Category: Stoicism

I believe it starts on 6th June but there’s some flexibility – you should contact Optimize to confirm, though. Hope you enjoy the course!

Thanks, Kasey!

Special Offer for Optimize Coach Program

Special Offer for Optimize Coach Program

I first started training therapists and life coaches about 25 years ago. People often ask me if there are any online courses for life coaching or self-improvement that would be good for someone interested in Stoicism. I don’t usually recommend courses unless I know quite a bit about the content and the people running them. So I’m pleased to be able to say that there’s a really good online training coming up soon by Brian Johnson, author of the book A Philosopher’s Notes, which draws heavily on Stoic philosophy — a subject he’s as enthusiastic about as I am!

Kasey Pierce recently did Brian’s Stoicism 101 Masterclass and has just published a short review in my Medium publication Stoicism — Philosophy as a Way of Life.

​Review of Stoicism 101: Online Course from Optimize​

The Optimize Coach program starts on 6th July. I told Brian I was going to pass on the details. So his team have very generously created the special code STOIC10, which as a subscriber to my email list you can use to obtain 10% off in addition to the early-booking discount. Registration has just opened, so you can obtain the best price if you book right now. That’s a fantastic offer.

I’ve been enjoying Brian’s content for several years now… Over the next few days, I’ll be sending you some more information about the amazing resources he has available on Stoicism, etc.

Please let me know your thoughts, and feel free to forward this email to anyone you know who may be interested in learning about Stoicism and coaching. Thanks.

Hope you enjoy the course,

Donald Robertson

Retelling the Story of Diogenes the Cynic

This is a story about a filthy dog… Over two thousand years ago, in ancient Greece, there lived a very controversial philosopher, who upset a lot of people. At first everyone hated him, sneered at him, and called him The Dog. But by the time he died, the people loved and admired him so much that they built a beautiful pillar, in his honour, made from white marble, with a statue of a little dog on top. His real name was Diogenes of Sinope and for over five hundred years he and his followers were known as the Cynics or Dogs. I’m going to tell you how he became one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy.

Read the rest of this article on Medium.

Retelling the Story of Diogenes the Cynic

Retelling the Story of Diogenes the Cynic

This is a story about a filthy dog… Over two thousand years ago, in ancient Greece, there lived a very controversial philosopher, who upset a lot of people. At first everyone hated him, sneered at him, and called him The Dog. But by the time he died, the people loved and admired him so much that they built a beautiful pillar, in his honour, made from white marble, with a statue of a little dog on top. His real name was Diogenes of Sinope and for over five hundred years he and his followers were known as the Cynics or Dogs. I’m going to tell you how he became one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy.

The Oracle of Delphi

The Dog came from Sinope, on the Black Sea coast. He was the son of a wealthy banker, in charge of the city’s coinage. According to legend, the Delphic Oracle, the priestess of Apollo, prophesied that he would gain a reputation for defacing the currency. So he literally rendered piles of silver coins unusable. Funnily enough the authorities didn’t approve. He was caught and banished forever from his home city. The Dog wandered to Athens, a penniless exile without a friend in the world.

However, some say he heard about a wise philosopher called Antisthenes, one of Socrates’ followers, who made a virtue out of poverty. Antisthenes defined being rich as having more than you need. Most people try to become rich by accumulating more money and possessions than they need. But as our possessions grow our desires keep growing, and we’re never really satisfied this way. Antisthenes therefore concluded that the only way to become truly rich is by decreasing our needs rather than increasing our possessions.

Training the Dog

So the Dog also trained himself to live with minimal possessions: a tattered cloak, a knapsack, a clay bowl, and a wooden staff to defend himself. By day he begged for food, at night he slept rough on the porches of public buildings, using his cloak as a blanket. One day he saw a little boy drinking from his cupped hands. The Dog exclaimed “A child has beaten me at my own game!” and smashed his bowl.

The Dog advocated plain speaking. And he ridiculed the famous philosopher Plato’s lectures as long-winded nonsense. He went round to his house and trampled on his expensive carpets, saying “Thus I trample on Plato’s vanity!” Surprisingly, Plato hated this. He called our hero “Socrates… gone mad!”

Diogenes also trained himself and his students in shamelessness. He tied a rope around the neck of a bottle and used to walk it like a dog through the busy potters’ district, ignoring people who laughed at him. And he liked to masturbate in the public marketplace. He said he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing his belly as it was to relieve sexual desire by rubbing his penis. And he was always getting beaten up in the street.

Abducted by Pirates

The Dog was wise, though. He said that humans are both the most intelligent and most foolish of all creature. When he saw the work of philosophers, physicians, and navigators, he was in awe of man’s intellectual capacity. But when he heard people talking about religious mumbo jumbo or their love of money and material possessions, he remembered how foolish and gullible we all are. Once he saw the officials of a temple dragging out a boy who had stolen a donation bowl. He cried out “Oh look, the big thieves are leading away the little thief.” He said the love of money is the root of all evil, over three hundred years before the New Testament.

One day, during a sea voyage, the Dog was kidnapped by vicious pirates, thrown in chains, and sold at a slave auction. When the auctioneer asked where he was from he said “I am a citizen of the world”, literally a cosmopolitan. Then the Dog spotted a wealthy Corinthian in the audience and yelled “Hey, you look like you need a good boss — to tell you how to live!” So the man bought him, and instead of being his slave, the Dog ran his household, and educated his two sons in philosophy.

Alexander the Great

The most famous legend was that Alexander the Great heard about the Dog and sought him out. He found him lazing naked in the sunshine, in a grove of trees outside the city of Corinth. Alexander was the most powerful man in the world. He was known as a patron of philosophers so he said “Ask me for anything you wish.” And the Dog replied… “Could you stand aside, you’re blocking the Sun.”

Alexander turned around, bemused, and walked back to his entourage, who were falling about laughing. However, he hushed them and said: “Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be this man.” Alexander said he wanted to come back and speak some more to the Dog but first he had to finish conquering the world. However, he died of a fever, years later in Babylon. He requested that his hands should be allowed to dangle out of his funeral casket, as it travelled through the city streets on a wagon, so that everyone could see even Alexander the Great left this world… empty handed.

The Tail of the Dog

Later in life Diogenes the Dog realised what the Oracle must have meant when she said he’d gain a reputation for defacing the currency. It was a metaphor for his iconoclastic nature. His destiny was to tear down social conventions, make people question their values, and show them a radically different way of life.

He finally succeeded in defacing the currency by teaching the Athenians that money alone can’t make you happy. Diogenes died happy even though he was a penniless exile and people called him a filthy Dog.

Well, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you seem to me to just have answered your own question, insofar as your reply shows you’ve not really understood the concept of “cognitive distancing”, how the Stoics understood it, and why it’s so important in modern psychotherapy. You’ve overlooked points made in the article itself, such as that it’s not just that our feelings are subjective (as you say) but that they’re determined specifically by cognitions, which matters.

I’m not suggesting that someone suffering from depression will be able to climb out of it. Rather, to be very specific, that by noticing the cognitive biases caused by depression, as they’re happening, they are (we know from research and clinical experience) typically able to gain cognitive distance, which often leads, especially with practice, to a reduction in the intensity of certain symptoms. That works both for “low mood” and, to some extent, for clinical depression. I mentioned at the start of the article that I’m a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, working with clinical depression, and the strategies I’m describing are, in fact, derived in part from research on depressive disorders.

How can Ancient Wisdom Help the Youth of Today?

How can Ancient Wisdom Help the Youth of Today?

Words of advice for young people? I’m a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist and the author of several books on Stoic philosophy. I’m always giving talks and workshops on self-improvement, or talking to people about ways we can help ourselves grow more emotionally resilient. There’s a perennial question that keeps coming up in these sort of conversations whenever a good idea emerges — why isn’t this being taught in schools?

There are a lot of important things we don’t teach young people, for some reason. Probably far too many to list here. (Although we’re well into the 21st century now, most of the time they’re still not even being taught proper sex education!) So I’ve set myself the more modest goal of explaining three basic lessons from Stoic philosophy, which might be of particular interest to younger people.

1. Our thoughts shape our feelings

When we’re upset about something, or someone, we naturally tend to blame our feelings on whatever it is we’re upset about. “If I’m angry with my girlfriend, it’s her fault.” What if that’s a mistake, though? When his friends got in an argument with someone, Socrates used to ask them if others felt the same way about the things that were annoying them. What if other people feel differently about the thing that upsets you? It can’t be the external event alone that’s making you feel that way, otherwise everyone else would be upset about it too — there must be something else going on.

Our own thoughts and attitudes determine our emotions in most situations. Maybe that seems obvious but we tend to forget it. We see other people making themselves upset unnecessarily about trivial things but we don’t realize when we’re doing it ourselves. That’s because we all have a huge blind spot for the way our thoughts influence our own feelings. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reputedly said that you can see the tiny sliver of wood in your brother’s eye but not the huge plank of wood in your own. We easily spot small ways in which other people are biased but we don’t notice ourselves doing the same thing, even if it’s on a much bigger scale.

It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said: “It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them.” That quote was made famous by early cognitive-behavioural therapists because it expresses in very plain language what we call the “cognitive theory of emotion”. At first, it might not be obvious how remembering this helps you but trust me it does. The moment we genuinely realize that our feelings might be different and that there are other possible ways of looking at a situation, we free ourselves, to some extent, from the grip of strong emotions. Psychologists call this freedom “cognitive distancing”, and many research studies have shown how powerful it can be as a way of managing feelings such as anxiety, anger, or depression.

There are many techniques that can help you separate your thoughts from external events in this way. For instance, writing the upsetting thoughts down on a piece of paper and looking at them as if they’re words spoken by someone else can help. Alternatively, if I notice myself thinking “This guy is an idiot, and I can’t stand him”, I might restate that slowly as if I’m observing my thoughts:

I notice right now that Donald keeps telling himself: ‘This guy is an idiot, and I can’t stand him.’

There are many other similar techniques. With practice, it becomes much easier to view our own thoughts from a detached perspective. However, the key is just to remind yourself that it’s not things that upset us but rather our own opinions about them, particularly our value judgments. Getting into the habit of doing that will give you a lot more freedom and resilience when coping with distressing emotions.

2. Getting upset involves selective thinking

There are many modern studies that show the ways in which our thinking is distorted by strong upsetting emotions. We don’t usually realize, of course, when it’s happening. Once again, though, it’s easy to notice that other people aren’t thinking straight when they become very angry, anxious, or depressed. The ancient Stoics said that “anger is temporary madness” and they were basically right about that. We become less rational when we’re upset and worse at solving problems, especially complex interpersonal or social ones.

When people are anxious, for instance, their thinking becomes biased in terms of overestimating risks. We all know that anxious people tend to exaggerate signs of danger. They also tend to underestimate their ability to cope. When we’re afraid, our brain is in a different mode of functioning. We go looking for more things to worry about. It’s a sort of confirmation bias. Sometimes this is called “threat monitoring” — where anxious people are on the lookout for things to be scared about. Conversely, that often means ignoring potential signs of safety. Someone who’s not feeling anxious will look at the same situation in a more balanced way, rather than focusing on the worst-case scenario.

The same is true of other feelings, such as anger, where we look for more reasons to get annoyed, and depression, where we interpret everything more negatively. However, realizing that strong emotions distort our thinking in this way can help free us, to some extent, from their influence. If I’m feeling depressed, and I know for sure that depression makes me look at things negatively, I can tell myself “This is just my depression talking — it’s not the only way of looking at things.” Generally, strong negative emotions make our thinking more selective, narrowing down its scope. So trying to broaden our perspective can help counter their effects. Looking at the bigger picture is usually a more balanced and rational way to view things.

For instance, when people are anxious they tend to visualize things that could go wrong. However, that means choosing a slice of time to focus on — it’s selective thinking. We know that worrying tends to focus on the worst moment in a sequence of events. Someone worried about losing their job would focus on the moment their boss tells them they’re being made redundant, perhaps. Having a narrow focus on the problem is like putting it under a magnifying glass. And selective thinking is also like what we call a lie of omission — it’s a form of self-deception.

One of the simplest and most powerful techniques used in cognitive therapy is simply to ask “And then what would probably happen next?”, and repeat that question a few times. Losing your job is tough at first but after a while, you’ll probably find another job. It might still be a short-term setback but thinking about the bigger picture in this way is not as overwhelming as focusing only on the worst moment.

3. Anxious feelings abate naturally if we let them

I would describe this as, arguably, the most robustly established finding in the entire field of psychotherapy research. It’s also something that ancient authors, including the Stoics, seem to have realized. Strong feelings, particularly anxious ones, tend to naturally fade over time, under the right conditions. Psychologists call this “emotional habituation”, and it happens even in simple organisms. It’s so basic that it’s almost more like a physiological process than a psychological one.

Imagine a woman with a severe spider phobia enters a room filled with spiders. Our heart rate is actually a pretty reliable measure of anxiety. So what will happen to her heart rate? It will go up, of course, as her phobia is triggered. If it’s a severe phobia it will probably go up from roughly 70bpm to around 120–140bpm within less than ten seconds, as though she’s started running pretty hard. And that’s what she’ll feel like doing! She’ll also experience a strong urge to “escape” the situation, by leaving the room. That’s how anxiety works, right?

Why on earth would she remain in a room filled with spiders if she’s got a spider phobia? Well, usually it would be because someone else is there, encouraging the individual to wait it out, and endure their feelings of anxiety for a while longer. That’s what therapists normally do when using the evidence-based phobia treatment we call “exposure therapy”. It’s not the only time people do this, though. As a child, your parents (if they’re smart!) might have encouraged you to face certain fears in order to overcome them.

So what will happen to her heart rate if our spider phobic doesn’t leave the room? What goes up must come down, right? Her heart rate will gradually reduce toward its natural resting level, or thereabouts. How long will that take? Well that varies but in some cases it might just be five or ten minutes, in more severe cases it might be half an hour or more.

Then we should ask what would happen if she came back and did the same thing again the next day. Well, her heart rate would go up but not as high as before, and it would reduce more quickly. What about if she did it on a third day? Well, her heart rate would increase but even less this time, and it would reduce, once again, even more easily. Eventually, maybe after 3–5 hours, someone with a simple animal phobia will find their anxiety has pretty much extinguished. That tends to be a lasting, permanent, reduction in most cases, unless there’s a reason for it to relapse — such as being attacked by a pack of wild spiders! In fact, exposure therapy of this kind has about a 90% success rate in clinical trials.

For exposure therapy to work it has to be prolonged enough. The most common reason for it not working is because the individual quits and leaves the situation too early. It also has to be repeated several times. There are other variables that can interfere with our emotional processing but generally speaking, repeated, prolonged exposure tends naturally to bring about emotional habituation, or the extinction of the feelings of anxiety being triggered. It’s the simplest technique in modern psychotherapy — so much so that therapists can find it a bit boring to do after a while. We know that this is how anxiety works and yet most people do the opposite and avoid their fears rather than facing them systematically.

So why aren’t these things taught in schools? Good question. Nobody knows. I think good parents, throughout the centuries, have always taught some of these basic psychological lessons to their children. Many of us have to learn the hard way, though, through a mixture of studying books, and trial and error learning from the school of hard knocks. I hope that this article helps some young people to learn simple ways they can cope better with upsetting emotions. Let me know what you think in the comments, and feel free to share this article if you can think of anyone who might find it helpful.

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