Stoic practices for dealing with negative emotions like anger and sadness

Mastering Emotions: A Stoic's Guide to Transforming Anger and Sadness into Wisdom and Strength

There is nothing wrong with being sad or angry, they are natural emotions, and sometimes necessary, as well.

Anger, for example, is needed for sometimes as a necessary of asserting oneself in the world. Sadness happens when you need to retrieve and think about your decisions and ways of thinking, and how they might need to change, leading you to self-reflection.

It’s not that you want to eliminate them, as they will probably help you, but they need to be used right. Aided by reason, they will make you progress, but without reason’s aid, they will most likely work against you.

And how does one reason while experiencing these emotions?

Reframing.

We tend to believe that the reality we experience is objective, but it is not, all the contrary, it is as subjective as it is. You are looking at reality through the frames you create. Here, one needs to ask the question: is this really how this is? How would someone else view this situation? What would (a person you admire) feel about this?

Reframing opens you up to different points of view. If you’re very angry, try looking at the situation from the perspective of the person who wronged you, maybe you will find something that you were not seeing, and become wise, and better prepared for the next time.

This is why anger alone does not help, in the long run. Anger will give you energy, and if you combine it with reason, it will make you try to change something that will be better for everyone, in a creation act, not a destruction act. Like a new way of seeing the world, for example.

Distancing.

It is important to see things with as much truth as possible. Distancing helps in seeing the situation from the outside. This is a precursor to reframing. Has it ever happened to you, that a friend has a problem, and he tells you about it, and the solution is blatantly obvious to you, but your friend is too close to the problem to see it?

You are not different. The problems that you have, certainly, a lot of people have, and worse. Thinking that we are unique in our angriness and sadness gives the emotions a special sauce that we think no one can sabor but ourselves, but the reality is that problems, when seen from afar, are more easily solved. It is good practice to distance yourself and wonder how a person who is not emotionally invested like you are, would act.

Self-reflection.

“An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates

It is not fun to be a human being, and not think about what it means to be a human being. What differentiates us from other creatures is our capacity to wonder about ourselves.

Angriness and sadness provide a lot of room for self-reflection. Why am I getting so angry about this? Why am I sad?

Your self is not dumb. You are not getting angry and sad unjustifiably. There is something that your self wants to tell you. But, if we think that we should “just not feel this way”, we are not going to be capable of pondering why we are feeling this way or the other.

If something makes you very angry, it could be a sign of something that you care about, and caring about stuff is great, it shows you what you find important in life. Now, it is important to ask, why do you care about it so much? And the path of self-reflection begins.

Practicing Virtue

Getting sad or angry also works as gauges to check how far are you in understanding one simple teaching:

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…

– Epictetus

Good and bad are not outside, but in how you react to life. The frustration that comes when things do not go your way in life, is a sense of madness. Reason tells you if something is under your control or not, and once you truly see if something is or not, it’s hard to get frustrated at it. You can’t get frustrated by a rock not obeying your commands.

If this is the case, when we’re angry, or sad, it is best to look inside and respond accordingly. There is always a virtuous response to anything. Tiredness? Endurance and fortitude. Angriness? Patience (and slow breathing). Sadness? Willingness.

You see, virtue, or vice, is always a choice, because you are the one choosing how to respond to life, all the time.

Preparedness

When you’re running long distances, it’s interesting how your mind prepares your body for them. When you’re running a 42K, you begin to be super, extremely tired by the 38k. But when you know that you’re running an ultra, you change your mindset to the 80k distance or 100k distance, and you can notice how you’re speaking to yourself differently.

Life is no different. It is better to be prepared, and to expect things to happen. When you get in your car, expect traffic, if you find yourself a girlfriend, expect jealousy and getting angry about dumb stuff. Life is not going to be easy, why make it harder thinking that everything should go our way?

Expect life to happen as it happens, and you will talk to yourself differently.

To conclude, getting angry and sad is not something bad, your response to it can be, but it can also be good if you choose to use them as what they are, lessons that need to be learned. Whether in the form of learning how to distance yourself from problems to see them in a more objective light, or noticing how much you care about rocks not following your orders. You have much more control than you think, in essence, practice your responses