How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

by Donald J. Robertson

Sometimes merely remembering the saying of Epictetus, that “it’s not things that upset us,” can help us gain cognitive distance from our thoughts, allowing us to view them as hypotheses rather than facts about the world. However, there are also many other cognitive distancing techniques used in modern CBT, such as these: • Writing down your thoughts concisely when they occur and viewing them on paper • Writing them on a whiteboard and looking at them “over there”—literally from a distance • Prefixing them with a phrase like “Right now, I notice that I am thinking…” • Referring to them in the third person, for example, “Donald is thinking…,” as if you’re studying the thoughts and beliefs of someone else • Evaluating in a detached manner the pros and cons of holding a certain opinion • Using a counter or a tally to monitor with detached curiosity the frequency of certain thoughts • Shifting perspective and imagining a range of alternative ways of looking at the same situation so that your initial viewpoint becomes less fixed and rigid. For example, “How might I feel about crashing my car if I were like Marcus Aurelius?” “If this happened to my daughter, how would I advise her to cope?” “How will I think about this, looking back on events, ten or twenty years from now?”