Jemma Spike

And at its best, I think, hopefully we can understand and see stoicism

as a philosophy that says, yes, the world cannot be good unless you make yourself good within it.

But also you do have a duty.

You do have that ethical duty to go out and do something about injustice and do something about what you're seeing around you.

So when you really understand that, I think you can hopefully see that it doesn't ask you to be passive and still.

It asks you to really

kind of get your hands dirty at times, if that is what's going to make the world better and that should be your priority.

Okay, so let's leave that behind.

Let's talk about how we can actually apply stoicism if that is something you want to do and if you want some of those psychological benefits we spoke about.

One of the selling points of stoicism is ironically how cheap it is and how little it needs from you.

How do you practice everyday stoicism?

Here are some examples.

Firstly, you need to recognize that

Much of the wellbeing talk pushed on us today suggests that you should remain positive all the time without exception.

All you should be working towards is to just be happy and to not have any negative emotions.

This is very different to stoicism.

A practice that was very popular amongst the Stoics was something called negative visualization.

Basically,

Imagine, and this is going to sound so counter to what maybe a therapist would suggest to you or somebody else, but imagine at the start of your day everything that could go wrong that day.

And also then imagine all the ways that you could fix all those things that would go wrong.