stoicism ≠ Stoicism

Lowercase “stoicism” is often equated with the way of coping with stress that people call “having a stiff upper-lip”. More specifically, it means suppressing or concealing unpleasant, painful, or embarrassing emotions. The problem with that is that there’s now a substantial body of scientific research from different teams of psychologists around the world, working with different populations, which tends to converge on the finding that stoicism is unhealthy. In fact to highlight that — and because it’s pretty awkward to distinguish between “Stoicism” and “stoicism” when speaking rather than writing — I sometimes just refer to lowercase “stoicism” as pseudo-stoicism. Many people assume that lowercase stoicism is synonymous with emotional resilience or toughness. Ironically, though, research tends to show the opposite. It doesn’t lead to resilience but often increases emotional vulnerability and it would better be described as a form of weakness rather than strength.

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Pseudo-stoicism is based on a very crude and simplistic view of how our emotions work. It’s basically both false and unworkable. The ancient Stoics, by contrast, had a much more nuanced conception of the psychology of emotion. That’s how they were able to develop an effective system of psychotherapy and emotional resilience-building. They were actually well over two thousand years ahead of their time in anticipating modern cognitive-behavioural therapy.

We call the naive psychological assumptions made by people in ordinary language their “folk psychology”. The folk psychology of emotions is remarkably simplistic. People tend to talk about feelings such as anxiety as if they were homogenous. Psychologists sometimes call this the “lump” theory of anxiety, for example. Anxiety is talked about as if it’s just a blob of unpleasantness and somehow we have to struggle to contain or suppress it. That’s such a crude concept, though, that it’s almost superstitious. In reality, there are many different types of anxiety, which function in different ways. Snake-phobic anxiety is not at all the same as a clinical panic attack or generalized anxiety, in psychopathology. They have different causes, symptoms, prognoses, and respond to different treatments.

Moreover, emotions such as anxiety are composite. They’re made up of lots of different elements, such as thoughts, actions, and feelings, of different kinds, which interact with one another. Anxiety, I like to say, is a cake baked from many ingredients — it’s not just a homogenous lump. The more we understand the ingredients of our emotions the more easily we can process and control them, in healthy and natural ways. Perhaps the most fundamental and important distinction is the favourite one of the Stoics — some things are up to us and other things are not.

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The Stoics were far ahead of their time in proposing that emotions are cognitive in nature — they consist not only of feelings but also of thoughts and beliefs. When you get angry, for example, it’s because you are having angry thoughts and your mind has activated underlying angry beliefs and attitudes.

People who use pseudo-stoicism as a coping strategy don’t distinguish between the “lump” of emotion and the cognitive aspects, though. They just try to shove all of their emotions down, forcing them out of their minds. Alternatively, they use alcohol, drugs, or distractions such as comfort eating or compulsive checking social media to try to escape their emotions by numbing themselves. The word “stoic” is therefore often just used as a synonym for “unemotional” and that’s definitely not what Stoicism teaches. The ancient Stoics repeatedly emphasized that their ideal was not to be like statues or men with hearts of stone.

Rather than trying to suppress feelings or sensations, which would entail judging an indifferent to be bad or harmful, the Stoics tried to modify the underlying value judgement. That approach happens to be more in accord with the way modern cognitive therapists bring about emotional change and it’s very different from what people mean by “keeping a stiff upper lip”. For instance, the Stoics believed that fear is based on the underlying belief that something bad, something awful, is about to happen. That’s virtually identical to modern cognitive models of anxiety. If someone has an irrational fear it’s typically the case that they’ve overestimated the probability and/or severity of the anticipated threat.

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