern Stoicism would be a good fit.

Dozens of different ways. So I'll have to simplify and pick a few basic examples.

1. Stoicism teaches us to distinguish more clearly between aspects of our lives that are under our direct control and aspects that are not (everything else) - our own actions versus stuff that happens to us. Stoics carefully train themselves, each day, to take more responsibility for their own voluntary acts and to be more emotionally accepting of events that befall them, outside of their sphere of control. Most people find that basic strategy ("The Dichotomy of Control") helpful.
   
2. Stoics also use a strategy I'd call a form of "Cognitive Distancing" that involves remembering that it's not events that upset us but our judgements about them, which there's solid research now showing can alleviate strong emotions.
3. Stoics also downgrade the perceived catastrophic nature of setbacks to a more balanced and realistic level ("threat appraisal") by focusing on the transience of external events. Clients who are recently divorced might imagine themselves several weeks, months, or years in the future looking back on events with greater detachment. That's similar to what modern therapists call "Decatastrophizing" events.

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