Learning to catch things at an early stage makes it easier to derail the chain of behaviors that leads to the full desire or passion emerging. Raising awareness of the subtle elements of a behavior also makes it feel less automatic. For instance, most adults can tie their own shoelaces automatically, without thinking about it. However, if you try to teach a child how to do it, you may find yourself suddenly all thumbs. What was habitual and automatic when we didn’t think about it often becomes very clumsy and awkward when we are forced to analyze the steps or do it in a slightly different manner. That’s unhelpful if you’re performing before an audience or playing a sport, where thinking too much about your behavior can cause self-consciousness and disrupt routine actions. Ask someone who’s about to perform a skilled action, like putting in golf, whether they begin doing it by breathing in or out—that will often be enough to confuse them and put them off. The same principle, that self-awareness disrupts the automatic quality of the behavior, can be very helpful when you actually want to break a bad habit. 3. GAIN COGNITIVE DISTANCE
Once you’ve spotted the early warning signs of a craving or habit, you can also help yourself change by noticing the separation between your current perspective and external reality. We’ve already introduced the concept of cognitive distancing from modern psychotherapy. It provides a way of understanding one of the most important psychological practices in Stoicism: that of “separating” our values from external events. When a desire or habit emerges, you can take note of thoughts that encourage it—“I wonder what’s happening online”—and also thoughts or excuses that facilitate it—“It won’t hurt if I just check my social media messages for a second.” Observing these in a detached way, almost as if they were someone else’s thoughts, will help you gain cognitive distance and will weaken the urge to act on them. The Stoics do this, as we’ve seen, in a number of ways. Following them, you might “apostrophize” the thought, speaking to it as if to another person, and say, “You are just a thought and not at all the thing you claim to represent”—the thing itself having no intrinsic value. You might also adapt Epictetus and say “It’s not things that make us crave them but our judgments about things.” We are the ones who choose to assign value to things that look appealing.
It’s as though strong desires and feelings of pleasure are telling us “This is good!” Strong desire makes us forget that there are other ways of viewing the things we crave. However, pausing and gaining cognitive distance, by defusing your thoughts from reality, tends to weaken the strength of your feelings and the hold they have over your behavior.
There are many different ways of gaining cognitive distance. One is to imagine how a role model might perceive the same situation differently. Suppose you’re craving a hamburger. You might use the verbal technique of asking yourself, “What would Socrates do about this desire?” Socrates, as it happens, was careful about his diet and preferred to eat modestly. He thought that self-control was more important than pleasure, as we’ve seen, and if we avoid overeating, we will obtain more enjoyment from our food anyway. You could also ask, “How would Marcus cope if he had the same sort of cravings?” Of course, you might prefer to pick a role model of your own, perhaps someone you know personally, a friend, colleague, or family member, or even a celebrity or fictional character. First, consider what the role model you choose would say to themselves about the desire. How would they react to the initial awareness of the urge? Then consider what they would actually do. Of course, you don’t have to imitate them, but viewing the experience from different perspectives can weaken the strength of the feeling. You may be inspired to problem-solve and think creatively of alternative ways to respond. On the other hand, when people feel overwhelmed by desires or emotions, they can often only imagine one way of looking at events.
Marcus also talks about the importance of breaking things down into their components and reflecting on each part in isolation. The idea is that when we analyze something in terms of its elements and focus on each in turn, asking ourselves whether it alone is enough to overwhelm us, the whole experience will tend to seem more bearable. Similar “divide-and-conquer” techniques are employed in modern cognitive therapy to overcome problematic desires and emotions. We may as well borrow the term used by the early twentieth-century psychotherapist Charles Baudouin, who was influenced by Stoicism, to describe this psychological technique: “depreciation by analysis.”16 That means breaking any problem down into small chunks that seem less emotionally powerful or overwhelming.
For instance, when engaged in certain actions, such as bad habits of the kind we’ve been discussing, Marcus advised pausing and asking of each step: “Does death appear terrible because I would be deprived of this?” That gave him a way of isolating each part of a habit in turn and casting its value in question.17 For example, someone smoking a cigarette might ask with each puff whether losing that sensation would really be the end of the world. Someone compulsively checking social media might stop and ask if not reading each individual notification would really be so unbearable. If you practice self-awareness in this way, you’ll often (but not always) realize that the pleasure you obtain from such habits is actually much less than you previously assumed.
Marcus led the dance of the Salii, the ancient leaping warrior-priests, and trained in boxing and wrestling as a youth. He draws on these experiences, making the astute psychological observation that you can spoil the delights of song and dance just by pausing to analyze them into their parts—for example, breaking a melody down into individual notes, in your mind, and asking yourself of each small part: “Would this be enough to overcome me?”18 Likewise, in the pankration, an ancient sport combining boxing, wrestling, kicking, and choking, analyzing each of your opponent’s moves individually can help you learn to overcome them without feeling overwhelmed. Marcus therefore advised himself to analyze events into their component parts in order to break the spell of passion.
You’ve already learned about the concept of Stoic indifference, or apatheia. It has a very specific meaning—freedom from harmful desires or passions—that the Stoics distinguished from ordinary indifference. It’s not about being coldhearted or uncaring. Whereas Stoics believed that the only true good is wisdom and virtue, we tend to slip into the habit of thinking about external things as if they were more important than fulfilling our own nature. We’ve seen how the Stoics particularly emphasized suspending value judgments about external things. They did this by using language to describe events as objectively as possible. As we’ve seen, they called this firm grip on reality phantasia kataleptike, or the “objective representation” of events.
You can see how this concept could apply to managing unhealthy desires. People often talk about the things they crave in language that’s bound to excite their own desire, even when they realize they’re fostering unhealthy habits: “I’m dying for some chocolate. Why is it so good? It tastes like heaven! This is better than sex.” (It’s mainly vegetable fat, some cacao, and a load of refined sugar.) That’s another example of rhetoric working against you. On the other hand, when you describe food, or anything else you crave, in down-to-earth language, you can feel detached from it. Hadrian, who is thought to have died from a heart attack, greatly admired an extravagant dish jokingly called the tetrapharmacum, or “fourfold remedy,” reputedly invented by Lucius Verus’s father. It consisted of pheasant, wild boar, ham, and a sow’s udder, all wrapped in pastry. By contrast, Marcus would sometimes look at roasted meats and other delicacies and murmur to himself, “This is a dead bird, a dead fish, a dead pig.”19 An exquisite wine is just fermented grape juice, and so on.20 Viewed from a different perspective, in other words, the things people crave are often nothing to get excited about.