Jemma Spike

People who score highly on

A stoic lifestyle, everything, like not everything, but a lot of stuff is better for them.

Less anxiety, less anger, greater resilience.

In contrast, people who suppress their emotions, people who don't have a guiding philosophy like stoicism, have low acceptance, more anxiety, and they don't have a core value set.

So they do worse on a lot of these other scales.

Neurologically as well, stoicism makes us happier.

It makes us more patient, kind, better able to respond rather than react because it allows us to interrupt the fearful parts of our brain and redirect our behavior in that split, like 40 to 50 milliseconds.

where we get a say over what we're going to do.

It allows us to be present in that moment, in that choice.

When you have a guiding philosophy like stoicism, it basically puts your frontal cortex more in charge, that rational part of your brain, more in charge of the fast, immediate, often irrational parts of your brain that just want you to choose and just want you to urgently do something and then often lead you down that irrational path of reacting.

I think the greatest evidence of Stoicism's psychological power is how prominently it appears in palliative and chronic pain research.

People who are at the end of their life, people who are really sick, people who are experiencing pain on all or most days.

there is increasing evidence to suggest that our beliefs about pain can actually influence our experience of pain.

Now, that's not to say a positive mindset fixes anything or everything.

Absolutely not.

No, no, no.

It's basically just that in these intense situations where sometimes there is nothing that you can do, the only thing you do have control over is your mindset.

And people who

act on that mindset, feel more empowered because it's about focusing on the thing that is for them and that they can, again, control.

One study in Victoria, in Australia, where I'm from, looked at 338 chronic pain patients from 20 to 100.