If every action is to be undertaken with the reserve clause, an acceptance that we may fail, then it follows that we should anticipate a whole range of setbacks that can potentially befall us. Indeed, the Stoics broaden this strategy, preparing themselves to cope with adversity by patiently visualizing every major type of misfortune, one at a time, as if it were already happening to them. They might picture themselves already in exile, in poverty, bereaved, or suffering from a terrible illness. As we’ll see, going one step further and anticipating your own death plays a very special role in Stoicism. The technique of exposing yourself to stressful situations repeatedly in small doses so that you build up a more general resistance to emotional disturbance is known in behavioral psychology as “stress inoculation.” It’s like inoculating yourself against a virus, and it’s similar to what we’ve come to think of as resilience building.
Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.” The clearest example of this prospective meditation strategy in The Meditations comes when Marcus describes part of his morning routine—preparing himself for the day ahead by anticipating various obstacles. Whereas other Stoics focus on the threat of disease, poverty, exile, and so on, Marcus is clearly more concerned with facing interpersonal problems, such as dishonesty, ingratitude, or betrayal. He imagines himself encountering a variety of difficult people in order to accustom himself to coping with them.
Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.8
It’s easy to see how this passage might relate to his life as emperor. Marcus certainly had enemies in the Senate, a faction opposing his military policy, and he later faced a full-scale civil war. He says that he was surrounded at court by individuals who didn’t share his values and who were hostile toward him; some even wished him dead. However, the Marcomannic Wars were themselves about treachery and deceit. King Ballomar of the Marcomanni was a Roman client and ally. Yet he secretly conspired for years to launch his surprise attack deep into Italy, bringing war to the very doorstep of Rome itself. He seized his chance at the height of the Antonine Plague, when the Romans were weak and troops normally garrisoned along the Danube were still returning from the Parthian War. It was a huge betrayal. So when we read this famous passage from The Meditations, we should bear in mind that Marcus was using Stoicism to prepare himself to deal calmly not only with petty nuisances but also with major political and military crises that changed the shape of European history. All of Rome was thrown into a panic by the news that a massive horde of barbarian warriors was plundering its way through Italy. Marcus responded calmly and with self-assurance. He used Stoic exercises like the premeditation of adversity to ready himself for sudden crises that would have left other men reeling.
Premeditation of adversity can be useful in confronting anger and other negative emotions, but its techniques are particularly suited to treat fear and anxiety. The Stoics defined fear as the expectation that something bad is going to happen, which is virtually identical to the definition originally proposed by Aaron T. Beck, the founder of modern cognitive therapy. Fear is essentially a future-focused emotion, so it’s natural that we should counter it by addressing our thoughts concerning the future. Inoculating ourselves against stress and anxiety through the Stoic premeditation of adversity is one of the most useful techniques for building general emotional resilience, which is what psychologists call the long-term ability to endure stressful situations without becoming overwhelmed by them.
Aesop’s fable “The Boar and the Fox” is all about building resilience. One day a fox was walking through the woods when he spotted a wild boar sharpening his tusks against the stump of a tree. The fox found this hilarious and made fun of the boar for worrying about nothing. When he finally stopped laughing, he asked, “Why are you being so fretful, you fool? There’s nobody here for you to fight!” The boar smiled and said, “True, but when one day I do hear the huntsmen coming, it will be too late then to prepare for battle.” The moral is that in times of peace, we should prepare for war if we want to be ready to defend ourselves. The Stoics likewise used moments of leisure to prepare themselves to remain calm in the face of adversity. EMOTIONAL HABITUATION
Of course, we don’t always know what specific challenges we’re about to face in life. However, your general emotional resilience can be developed by training yourself in advance to cope with a broad enough range of situations. That’s precisely what the Stoics did through the premeditation of adversity strategy. One of the most robustly established findings in the entire field of modern psychotherapy research is the fact that anxiety tends to abate naturally during prolonged exposure to feared situations, under normal conditions. That’s been the basis of evidence-based phobia treatments since the 1950s, and it’s also an integral part of modern treatment protocols for other, more complex forms of anxiety, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Take a person with a severe cat phobia, for instance, and place them in a room with some cats. Their heart rate will go up, probably almost doubling within a few seconds. But what happens next? Well, what goes up must come down … If they remain in the room and do nothing but wait, their anxiety will typically diminish over time. That may take as little as five minutes or maybe as long as half an hour or more. Nevertheless, in most cases, their heart rate will eventually go back down to something approaching its normal resting level. If you bring them back the next day and put them in the room with the cats once again, you’ll typically notice that their heart rate will go back up but not as high as before, and it will tend to lower more quickly. If you repeat this exercise for several days, then they will become emotionally “habituated” to the cats, their anxiety having permanently reduced to a normal or negligible level.
That this basic truth was understood long ago is nicely illustrated by another of Aesop’s fables, called “The Fox and the Lion.” One day a fox strolling through the woods spotted a lion—a creature she’d never seen before. She froze with terror but stopped to watch from a distance before slowly creeping away. The next day she went back to the same spot and saw the lion again, but she was able to get closer than before, hiding behind a bush for a while before making her escape. On the third day, the fox returned, but this time she found the courage to walk right up to the lion and say hello, and somehow the two became friends. The moral of the story is that familiarity breeds not contempt but indifference. We can expect anxiety to abate naturally with repeated exposure, under normal conditions.