SMRT 2020 Week 4 Stoic Resilience

Introduction

Week Four consolidates your learning from the previous

weeks and attempts to deepen your understanding
further.

It will focus on expanding your improvements across

other areas of life, more generally, and also maintaining
your progress over the longer term by preparing for a
wide range of future challenges.

Social media use is optional for this course, but we recommend that you
follow Modern Stoicism on Twitter and Facebook, if possible. You can now
also join our Facebook discussion group for SMRT.

Image: Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic Emperor of Rome.

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Welcome to Week Four

Welcome to week four of Stoic

Mindfulness and Resilience Training!

Well done, you’ve made it to the

fourth and final week. This chapter
mainly looks at ways to maintain your
well-being in the long-term by
anticipating future adversity and
potential setbacks and preparing
yourself to cope with them resiliently.

You’re nearing the end of a four-week course, but what will happen next? Are
you simply going to revert back to your previous habits or will you take
forward some aspects of what you’ve learned? Will your future ways of
responding be different from your responses in the past?

It’s time now to prepare for the future by building on what you’ve learned.
How can you ensure that you remember the most helpful parts, address any
problems or obstacles you’ve still got to overcome, and anticipate any
potential future setbacks? Pause to consider what advice you’d give someone
else who was nearing the end of this training, to help ensure they continued to
benefit…

The pages that follow contain some strategies derived from ancient Stoicism,
combined with some very generic principles used in modern behavioural skills
training. In particular, we’re going to be looking at the ancient Stoic resilience-
building technique called premeditation of adversity (praemeditatio malorum).

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YouTube Live Webinar

Set a reminder now for the introductory live webinar on Youtube, which will
take place at 4pm Eastern Time on Sunday 31st May. Missed it? Don't worry
because you can watch the replay via the same link.

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Overview of Week Four

The emphasis this week is on bringing together what you’ve learned so far,
broadening its scope to apply across different aspects of your daily routine,
and extending it to help prepare for potential setbacks in the future.

This is the overall plan for week four…

• Lesson. This week focuses on general resilience-building and “relapse

prevention” or how to strengthen your Stoic Mindfulness techniques in
advance to face a broad range of potential future setbacks.

• Daily Meditation exercise. Your daily exercise is going to change now

from being a single-sitting meditation to being a more “rapid and
frequent” approach, that requires mindfulness of yourself, and of your
Stoic principles, much more regularly throughout the course of each
day. https://learn.modernstoicism.com/courses/361577/lectures/5539464

• Audio recording. This week you’ll be listening to a more intensive 15

minute meditation recording each day, on Stoic premeditation of
adversity, that challenges you to mindfully confront imagined future
“catastrophes” or setbacks while rehearsing philosophical “indifference”.
https://cdn.fs.teachablecdn.com/wmPpWhRzTku1fg961SuJ

• Self-monitoring. This week, instead of monitoring your thoughts,

actions, and feelings, etc., you’re going to work on developing a
“blueprint” for future resilience and reviewing it each day, particularly by
trying to expand your awareness of the “early-warning signs” of
emotional disturbance or bad habits.
https://learn.modernstoicism.com/courses/361577/lectures/5539473

• Discussion questions. “What would be the pros and cons of

continually remembering, when starting to feel distressed about a
situation or event, that it’s not things that upset us but our judgements
about things?” https://learn.modernstoicism.com/courses/361577/lectures/5539477

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• Optional webinar. Discussing the materials and exercises for this week.
https://youtu.be/VVRAFsJl19g

In this final week, it’s particularly important that you make full use of the
Comments section, if possible. Discussion has the potential to help you resolve
any unanswered questions and tackle any remaining obstacles by talking them
through with your fellow students. Often just the process of putting a question
into writing and sharing it can help people arrive at a new way of looking at
things, and find their own solution. However, but the comments you receive
from other people can also be extremely valuable, especially if you’re able to
contemplate a range of perspectives on the issues you face.

As always, if there’s anything you don’t understand or get stuck with, let us
know immediately, by posting on the Comments section or contacting the
course facilitator, and we’ll do our very best to help you.

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The Basic Concept

The final stage of training in a psychological skill often concentrates on:

1. Generalization, or applying it to a wider and wider range of situations

2. Relapse prevention, or anticipating potential setbacks in the future and

preparing for them in advance

The ancient Stoics were interested in achieving comprehensive and lasting

personal transformation, so it’s not surprising that they employed a similar
approach. They did seek to address short-term emotional problems,
somewhat like we would in modern counselling or psychological therapy, such
as coping with bereavement or other traumatic life events. However, most of
the time, their focus was on building long-term psychological well-being and
preparation for coping with future setbacks, which is similar to what we call
emotional “resilience-building” today. To put it another way, Stoicism is more
than a therapy – it’s a philosophy of life. That said, even in the ancient world,
many people were initially drawn to Stoicism as a way of coping with short-
term emotional challenges, and only later became convinced of the
philosophical truth of its underlying doctrines and its value as an actual way of
life.

One of the best-known strategies employed in ancient Stoicism is called the

premeditation of adversity (praemeditatio malorum, in Latin). This involves
training yourself in advance to face future misfortunes or setbacks with
philosophical equanimity by repeatedly visualising typical “catastrophes” or

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losses as if they’re happening right now, while practising Stoic equanimity.
(William Irvine describes a similar technique in his bestselling book on
Stoicism, which he calls “negative visualization”, although the rationale he
presents is somewhat different from the ancient Stoics.) What the Stoics
describe happens to be very similar to one of the most robustly-established
techniques in research on modern psychotherapy, called “imaginal exposure”.
(Many different names are used to describe roughly similar techniques.) We
know quite a lot now about the psychological processes involved in this
strategy and the best way to make it work. The most important fact is that
anxiety and many other negative feelings, generally speaking, tend to naturally
abate over time if exposure is repeated and prolonged enough, and certain
interfering factors are prevented. Psychologists call the process by which
anxiety naturally wears off “habituation”.

For the purposes of general resilience training, therefore, we would

recommend that you pick the things you’re going to visualize very carefully,
and do not attempt to face situations that seem potentially overwhelming.
Start with small things and work your way up, in other words. (Psychologists
call this “graduated” exposure.) Don’t rush things. Be systematic in your
approach. The ancient Stoics left some comments that hint they may have
been aware of the process of habituation. However, they didn’t leave clear
instructions about one key fact: the amount of time required. In therapy,
clients with clinically-severe anxiety are normally asked to visualize upsetting
scenes for roughly 15-30 minutes at a time, every day for a couple of weeks or
more. One of the most common mistakes people make is cutting this process
short, before their feelings have had time to fully abate. As a rough guide, it’s
usually recommended that you rate the intensity of your feelings from 0-100%
and continue the exercise, each day, until they’ve reduced to at least half their
peak level.

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Again, if you begin with easy targets, mildly upsetting events, you’re likely to
find the process of imaginal exposure takes roughly 5-15 minutes or less.
However, practising mindfulness strategies of the kind you’ve already been
learning can often reduce the time required, and this varies considerably from
one person to another. Don’t try to force your feelings to reduce, though, your
goal is to accept them, albeit in a detached manner, and allow them to settle
down naturally over time. It’s very important that you don’t cut the exercise
short as doing so can occasionally make negative feelings worse. You should
continue to patiently visualize the problem situation until your discomfort has
reduced enough. Doing this repeatedly, over several days or weeks, tends to
lead to a permanent reduction in the emotional reaction caused.

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ome Examples

The audio recording for this week will help guide

you through this process. So don’t worry if there seems to be a few more
things to remember this time. You can always re-read these notes later or
discuss your progress with the group as well. Let’s look at some examples of
how you might use Stoic premeditation of adversity that incorporate some of
the concepts and techniques you’ve been practising over the past few weeks.

Suppose you’ve noticed, through your self-monitoring, that you become

nervous during challenging conversations with certain people. You might
begin by picturing a scene in which you try to assert yourself while talking to
them. You’d pick a scene perhaps in which they’re mildly confrontational, and
your anxiety or discomfort could be rated about 30-40%, rather than one in
which your anxiety is 100% and you potentially feel quite overwhelmed. Start
with small steps and work your way up systematically. There are two main

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aspects of your Stoic practice that you might build upon during the audio
recordings, while you’re rehearsing ways of coping and exposing yourself to
(potentially) “stressful” scenes in your imagination.

Detached Mindfulness
The first thing you should do when picturing (seemingly) upsetting events is to
continually remind yourself, as Epictetus said, that it’s not things that upset us
but our judgements about things. Ancient Stoic students were told to have
this maxim always metaphorically “ready-to-hand” to cope with adversity, and
so you can repeat it to yourself as a “coping statement” while picturing
stressful situations each day. Think of this as if you were doing “mental sit-ups”
and strengthening your emotional resilience “muscles”, your Stoic principles
and values. Visualizing difficult situations gives you a way to build up mental
resilience even when you’re not currently facing any significant emotional
challenges in life. This “cognitive distancing” strategy alone, when used
carefully, can have very powerful benefits during imaginal exposure. Practice it
as a form of mindfulness. Be aware of your own value-judgments and
automatic thoughts, and observe them in a detached manner while you
picture future events. You don’t need to try to change your thinking, just
observe your habitual thoughts and judgments without “buying into them”.
Remember that an impression is just an impression and not the thing it
represents, as Epictetus puts it. Don’t allow yourself to be swept along by your
feelings and impressions. Just do nothing in response to them except studying
these subjective experiences in a detached and objective manner as if you
were observing someone else’s thought processes.

Valued Action & Virtue

It’s sometimes better to picture scenes more passively until your feelings have
abated enough for you to begin the slightly more complex task of imagining
yourself acting differently, in situations that require it. For example, if you feel

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ready to do so, you might focus on your core values, and mentally rehearse
how you would respond if acting according to your conception of virtue.
Perhaps doing what you would consider praiseworthy and healthy, or
emulating what you imagine someone wise, just, and courageous would say
and do in a similar situation. The Stoics advise us to focus on our commitment
to doing the right thing, and to place more importance on this than upon the
other person’s reaction, or the outcome of the conversation. To put it another
way, you’d distinguish carefully between what’s up to you, or under your direct
control, and what is not, in any situation you’re mentally rehearsing.

In a conversation, very simply, your own actions are up to you, but the other
person’s responses are not. When therapists train people in assertiveness skills,
likewise, the first step is often to encourage them to accept that even if you’re
very skilled at being assertive, the other person can still respond negatively. So
if you want to handle challenging situations well, you have to remember that
their behaviour is not under your direct control, and be willing to accept that,
whatever you do, your actions may fail to achieve the external outcome you’d
prefer to happen. In other words, from a Stoic perspective, it’s your own
actions that really matter not the other person’s. Focusing on the Stoic
concept of virtue, as what’s “up to us”, and indifference toward what’s outside
our direct control, can be particularly helpful when mentally rehearsing
situations that require you to interact with other people.

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Some More Comments

From a technical perspective, in Stoic Ethics, future events can be “preferred”

(or “dispreferred”) but only our own current actions are judged truly “virtuous”
or “vicious”, “good” or “bad”, “helpful” or “harmful”. In the premeditation of
adversity, however, future “misfortunes” are to be imagined as if they’re
happening right now, which actually means shifting them from the category of
things “dispreferred” to that of things judged absolutely indifferent. In other
words, for Stoics, this was a way of rehearsing total indifference and
acceptance toward external “misfortunes”. Once they’ve already happened
there’s no point wishing that they hadn’t. We can’t turn back the clock, and it
would be irrational and unphilosophical to desire to do so.

By pretending things we’d naturally want to avoid have already happened we

can prepare ourselves to cope with them if it turns out that we’re unlucky and
they do, in reality, befall us. Psychologists sometimes call this process of
accepting things in a matter-of-fact way and focusing on coping sensibly with
their consequences: “decatastrophising”. It requires an ability to let go of our
judgements of value about things that have already happened, our judgement
about them being a “catastrophe” and deeply-distressing. If not that, it at least
requires gaining “distance” from our distressing value-judgements, and
focusing instead on problem-solving in light of the current situation.

Q: “What if I can’t think of any upsetting situations

to imagine?”

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When people are focusing on general resilience-building they sometimes work
on a broad range of completely hypothetical situations, perhaps even ones
they’ll never face in reality. If you’re doing this, you should try to work on a
diverse variety of examples, if possible. People tend to brainstorm examples of
situations that would make them anxious or uncomfortable if they were real,
such as sky-diving, abseiling, being interviewed on television, speaking at a
huge conference, being launched into space, or anything that might be a test
of your ability to cope. The ancient Stoics typically rehearsed extreme life
events such as bereavement, poverty, illness, exile, shipwreck, and ultimately
facing their own death. Those examples are useful but we wouldn’t expect
people to mentally-rehearse very extreme emotional situations during an
online course like these, unless perhaps they’re completely confident in their
ability to do so safely.

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Download Audio Recording

This recording lasts about 15 min. and encourages you to mentally-rehearse

coping with an upsetting situation, using mindfulness and your Stoic principles
to prepare in advance for a range of anticipated challenges in life.

This week’s recording is very important because the lesson involves a slightly
more complex psychological process, which it will be much easier to
understand if you’ve used the audio recording. The recording also differs from
those in previous weeks in that it will require a little bit of preparation: just
that you have a clear idea beforehand of a specific situation that you can
visualise as if it’s happening now. You should pick a scene that’s mildly
upsetting, but not one that might potentially be overwhelming. Don’t bite off
more than you can chew. Take things in small steps. You can work on more
challenging situations later.

You’re going to patiently replay this scene in your mind, repeatedly. That will
require a little more concentration and patience perhaps than the previous
exercises you’ve completed, which is why we’ve kept it until the last week of
the course. You’ll also be asked to make a mental note of the level of
subjective discomfort you experience (from 0-100%) – which is normally
roughly 30-40% for people working on a relatively mild problem.

Download

https://cdn.fs.teachablecdn.com/wmPpWhRzTku1fg961SuJ
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Daily Meditation Exercise

This exercise differs from the others in that it’s intended to be practiced
repeatedly and frequently throughout the day, applying your skills across a
wide range of different situations and activities. This is designed to help you
maintain a more general “Stoic” attitude toward life and build longer-term
emotional resilience.

You’re going to try to remind yourself in a fairly rapid and frequent manner,
throughout the day, of your Stoic principles. The idea is to introduce a
structured routine that doesn’t take any real time out of your day but will
“spread” attention to your Stoic practices throughout as much of your day as
possible, ideally developing an attitude of Stoic mindfulness that’s as near-
continuous as possible. A common way to do that is to remind yourself very
frequently throughout each day, perhaps during every waking hour, to pause
and reflect on your principles or employ some basic psychological practice,
such as a mindfulness exercise, for as little as one minute at a time.

Examples
Here are some examples of ways that you can help yourself to practice very
frequently each day:

Reveal Examples

1. Make a rule that for the next seven days you’re going to try to do your
daily exercise at least once during each waking hour of the day. Check

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the time frequently and try to make sure you don’t let an hour go by
without doing your practice even if it’s just for one minute. You could
set an alarm on your mobile phone to help you remember, for example.

2. Make a rule that you’re never going to leave a room or begin a new
activity or conversation without pausing for at least one minute first to
engage in your daily practice. Alternative cues would be eating,
drinking, or using the lavatory – which can be treated as signals to
pause beforehand and do your mindfulness practice for at least a
minute. Obviously, that won’t always be possible but you can still try to
use this as a reminder to do it as often as seems realistic and
practicable.

3. Create cues or reminders for yourself such as setting an alarm, changing

the wallpaper on your computer or mobile device, or even tying a piece
of string around your finger. People often put (software) sticky notes on
their computer desktop or real sticky notes around their home and
office as reminders. You may need to change these cues slightly each
day so that you don’t become habituated to them through over-
exposure, and stop noticing them.

People often report that it’s easier to do their practice very frequently if they
tell themselves something like “Even if it’s just for one minute, I’m going to do
this…” In reality, once you get started, you’ll usually find you naturally spend a
little bit longer on your exercises. People virtually never complain that this
takes up too much time in their day, though, as it seldom seems to eat into
time spent on other worthwhile activities.

At first, as you’ve already learned, it can take quite a bit of determination to

instigate a new pattern of behaviour but it helps to keep telling yourself that it
gets easier with practice, which you’re bound to find is the truth. People
normally report that within a few days it starts to feel more “natural” and
“automatic” for them to pause frequently and employ their mindfulness
practice.

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Brief Mindfulness Exercise

The daily exercise we’re going to recommend is the one below. However, by
this stage in the training you may have your own ideas about a brief strategy
that you’d rather employ, perhaps drawing on material from previous weeks.
You may also find that you can adapt previous meditation or psychotherapy
strategies to support your Stoic training, and that should be fine.

Here’s the standard “default” strategy we’re recommending, though, in case

you need something more specific as a guide:

1. Stop what you’re doing for at least one minute, or more if you want.

2. Turn your attention inward and focus on observing your own mental
activity, from moment to moment, keeping your attention firmly
grounded in the “here and now”.

3. Don’t try to change anything, or stop anything from changing. Just

notice the difference between what’s “up to you” and what isn’t.

4. If it helps, just repeat a word in your mind each time you exhale and
notice the way you’re doing this voluntarily, and how other thoughts
and feelings cross your mind involuntarily.

5. Observe your automatic thoughts and feelings from an “indifferent” and

detached perspective, without “buying into them; as if you were
studying the thoughts of another person.

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Essentially, you’re being asked to ground your attention in the present
moment, become more attuned to your own actions and judgements, and to
recall two key Stoic maxims:

• Some things are “up to us” and some things are not; only our own
voluntary actions and judgements are under our direct control.

• It’s not things that upset us, but our judgement about things; remember
that troubling impressions are just thoughts and not the things they
claim to represent.

Similar brief exercise methods have proven very effective in behavioural

psychology and in modern research on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
It’s really just a way for you to squeeze more benefit out of your Stoic training
by making it into something that’s more familiar and habitual, and also
applying it across a wider range of situations each day. The broader the range
of settings in which you become adept at practising your strategies, the more
robust the benefits will become, and the greater your emotional resilience will
be in the face of unexpected future adversities.

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Self-Monitoring

In the final week, you’re going to develop a blueprint or “coping plan” for
maintaining your resilience in the future, and review this each day to make
sure you’re able to follow it satisfactorily. The idea is to formulate a simple
conceptualisation of the habits you’re most determined to overcome, and to
become crystal-clear about the key factors you’d need to observe to
implement any change. This doesn’t necessarily take much time. You’ve should
have plenty of time to reflect on things and try to simplify your observations
over the past few weeks into a handful of key observations, worth
remembering for the long-term.

A simple revised coping-plan might be composed of three main elements,

which can be subdivided as follows:

1. Triggers. The signs or situations that you need to keep an eye on, and
be particularly cautious about, in order to prevent yourself from
relapsing into old habits…

1. Early-Warning Signs. These initial signs might be bodily

sensations, such as trembling, or thoughts, such as “What’s the
point!, which you recognise as being early-warning signals of
unwanted reactions.

2. Situation. These are the “high-risk” situations, in which you

consider yourself most vulnerable to setbacks, and where you
therefore need to be especially cautious and mindful of your
responses.
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2. Previous Response. This is the old pattern of coping, which you’ve
decided to abandon and replace with something more constructive;
these are voluntary responses, you can potentially choose to cease.

1. Thoughts. Sometimes this is the trickiest part because we often

overlook our thoughts unless we’ve been practising mindfulness
carefully. For that reason, though, it’s especially useful to try to
identify the ways of thinking that you could “do without”, i.e.,
unnecessary and unhelpful ways of responding.

2. Actions. What unhelpful ways of coping, or behaviours, could be

abandoned or replaced? The hardest part of this is noticing that
inaction, or avoidance, sometimes in very subtle forms, is often
the pattern of behaviour that needs to be reversed. That might
include subtle patterns of mental behaviour such as distracting
yourself or trying to block your feelings, etc.

3. Alternative Response. This is the new way of coping that you want to
introduce into the situation, on the assumption that doing so will often
take effort and perseverance, and that you shouldn’t expect to succeed
perfectly first time.

1. Thoughts. What would be a more helpful thing to tell yourself in

these situations, or when you notice these early-warning signs
arising? This should be realistic and truthful, but also constructive
and helpful – not just “positive thinking” in the sense of
Pollyannaism.

2. Actions. What would be a more helpful thing to do in these

situations, or when you notice these early-warning signs arising?
What would be a constructive way of responding or alternative to
avoidance?

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Example Coping-Plan

Once you’ve got a clear idea of your revised coping plan, it’s helpful to write it
down in a reasonably concise form, which you should review each day, and
attempt to improve, where possible. You might want to write this down on a
small card and keep it in your pocket, or save it on a notepad in a mobile
device. Here’s an example of how you might lay this out concisely. The gaps
are filled in using an example of someone who wants to control their temper,
especially in conversations with their partner…

EXAMPLE COPING-PLAN
From now on, whenever I notice these early-warning signs…
[Clenching my teeth, frowning, tensing my shoulders, starting to raise my
voice.]

…especially in situations like these…

[Arguments beginning with my partner, worrying about things at work.]

…instead of responding by thinking this…

[“I can’t handle this”, “I don’t know what to do”, “What’s the point!”.]

…and doing this…

[Dwelling on things and worrying about the worst-case scenario, criticizing
other people unnecessarily, staying awake late at night worrying, getting into
arguments, shouting.]

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…I will practice telling myself…
[“I’m not in the right frame of mind to deal with this; I’ll come back to it later
once my feelings have settled down”; “I can deal with this if I take things
slowly; I’ve got through plenty of similar things in the past”; “It’s not this
situation that’s upsetting me, it’s my value-judgments, and placing too much
importance on things outside of my direct control”]

…and doing this…

[Pausing, viewing my upsetting thoughts in a detached way, and postponing
problem-solving until my feelings have calmed down; accepting my thoughts
and feelings without struggling against them; viewing my thoughts with
detached mindfulness; explaining to my partner that I can sense I’m becoming
tense and that I need to take time to clear my thoughts properly before
responding.]

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Worksheet: Coping Plan

Use this scratchpad to practice writing your coping plan.

Triggers

From now on, whenever I notice these early-warning signs…

Situations

…especially in situations like these…

Old Thoughts

…instead of responding by thinking this…

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Old Actions

…and doing this…

New Thoughts

…I will practice telling myself…

New Actions

…and doing this…

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Week Four Knowledge Check

Quiz

1/1

Which of these statements are true?

Stoicism is about repressing all emotions.

Stoicism teaches us to place no value on the outcome of our actions.

Stoicism teaches that virtue is the only true good.

Ancient Stoics were actively engaged in politics and the military.

Go to Teachable to take this quiz and find out the answer

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Complete Brief Course Evaluation

Go to Teachable to complete this at

https://learn.modernstoicism.com/courses/361577/lectures/15679545

In addition we would be very grateful if you could complete the full set of questionnaires as
you did at the start of the week – the link for this will be provided at the end of the course.

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What Next after Week Four?

Congratulations on completing the lesson for week four. Now it’s time to start
putting things into practice!

NB: If you completed the questionnaires at the beginning, it's very important
that you resubmit your responses at the end of Week Four, once you've
completed the entire course. After the course end date, you'll receive an email
reminder to complete the questionnaires with a link and the final "finishing the
course" section will be published online.

You should start using the techniques covered right now, if possible, and
continue with them each day throughout the following week. If you think you
might have any problems adhering to the daily practices, or need any
clarification, get in touch right away with the course facilitator.

However, your first step should be to visit the Comments section, as soon as
you’re ready, and post your thoughts on the question for this week:

What would be the pros and cons of continually remembering, when starting
to feel distressed about a situation or event, that it’s not things that upset us
but our judgements about things?

Here’s a second question for you to consider, and discuss, if you want:

How can you help yourself to make the best use of this distinction in daily life?

Go to the Discussion section below and post your thoughts. If there’s

anything whatsoever you could use help with, either technical stuff or the
course content, please don’t hesitate to contact the course facilitator.

Show your Support

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