Massimo Pigliucci

That's where you get the stiff upper lip.

although they're not the same thing.

And stoicism is about being conscious of your emotions and trying to regulate them in a way that is actually good for you.

And you can see how you can go from there to the simplistic version of, oh, that means I just need to suppress my emotions.

So, I was an electrical engineering student at the University of Michigan, and as you can imagine, this meant lots of stressful problem sets and lots of stressful exams.

But funny enough, taking exams wasn't actually the part I dreaded most.

The real horror always came after the exam was finished, when everyone poured out in the hallway outside the lecture hall.

That's when the post-mortem would begin.

Hey man, what'd you get for question two?

I do have an equivalent for question four.

What did you do?

See, I'm a terrible test taker, so these conversations are absolute torture to me.

Within minutes, I'd discover all the ways my answers were different from my friends, and I'd be convinced of my failure as an engineer.

Now, one day, after a particularly brutal electromagnetics final, I walked out feeling devastated and certain I bombed it.

Sure enough, my friends were also worried, waved me over to go over answers with them.

But as I was walking over there, it suddenly hit me.

The ink was dry.

The grades were now in the hands of the professor and completely out of my control.

Why put myself through the stress of confirming whether I'd messed up when there was nothing I could do about it?

Oh, perfectly.