Jemma Spike

And I think that is just

in many ways in my many short years, like the secret to happiness.

It's the strange philosophy of not holding on too tight because if it is meant to be, it will stay.

And if it's not meant to be, you'll just hurt yourself more trying to force things to be the way that you want them to be.

When also you don't always know what's going to be the best outcome.

Like you actually don't know what's going to make you happiest.

You just have to be prepared for any outcome and make do with what that is and know that you can make happiness within that.

Okay, so this brings us to the huge major question of the episode.

What impact does stoicism actually have for our brain and on our psychology?

This may all sound really nice in theory.

Does it actually help is basically what we want to talk about.

And the short answer is 1000% yes, it does.

In fact, new research shows that authentic stoicism, so not like the suppress your emotions type, predicts much better well-being.

a much greater sense of happiness, better friendships.

And we know this from one of the biggest bodies of work done on Stoicism research called the Stoics Attitude and Behaviors Scale.

So there's this very famous philosopher and psychotherapist, his name is Tim Lebon, and he is the lead researcher in creating this

scale and this scale basically identifies seven dimensions of stoicism and how they relate to happiness so it gets people to self-report it asks people a bunch of questions that are kind of like thinly veiled at targeting these things things like virtue things like mindfulness benevolence and then it looks at how their life is turning out are they a happy person

this scale has been tested on thousands of people worldwide.

And not just people who say they practice stoicism, but just the average person, some of whom end up adopting stoic principles kind of by accident.

And the results are so clear.