3 Stoic Practices For When You Overreact

Your face goes hot, your jaw tightens, and you’re halfway into a reaction before you remember what you know about staying calm. In this 16-minute talk, Jon Brooks explores Seneca’s three stages of anger alongside research on how the brain responds to emotional triggers. You’ll learn three Stoic practices: examining an impression before agreeing with it, calmly rehearsing difficulties in the morning, and reviewing the day in the evening. The aim is to give yourself a little more time to choose how you respond. Pick one practice to use for 30 days, returning to this talk whenever you need a reminder.
Please note that the content is educational and not a substitute for one to one professional care.

Transcript

What if the reason you kept losing your temper or your nerve or yourself was nothing to do with the willpower or a lack of self-control, But to do with a head start that your brain is giving your body that is measured in mere milliseconds? Here's something I find pretty crazy. Thousands of years ago, The ancient Stoics, Without any of the fancy tools we have now or fMRI scanners, Described an architecture of the brain that maps very closely onto modern neuroscience. And not only that, They describe the set of exercises to help us with the difficult emotions that we feel and the challenges we face as human beings that work for the very reasons they said they'd work. So in this video, We're going to keep things simple. We're going to explain what goes on in your brain when you get hijacked and three stoic exercises you can use to prevent some of the fallout when that happens. You've read some stoicism, Maybe a few quotes, Maybe a few books. You understand some of the basic ideas You have an impression. You're meant to examine the impression. It's your judgment, Not the event. And you take it on board and you think, This makes sense. I'm going to start living with this in mind. And then you get cut off in traffic. And then someone looks at you the wrong way. And then you get the reaction from another person that you didn't like. And before you can remember any of the theory of stoicism, You get hijacked. And you're halfway before that negative reaction, Even before you've remembered a single principle in stoicism. This is the gap between knowing something and living something, And I talk about this a lot. I actually see Stoicism a bit like a martial art for the mind, But it applies to learning anything. If you want to learn a language, You can learn some grammar and some theory and some new words. It doesn't mean you're going to be fluent in it. It doesn't mean if you move to that foreign country, You're going to be able to interact with the locals. And the same applies to Stoicism. You might learn a technique. You might read a quote that's interesting. It doesn't mean then that you can apply it under pressure. I really like it because it kind of teaches me how to learn. You learn a technique from your coach or instructor and then you're meant to do it in sparring against live resistance. But it's never as easy as it sounds. You might think you've mastered it, But you haven't. And there's a term for this called the illusion of mastery. And a lot of us go through life with this illusion, Like we feel like we've understood something or we've gotten something. And then we try to apply it under pressure when the stakes are high and we realize we don't know anything. Problem is martial arts is good for this, Because you have direct feedback. Same as a video game. People like video games because there's instant feedback. You either do it well or you don't. Whereas something like Stoicism or Philosophy, You don't get that instantaneous feedback. And so you don't quite know whether you're doing it right or doing it wrong. And so you can end up in this sort of intermediate purgatory space where you're not quite progressing and you're not quite remembering to use the tools that you've learned when it counts most. So let's get into some of the theory. Seneca wrote a book called on anger and in this book he described three stages. The first is what he calls a first movement, An involuntary tightening, The flinch. Your face goes hot, Your jaw clenches, Your heart is already beating faster and you haven't even thought yet. The second stage is where judgment kicks in. This is bad, This is unfair, This shouldn't be happening. And the third is the full emotion and by that point Seneca says reason has already being conquered. The Stoics had a Greek word for this first stage, Propitheiae, Or pre-emotion. Sometimes people call it the first movements. It's this reflex before the feeling fully arrives. This is a Stoic idea through and through. You can trace it back through the early Stoics, As far as Chrysippus, Who lived three centuries before Seneca. And they were describing something very interesting about the mind and about psychology, Way before anyone could truly map it in a scientific sense. And this is where things got pretty strange. In 2016, A paper in Nature Neuroscience did something almost no one had managed to do before. They got direct recordings from inside the human amygdala, That small almond-shaped structure deep in your brain that fires fast when something biologically important shows up. And what they found is that when people were shown an image of a fearful face, The amygdala started responding in around 74 milliseconds, Well before the visual cortex had finished registering what the face even was. The prefrontal cortex, Which is the part that does the careful thinking and the weighing and the is this actually a big deal or am I being dramatic kind of inquiry, That takes longer, A lot longer, Hundreds of milliseconds often more. By the time it's properly online, The amygdala has already written the opening sentence of your reaction. So that's what I mean when I say that your body gives your brain a head start. It's not like there's a lizard brain and a human part of the brain that's competing, That's pop psychology. And it's not like there's a clever part of you and a less clever part of you. It's more like the amygdala is this very clever but very fast salience detector that scans the environment and then passes on messages to the prefrontal cortex to sort and think about properly. Seneca saw this not in neurons but in behavior. He noticed himself, He noticed friends, He noticed the court of Emperor Nero, And he saw that there's this flinch for the Fudd emotion. There was a feeling before the decision and the later Stoic Epictetus built an entire practice around this idea. Wait for me a little, O impression. Allow me to see who you are and what you are an impression of. Allow me to put you to the test. The line wait for me a little, That's Stoicism in a sentence. That's the practice part at least. It's identifying the gap between the impression and whether or not you were sent to it. If you can get good at this skill, Noticing the impression before you agree or disagree with it, So that you can actually allow your prefrontal cortex to make the right decision, You are practicing a big part of stoicism right there. In the modern world, We tend to think more in stimulus and response rather than impression and assent, But it's the same gap. And we're going to look now at how we can actually train this. We're going to look at three different exercises that all have a backing with neuroscience, Something tangible that's been measured in the brain. OK, Number one is the pause or examining the impression. This is exactly what Epictetus was talking about in that quote. When an impression comes, We don't try to suppress it. That's a mistake. We let it be there, But we just notice it. We pay attention to it before we immediately agree or disagree with it. So the next time you get that reaction from someone you care about or that email or someone cuts you off in traffic, You ask a few questions. Is this impression that I have true? This situation as big as I think it is. What evidence do I have for believing this claim? And by the way, When we use the word impression, An impression is like a sense of something happening with a claim about reality baked in. So someone looks at you the wrong way and the impression is they disrespect me. Someone cuts you off in traffic and the impression is they're trying to kill me or they're a terrible driver. So an impression always has this claim. And so when we pause, We just examine the impression. And what that's doing neurologically is what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal. In 2014, A meta-analysis pulled together 48 separate neuroimaging studies of reappraisal published in Cerebral Cortex. The finding was consistent. When people reappraise an emotional stimulus, Several regions of the prefrontal cortex go up and activity in the amygdala goes down. So what we're doing here is we're using the slower, More deliberate part of our brain, The prefrontal cortex, To just manage the really fast amygdala so that it doesn't hijack us. The stoic term is assent, Which means agree with or disagree with or sort of endorse something. So sometimes something will bother you, Right, And it will make you feel flustered and unhappy in some way. And there is a claim about reality that comes to you through the impression. And if you feel this negative emotion, Some part of you has agreed with the impression, Right, So someone looks at you the wrong way, You think, They disrespect me. For you to then feel negative, You must on some level assent to it, Endorse it, Agree with it. And this practice is just saying, Hang on a second, Let me take a moment and pause here. It reminds me of something that happened a few weeks ago. I was hanging out in the house and the kids were playing outside and I heard like a shrill cry that came from my son. And in that moment, One of the other kids came through the door. My body literally jumped out of the seat. I thought something terrible is happening. You know, He's hurt, Something's gone wrong, He's fallen. And I looked up the door and he was just singing to himself. That is the amygdala. It's there in some sense to protect us, To keep us safe, But it was wrong in that situation. Now, Do I regret jumping up and looking outside? No, But I could have just paused a little bit and examined the impression a little bit more because there was really no strong evidence that anything had actually happened. The next exercise is premeditatio malorum, Where we preview the day ahead. So this is an exercise that Sanatha loved, Where the morning and by the way premeditation of adversity is another word for it and it can be translated as premeditation of evils. So in the morning you think of all the things that could possibly go wrong. Now hang on a second I'm not telling you to manifest negative things okay this is not what it means. You just you don't catastrophize right you don't make yourself more anxious you don't spin on different thoughts and worry. The difference between worry and contemplation is that worry is an automatic process that takes over you. Contemplation is where you are in the driver's seat. There's a world of difference between trying to go to sleep at night, You get these worrying thoughts that keep you up, Versus calmly sitting in a meditation posture and reflecting on things that could possibly go wrong and how you handle them if they do. And this is all basic stuff, Right? Maybe you have a partner that might be coming home a bit stressed. Maybe you have a child after school that is dysregulated. Maybe you have a meeting that you don't think will go well. Now, You could say that Aren't you just manifesting negative things by thinking in this way? Well, Not really. From a Stoic perspective, The only good is your character and how you act and how you think. Some people will go, Hang on a second, There's no way I'm going to be doing this because I'm just going to be making it more likely that I'm going to be manifesting these bad things. The Stoics didn't see it like that. The Stoics would say the only true good is virtue, Your character, And the only true bad is acting badly or having a bad character and everything else is indifferent. Makes sense. The meeting that doesn't go well isn't actually bad. It's indifferent. What always counts is how you respond to the meeting not going well. And by premeditating, You're actually improving your character. You're saying to yourself, Oh, This could go wrong. I'm expecting it. I'm not going to let it surprise me. And here's how I'll deal with it well in the moment. Modern psychology has a near identical version of this called stress inoculation training developed by Donald Mechenbaum in the 70s. The principle is the same. Cognitive preparation before a stressful event reduces your reactivity to it. When your prefrontal cortex has already rehearsed the scenario, The amygdala's response is smaller when the thing actually arrives. Have multiple engines because if one fails, The others can kick in. It would be naive for a pilot to say, Oh, I'm probably never ever going to crash. I'm not even going to think about crashing. They have to be prepared if something goes wrong to be able to land safely. And a lot of training for high level people is sort of thinking about what could possibly go wrong and to prepare for it. You're not predicting that it's going to happen, But you know, The same as a fighter needs to learn good defense. A fighter needs to think through all the possible things that could go wrong and sort of manage them if they come up, But at the same time have this confidence that things will work out. So I'm not asking you to believe all these things are going to go wrong, But to just meditate on them and to prepare your mind in case they do, So you're prepared and you can act well when they happen. This third exercise Seneca wrote about in his book on anger, The Era, And he credits an earlier Roman philosopher called Quintus Sextius, Who founded the school which Seneca trained in. And what we do at the end of every day, We ask ourselves some basic questions. Like, What did I do well? What didn't I do so well? Where did I react instead of respond? What could I do differently tomorrow? You keep it all about your character and your actions. You're not beating yourself up in any way. You're not trying to make yourself feel worse. You're just doing an audit of your character, Of your actions, So that you can improve a little bit each day. And here's what's happening in your brain when you do that. In 2007, Matthew Lieberman at UCLA ran an fMRI study called Putting Feelings Into Words. Participants saw images of emotional faces and their job was to match each face with the right emotional label. Not naming it out loud, Not writing it down, Just choosing the right word with a button press. Angry, Afraid, That kind of thing. That simple act of labeling, Putting the feeling next to its word, Dropped activity in the amygdala and lit up an area called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, The same kind of circuit that cognitive reappraisal uses. And naming an emotion disarms them. And that's what we're doing with the evening journal. We're not just journaling for the fun of it. We're not trying to beat ourselves up. We're taking the chaotic mess of the day that's unprocessed and we're giving it some shape and some structure with writing. And there's a lot of research on expressive writing that comes from James Pennebaker. And he's been researching this for 40 years. And the benefit doesn't come from just venting. It comes from shaping a narrative and using causal words like, Happened because of this and this is what I've learned. The narrative component, The writing it down does a lot of the heavy lifting here. And I've actually done some expressive writing myself for trauma and I found it incredibly valuable. Just writing for 15 minutes. You can do the evening review for today, But you can also go back and look at some of the most difficult periods of your life and journal about them and you should find some relief in doing that. What happened? What was I wearing? What did I want to do? Sense of this? How can I take responsibility? How was I a victim? How wasn't I a victim? You explore this in writing and there's a lot of research showing that it can actually heal trauma and that was my experience from doing it. So here's the honest part of all of this. None of this is going to change your brain overnight, Obviously. They showed a clear functional connection. When individuals did this eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction, They found clear functional changes between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. And I'm mentioning this because it does kind of map in some way onto this type of sustained stoic practice. It's the closest thing we have at the moment. But the really deep structural level changes to the brain probably don't happen after eight weeks. They can happen, But they probably take more like years. And so the goal is not really to change ourselves that deeply, You know, To come up with a new brain. We don't want to be a new person. We don't want to have a new identity. We want to be us, But we want to widen the gap between impression and assent, Just that little bit, So we, Us, Who we really are, Has an opportunity to choose properly and use good judgment. We don't need a new brain to do that, We just need to widen the gap. Go well.