Les 1
Find The Hidden Source Of Your Anxiety
Your surface-level worry is rarely the real worry. The fear of being late for work might actually be a fear of being fired. The fear of being fired might actually be a fear of losing everything you've built. The fear of losing everything might actually be a fear of dying alone. We all have layers.
Today you'll practise the What If Technique — also called the Downward Arrow Method in cognitive behavioural therapy — to trace your anxiety down to its real root. It's a Socratic questioning exercise built from Stoic self-inquiry and modern CBT, and it's the foundation of everything that follows in this course. You can't work with an anxiety you can't see clearly.
The session might feel uncomfortable. It may even stir up new anxieties as you go deeper. That's the point. You're doing the work the Stoics called "knowing thyself" — and it's why Day 1 is Day 1.
Complete this session today and move to Day 2 tomorrow. For best results, return to the What If Technique whenever a new anxiety surfaces — it works on every layer.
Les 2
Build Your Personal Stoic Anxiety Maxim
The Stoics weren't emotionless. That's the biggest myth in all of Stoicism. What the Stoics actually trained was the second half of the emotional sequence — the moment after the involuntary first impression, where you either confirm or challenge what you're feeling with reason. Miss that moment, and whatever the nervous system throws up runs the show. Catch it, and you're free.
Today you'll build a tool for catching it: your personal Stoic anxiety maxim. A short, memorised phrase designed specifically for your anxiety — something concrete to reach for in the moments reason is hardest to access.
Epictetus carried maxims for everything. "An impression is all you are, not the source of the impression," he'd tell himself under pressure. "I am kissing a mortal," he'd say when saying goodnight to a loved one. The ancient Stoics used these relentlessly — not as inspirational quotes, but as practical tools deployed in the moment of difficulty.
You'll build your own using three rules the session walks you through:
- If-then format — anchor the maxim to your specific trigger so it reliably fires ("Every time I feel my voice tremble, I will…")
- Specific and concrete — no vague generalities
- Phrased in the positive — what to do, not what to avoid
By the end you'll have a personalised implementation intention tied directly to whatever anxiety pattern you uncovered in Day 1.
Memorise your maxim today. Recite it whenever the trigger appears — during the rest of this course and long afterwards. The more you use it, the faster it works.
Les 3
Make Anxiety Your Ally, Not Your Enemy
Here's the paradox at the heart of anxiety: the harder you fight it, the stronger it gets. Feeling anxious about feeling anxious is the trap most sufferers are stuck in without knowing it. What you resist persists.
Today you'll practise the Stoic reframe that breaks the loop. Instead of treating anxiety as something to remove like a tumour, you'll learn to meet it with curiosity — as a teacher, an ally, even a friend. This sounds counterintuitive until you understand the mechanism: by becoming physically relaxed in anxiety's presence, you stop feeding the fire that keeps it burning.
You'll practise a guided mindfulness of sensations — noticing where anxiety actually lives in the body, welcoming it fully, and staying with it long enough for something to shift. We'll also look at why panic attacks happen (it's a feedback loop, not a medical event) and how the Stoics and modern psychology both agree on the cure.
Return to this session whenever anxiety surfaces during the rest of the course. The practice of welcoming rather than fleeing gets easier every time.
Les 4
The Stoic View From Above: Gain Perspective On Your Fear
When anxiety grips you, your world shrinks. The problem in front of you feels like the only problem in the universe. Your body, your thoughts, your fear — everything zooms in until there's no room for perspective.
Today you'll practise the Stoic technique Marcus Aurelius used to break that spell: the View From Above. It's a guided cognitive distancing exercise drawn directly from his Meditations, in which you zoom out from your situation progressively — first watching yourself on a movie screen, then seeing your life from a god's-eye view, then from space itself, then through the eyes of an alien civilisation wiser than our own.
At each stage the anxiety shrinks. Not because the problem has changed, but because the frame around it has. This is the Stoic answer to being trapped inside your own head.
This is the session most students return to when they're overwhelmed. Bookmark it. Use it whenever your world shrinks.
Les 5
Premeditatio Malorum: Face Your Fears To Heal Them
Psychologists know anxiety behaves like a flame on a candle. Avoiders try to dampen the flame — which only extends the burn. The counterintuitive truth is that the fastest way to end the flame is to intensify it until the wick burns out.
Today you'll practise Premeditatio Malorum — Premeditation of Adversity — a Stoic exercise that does exactly this. Rather than avoiding the thing you fear, you'll deliberately imagine it, vividly and in detail, making it worse each time you replay it. Modern psychology calls this cognitive exposure. The Stoics called it preparation.
The exercise delivers three benefits: it motivates practical precautions, it builds resilience in advance of the feared event, and it generates gratitude for what hasn't happened yet. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus all practised this daily — not out of pessimism, but as the foundation of genuine equanimity.
This session is demanding. Complete it fully — the effect depends on going all the way in. Return to it whenever a new fear begins to grow.
Les 6
Amor Fati: The Formula For Deep Acceptance
Yesterday you practised facing your fear. Today goes one step further: you'll practise loving it.
Amor fati — love of fate — is a concept the Stoics pointed toward and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche named directly. The formula is radical: don't just accept what life gives you, love it so completely you would ask for more of it. More anxiety. More adversity. More of everything that presents itself.
This sounds counterintuitive until you try it. When you ask for more of what you fear, something strange happens: the fear loses its grip. You reframe the emotion from "something to remove" to "something to welcome," and the entire relationship changes. The Stoic acceptance paradox is that the first step toward feeling better is being genuinely okay with feeling bad.
You'll practise this with the specific anxiety you've been working with throughout this course. You'll also explore the self-acceptance versus self-improvement paradox — and why the Stoics saw no contradiction between loving your fate and still working to change it.
Return to this session whenever you find yourself in resistance — against anxiety, against circumstance, against life itself. Amor fati is a practice, not a one-time realisation.
Les 7
The Stoic Death Contemplation: Annihilate Your Deepest Fear
The final session. And the deepest.
Some of the great philosophers — Stoic and otherwise — believed that nearly every anxiety we carry traces back to a single root fear: the fear of death. If that fear loosens, every fear above it loosens with it. If it doesn't, the others always grow back.
Today you'll practise the Stoic death contemplation. The Stoics — Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus — thought about death every day, not out of morbidity but as the foundation of a well-lived life. You'll contemplate death at three distances: ten years from now, one year from now, and one day from now. You'll imagine your own body after death. You'll sit with Epicurus's argument that death may not even be an experience. And you'll finish with a compassion practice, because the Stoics believed inner work is only half the job.
This is a demanding session. It's also, for many students, the one that changes the most. The fear beneath all fears, faced directly, tends to shrink to the size of what it actually is.
Complete this session once to finish the course. Return to it when the big fears surface — a diagnosis, a loss, a sleepless night. The contemplation doesn't get less powerful. It gets more precise.
