The Little Book of Stoicism: Timeless Wisdom to Gain Resilience, Confidence, and Calmness

by Jonas Salzgeber

Imagine strong emotions to be like your inner wolf—immensely powerful when let loose and able to pull you wherever it wants to. Emotions activate an action tendency—when you feel angry, for example, you have the tendency to clench your fists, shout, and throw stuff. Basically, when the inner wolf is angry, we let it take over, and then we blindly follow the action tendency and act out. What the Stoics found, however, is that we don’t need to follow that tendency. We can train ourselves to act calmly despite feeling angry, act courageously despite feeling anxious, and going east despite the wolf pulling west. Fortunately, we don’t need to pretend the wolf isn’t there, or even kill it (which isn’t even possible). The Stoics want us to tame and learn to understand that wolf. Instead of letting it dictate our actions when it’s angry, anxious, or hungry, we act calmly despite the anger. It can snarl and howl as much as it wants, we don’t fear it and act as we choose to. The wolf doesn’t have a say in our decisions any longer despite feeling the action tendency. The goal isn’t to eliminate all emotions, the goal is to not get overwhelmed by them despite their immense power. We feel the emotional wolf, but we keep on our path despite it pulling in another direction. “Okay, the wolf wants to freak out, but what would it help?” we say to ourselves. We rise above our emotions, we can hear it snarl, but we know we neither need to listen nor follow along.