By the time he wrote The Meditations, during the Marcomannic Wars, pleasant retreats were a thing of the past, and his life was spent far from Rome. Marcus still found himself pining after his beautiful holiday villas, such as Antoninus’s family home at Lorium on the Italian coast, where Marcus spent much of his youth. He says that at times, like many other people, he feels a strong desire to get away from things and retreat to the peace of the countryside, seashore, or mountains.9 However, he tells himself that feeling the need to escape from life’s stresses in this way is a sign of weakness. It might be what the Stoics called a “preferred indifferent,” but escape is not something we should demand from life or feel we really need as a coping tool—that sort of dependence on being able to escape from stressful situations just creates its own problems. Marcus tells himself that he doesn’t literally need to get away from it all because true inner peace comes from the nature of our thoughts rather than pleasant natural surroundings. He tells himself that resilience comes from his ability to regain his composure wherever he finds himself. This is the “inner citadel” to which he can retreat, even on the frigid battlefields of the northern campaign.
Marcus returns, in particular, to the analogy of a mountain retreat several times. He reminds himself that it makes no difference where he is or what he’s doing; the time left for him in life is short, and he should therefore learn to “live as though on a mountaintop,” regardless of his circumstances. In fact, everything that troubles us here is just as it would be on a hilltop, by the seashore, or anywhere else—what matters is how we choose to view it.10 The Stoic can live with contentment and joy in his heart this way, even if men are against him and his physical environment is torturous. Wherever we find ourselves, our judgments are still free, and they are the seat of our passions.
In order to achieve this sense of inner peace, Marcus tells himself to frequently retreat not to the hilltops but to his own faculty of reason, thereby rising above external events and purifying his mind of attachment to them. He believes that to do this effectively he must reflect, in particular, on two concise but fundamental Stoic principles:11
1. Everything that we see is changing and will soon be gone, and we should bear in mind how many things have already changed over time, like the waters of streams flowing ceaselessly past—an idea that we can call the contemplation of impermanence.
2. External things cannot touch the soul, but our disturbances all arise from within. Marcus means that things don’t upset us, but our value judgments about them do. However, we can regain our composure by separating our values from external events using the strategy we’ve called cognitive distancing.
In other words, peace of mind can be achieved even in the chaos of the battlefield—as Socrates reputedly showed—or in the clamor of the Senate, as long as we keep our mind in good order. Marcus concludes by condensing this into six Greek words, perhaps quoted from a previous author, which we might translate as The universe is change: life is opinion. COGNITIVE DISTANCING FOR ANXIETY
The second of these two fundamental techniques for securing peace is familiar to us as cognitive distancing. We can employ it in response to real-world situations or during the sort of premeditation, or imaginal exposure technique, described earlier. Although we know that anxiety habituates naturally through repeated exposure and the Stoics presumably must have observed this during their use of regular premeditation, their real goal was to change our opinions about external events, not just our feelings.
Gaining cognitive distance is, in a sense, the most important aspect of Stoic anxiety management. This is what Marcus meant by “life is opinion”: that the quality of our life is determined by our value judgments, because those shape our emotions. When we deliberately remind ourselves that we project our values onto external events and that how we judge those events is what upsets us, we gain cognitive distance and recover our mental composure. DECATASTROPHIZING AND THE CONTEMPLATION OF IMPERMANENCE
The first basic technique for attaining peace, described by Marcus above, is related to decatastrophizing, or learning to downgrade the perceived severity of a threat from “total catastrophe” to a more realistic level. Again, decatastrophizing can be applied in real situations or in imagined ones, during the premeditation of adversity. For example, suppose you’re worried that you’ll fail an important exam and you become very anxious, feeling that failure would be the end of the world, a total disaster. Decatastrophizing would entail reevaluating the situation in a more balanced manner so that it seems less overwhelming and you’re more able to identify potential ways of coping. Viewing things in a more moderate and realistic way like this tends to reduce anxiety. You might experience setbacks, but it’s an exaggeration to talk as though they’re the end of the world.
As it happens, most people find it easier to visualize a scene if they write down a description of it first and perhaps review it later. Staying with the example above, you might write a page or so about losing your job: how it begins, being told the bad news, the immediate aftermath, etc. People often find that reading their description aloud several times before attempting to visualize it helps them to clarify the details and picture the scene more vividly. As always, it’s important to leave out emotive language (“They just treated me like trash and threw me out on my backside.”) or value judgments (“This is totally unfair!”). Just stick to the facts as accurately and objectively as possible.
Asking yourself “What next?” a few times can move your focus past the most distressing part of the scene and take away its catastrophic appearance. For example, what would happen after losing your job? It might be tough for a while, but eventually you’d find something else and your life would move on. Another simple and powerful technique is to ask yourself how you would feel about the situation that worries you in ten or twenty years’ time, looking back on it from the future. It’s an example of a more general strategy known as “time projection.” In other words, you can help yourself develop a philosophical attitude toward adversity by asking, “If this will seem trivial to me twenty years from now, then why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today instead of worrying about it as if it’s a catastrophe?” You’ll often find that shifting your perspective in terms of time can change how you feel about a setback by making it seem less catastrophic. WORRY POSTPONEMENT
In recent decades, researchers and clinicians have gained a better understanding of the ways in which excessive worrying can perpetuate anxiety. By “worry” they mean something quite specific: an anxious process exhibiting a particular style of thinking. Worried thinking is perseverative—it goes on and on. It tends to involve “What if?” thoughts about feared catastrophes: “What if they get so angry they fire me? What if I can’t get another job? How will I pay for my kids’ college?” These questions often feel as if they’re unanswerable. One just leads to another, in a chain reaction, which goes on and on, fueling anxiety. Severe worrying can often feel out of control, but, perhaps surprisingly, it’s actually a relatively conscious and voluntary type of thinking. People sometimes don’t even realize that what they’re doing is worrying. They may confuse it with problem-solving, believing that they’re trying to “figure out a solution” when in fact they’re just going in circles making their anxiety worse and worse.