The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

Stoicism is meant to help you master your emotions. There's a version of it that just teaches you to avoid them.

In this conversation I joined Erick Cloward on the Stoic Coffee Break to talk about "stoic bypassing" (Jules Evans' term): using the philosophy to suppress hard feelings instead of feeling them. We both grew up learning to push emotions down, so it got personal.

We cover the difference between suppression and reappraisal, alexithymia, why the Let Them Theory is thinner than it looks, how the manosphere funnels every emotion through anger, the case for voluntary discomfort, and a reframe from Epictetus that means you can never lose a first date.

This first aired on Erick's show, the Stoic Coffee Break. Go and follow him.

Erick Cloward / Stoic Coffee Break
Podcast: https://stoic.coffee
Original episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5oBAAeiX5x1aMCqoahP3Dv?si=6av80YqGSmeIMG7wdTjGbg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stoic.coffee
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

During the 170s of the common era, while ruling an empire and often away from Rome, Marcus Aurelius wrote notes to himself in Greek. What survived is not a public book. It is a private notebook, the Meditations, sentences a man wrote to remind himself how to live.
This is a short morning practice built from eight lines drawn from the Meditations. Some are close to verbatim, others are rendered in modern English to be repeatable in the mouth and the mind. Between each line there is a little silence. At the end, one quiet commitment for the day ahead.
These were notes he wrote to himself. We are not the first to need them.

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Are Stoics really emotionless? It is the most common thing people believe about Stoicism, and it puts a lot of people off the one idea that might actually help them.
In this conversation I sit down with Erick Cloward, host of the Stoic Coffee Break podcast and author of Stoicism 101, to take the myth apart. We get into why the word "stoic" came to mean cold and shut down, and why the Stoics actually felt their emotions fully. They just learned to be masters of them rather than ruled by them.
Erick shares the example that makes it click: two people miss the same bus. One shrugs and reads a book, the other is furious. Same event, two reactions. The difference is never the event. It is the judgement you add to it. We also get into amor fati, the view from above, and what it really takes to react less and recover faster.
Try this after listening: next time you react strongly, name the event in plain terms, then name the story you added on top. The gap between them is where the work happens.
Erick's book and podcast: stoic.coffee
 Companion article: https://www.stoichandbook.co/podcast/are-stoics-emotionless/
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

Marcus Aurelius is the most quoted philosopher on the internet, and his private journal shows a man who kept failing at the thing he's famous for. He struggled to get out of bed. He needed ten separate strategies to manage his temper. Near the end of his life he wrote, to himself, that he was "far from philosophy."
In this episode I read the passages most Stoicism channels skip. The two getting-out-of-bed debates, four books apart. The brutal self-talk about caring what people think. The procrastination confession. The contradiction of Commodus and the gladiatorial games. And the old distinction that makes sense of all of it: the sage versus the Stoic in training. Marcus knew which one he was.
If you've ever felt like a fraud for relearning the same lesson again and again, this one is for you.
Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/h1Rm4Cv_aQY
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

You haven't done anything yet, and the voice is already running its commentary. Too slow, too weak, not enough. The day hasn't started and you're already failing in advance. This guided Stoic practice works with the inner critic directly — not to silence it, but to strip it of the authority it doesn't deserve.

You'll practise the Stoic technique of examining your impressions: separating the bare facts from the judgements your mind adds automatically. Drawing on Epictetus's principle that it's not events but our judgements about them that disturb us, and on Marcus Aurelius's habit of asking "what is this thing in itself, stripped of my story?" — you'll learn to recognise the critic's voice as opinion, not fact.

For best results, listen every morning for 30 days. The critic gets quieter when you stop agreeing with it.

For mornings when the issue is letting go of what already happened, try "Stoic Morning Practice: Let Go Of What You Can't Control" — part of the same daily series.
Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co
The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com