The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient

by William B. Irvine

WHEN YOU EXPERIENCE A SETBACK, your subconscious mind goes to work trying to fathom its cause, and it is inclined to point an accusing finger: it looks for another person as the cause and likes to attribute sinister motives to that person. More generally, your subconscious mind tends to treat life’s setbacks as undeserved tribulations. It therefore tries to convince you that you have been wronged. Shortly thereafter—unless you take steps to prevent it—your emotions will rise in support of your subconscious mind’s interpretation of events. But whereas your subconscious mind likes to nag your conscious mind into submission, your emotions shout their demands. As a result, in the aftermath of a setback, you might, much to your surprise, find yourself shouting at the person your subconscious mind has accused.

When you experience a setback, your conscious mind can therefore become the target of a double attack—a crossfire, as it were—directed by your subconscious mind and assisted by your emotions. Under these circumstances, your conscious mind will struggle to think clearly, and as a result, you might end up with a second-rate workaround to your setback. And even worse, once your emotions are triggered, they are hard to subdue, so they may continue to disrupt your life long after the setback that triggered them has been overcome. Dealing with your emotions and your subconscious mind, I should add, is a lifelong challenge, since unlike any children you might have, your emotions and subconscious mind are never going to grow up.

The Stoic philosophers long ago understood and appreciated the power of framing—not that they used this term to describe it. According to Epictetus, “Another person will not do you harm unless you wish it; you will be harmed at just that time at which you take yourself to be harmed.”2 More generally, he reminds us that “what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.”3 Seneca shared this view—“It is not how the wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken”4—as did Marcus Aurelius: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”5 The Stoics, in other words, knew that while our subconscious mind is inclined to frame events in ways that trigger negative emotions, we can substantially undermine that tendency by consciously reframing events.