Massimo Pigliucci

Basically, it consists in this.

Before you go to bed, you take a little bit of time, not a lot, five, ten minutes maybe.

You get into a quiet corner of both your house and your mind, and then you go and reflect on salient events that happened during the day, asking yourself how you reacted, how you handled those things.

Seneca specifically, for instance, says, you know, you should go over and say, what have I learned today?

How am I improved myself?

In what way am I better?

Epictetus is even more specific.

It says that we need to ask ourselves three questions.

What did I do wrong?

What did I do right?

And what could I do better the next time that something like that happens?

It has very good empirical backing from modern science.

It really does work.

It is a kind of self-analysis.

Now, there is a limitation in doing self-analysis, which is, as especially modern psychologists have demonstrated, you know, human beings are very good at rationalizing.

So you can write down things and then you can make up all sorts of excuses about why you did certain things or you didn't do other things.

But the Stoics were aware of that, which is why they said, well, you need to do the self-analysis, you need to do the self-examination, but you also need some help.

And there are two major sources of help for the Stoics.

One is to imagine a role model.

So imagine that you're actually talking to somebody.