6 Stoic Tactics to Escape Negative Thought Loops

The Stoics did not view hardship and challenges in life as something to avoid at all costs. Instead, they saw them as opportunities for developing virtue and mental toughness. They thought that all human beings need a bit of adversity to grow, just as a muscle needs to be broken down before it can become stronger. When we adopt the same view of hardship as the ancient Stoics, our resistance to negative thoughts and situations softens, and we can start finding the silver lining in any experience.

Very often in life, we complain when things don’t go out way. If not outwardly, then usually inwardly. This is essentially the pattern of resistance: the unwillingness to accept reality for how it is, and the tension you feel between your current experience and the experience you wish you had. The ancient Stoics noted that many things in life have a “price of admission.” In other words, to get what you want you typically have to be willing to pay the price to get it, which is often an emotional or behavioral price. By thinking of life in these terms, we unlock a more rational view of our situation and release the delusional grip of victim mentality.

The Stoics understood a very important psychological insight: when we personalize negative thoughts, they cause us to suffer more. When something we would classify as “bad” happens to a friend, we still care, but we also see the situation with calm reason. It is not a total catastrophe, but rather an obstacle to overcome. If we train ourselves to not take things so personally, to step out of our ego-based view of life, and see things from above, the sting is greatly removed from otherwise debilitating setbacks.

Our mind is a double-edged sword. Many of the great parts of our psychology, bring with them a problem. Anxiety, for example, is an emotional state that can keep us alive. It can keep us safe. But this same lifesaving emotion can also keep us stuck and afraid of living fully. In this lesson, we look at how our innate drive to understand the world through story, can also be a source of irrational pain. When met with a difficult situation, our minds like to add extra story elements and flesh out the narrative, even when those details are illusory and unhelpful.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to become happy in life. The first way is to chase after the things you want and acquire them. The idea with this method of happiness is that there is a gap between where we are and where we would like to be, and if we could close the gap we will achieve fulfillment. The other approach, one that the Stoics favored, was to train ourselves to want the very life we already living—to desire the possessions and relationships we have now. Always chasing things, they believed, leads us to become ungrateful for what we have and constantly look to the future for happiness in a way that resembles gambling with big highs and big lows. When you learn to consistently want what you already have, negative thoughts become just “thoughts.”