Getting stuck on Channel C 

Has your mind ever gotten stuck on Channel C (the Crazy Channel)? 

That’s what I was glued to last night. Despite possessing an otherwise easy-going nature and writing and speaking about Stoicism, a philosophy meant to point toward serenity, I was slammed with a panic attack. Or, that’s what I think it was. Sweating, breathing shallowly, and feeling a debilitating sense of doom, I thought “This is it; life has exceeded my ability to handle it.” 

Many external sources of anxiety 

Perhaps I temporarily went a little nuts because I had earlier witnessed a gory car accident, noting how easily the victims could have been someone I loved. Maybe it was anxiety over the approaching presidential election, or my worries about one of my kids who is going through a rough patch. (“A mother is only as happy as her saddest child.”) Maybe it was the !@#%*! clogged kitchen drain whose Vesuvius explosion flooded the kitchen floor with water and all the gross junk that had been moldering in the pipe. 

No one is a sage 

Who knows what combination of “externals” triggered this hijacking of the more cultivated self I’d prefer to experience and exhibit all the time. We are not bloodless machines. However ardent our Stoic studies and practices, we will occasionally and often unaccountably be visited by grossly disordered thinking that makes us see ourselves and life itself askew in a fearful light. What to do? 

The Stoic prescription 

This morning, rather than reaching for medication, I knew I needed to apply my Stoically-inspired Rx—it worked— and I offer it to you for those odd moments when Channel C has you in its clutches: 

1. Remember there is no such thing as a perfect Stoic or a perfect anybody. Despite our best intentions sometimes our passions win. We can work with those passions so they are defanged or recalibrated in a constructive direction, but they are a real and necessary part of our human story. Seeking to eradicate or deny them is a fool’s errand. 
2. Take at least three really slow deep breaths, then consider these helpful Stoic insights about fear and what to do about it: 

Epictetus advises: 

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems. 

People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them. 

Both from Enchiridion 5 

(three more slow deep breaths) 

Marcus Aurelius counsels: 

There is the long stretch of infinity ahead of it and behind it...What sense does it make to fret and fume – as if your troubles are going to last forever? 

Meditations, 5.23 

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. 

Meditations 8.5 

(three more slow deep breaths) 

Seneca’s common sense: 

Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow. 

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. 

Both from Moral Letters, 13 

After meditating on these teachings, take three final very slow deep breaths. Now, go forth and act in the world! 

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Sharon Lebell is the author of The Art of Living and is a member of our Advisory Board.

 

 

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