PDF Summary:The Stoic Challenge, by William B. Irvine

Every one of us experiences hardship, often on a daily basis. But what if we didn’t have to suffer it? In The Stoic Challenge, William B. Irvine argues that minimizing suffering isn’t just possible—it’s something that people have been doing since the Stoics, a group of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers, pioneered a strategy to approach adversity as opportunity.

Our guide explains how you can do the same by following Irvine’s explanations of Stoicism’s central strategy—reframing—to live with more equanimity, effectiveness, and even delight. We’ll explain Irvine’s core assertion that we can change our lives by changing how we relate to adversity, and we’ll detail how you can implement this strategy through a variety of actionable training methods. In our commentary, we’ll compare Irvine’s perspective on Stoicism to other philosophies and approaches that address the same challenges.

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The argument fizzles, and just like that, you’ve handled this challenge like a Stoic. You’ve maintained steady emotions, found a resourceful solution, and gotten a bit better at the habit of using this strategy in daily life.

Why the Stoic Strategy Works

According to Irvine, this Stoic strategy for navigating adversity works by making use of one powerful psychological phenomenon: the framing effect. In short, this effect says that the way you interpret or frame something affects how you feel about it and, in turn, how you handle it. This is because different frames emphasize different aspects of a situation, and focusing on one aspect versus another changes how you relate to it.

For instance, perhaps you had to take physical fitness assessments as a child in school, including a running test. While some kids focus on how long and physically demanding the test is, others view it as a fun way to compete with friends and beat their previous times. Just by emphasizing different aspects of the run, each group experiences the same thing in different ways.

When it comes to more serious adversities, reframing can help you see a perceived problem as a chance to grow or even enjoy yourself. In a Stoic context, that’s the whole point of reframing: It helps you view and handle troubles in a way that bolsters your emotional tranquility and improves your practical outcomes.

(Shortform note: Framing doesn’t just affect the way you view adversity—it also plays an important role in decision-making. Another way to look at the framing effect is as a cognitive bias. That is, you only ever have limited information about a choice, and that information biases how you view your options. In Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein argue that this effect affords numerous opportunities to design the choices that we present people with in order to nudge them toward better decisions. In other words, framing operates on both a personal level, as Irvine explains, and on a systemic level, such as how the real estate market presents stock data and decisions to buyers and investors.)

How to Use the Stoic Reframing Strategy Today

Traditionally, Irvine explains, the Stoics would frame the adversities they encountered as tests put to them by the Roman head god, Jupiter. They believed that Jupiter showed his favor by testing people he thought capable of achieving excellence—so every adversity was an opportunity to prove your mettle. This framing gave a Stoic the strength to remain resolute and resourceful because he wouldn’t accept failing before his god.

Although the ancient Stoic mindset relied on belief in Jupiter, their method of approaching adversity doesn’t—it’s still valid, according to modern psychology. To use this method today, then, just find a different way to frame things that reproduces the motivation that the Jupiter frame gave the Stoics. Irvine offers two alternatives:

• If you follow Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, you can devise a frame that motivates you to prove yourself in the eyes of your god.
• If you follow no god or gods, you can assume that imaginary Stoic gods will test you. Irvine contends that while it may sound silly, this has a powerful motivating effect on the subconscious, and it’s the framing that he personally uses.

(Shortform note: For more alternative framings, you might look to bhakti yoga, a centuries-old Indian path to spiritual attainment that involves devotion to, traditionally, a personal deity, a guru, or the Divine in general. Some contemporary practitioners of bhakti yoga also advocate for devotion to universal values such as love and compassion. Drawing from this, you might craft a framing that appeals to your higher values or aspirations, rather than various gods that may not spark your motivation.)

In any case, Irvine says, you can then use the general form of the Stoics’ strategy: When adversity arises, immediately reframe the situation, and then attend to your emotional and practical responses to the problem.

Your emotional response is your first priority, according to Irvine. To prevent your reactive emotions from taking over, you must reframe things within five seconds. As we explained earlier, the key is to prevent negative emotions from arising in the first place.

(Shortform note: In Mindfulness in Plain English, Henepola Gunaratana asserts a slightly different perspective on emotional regulation. Like Irvine, he says that as soon as you recognize a reaction, such as the arising of ruminations on a fight with a loved one, you need to step back and view it from afar. However, whereas Irvine suggests immediately redirecting your emotional responses, Gunaratana says that the meditator’s mindset involves dropping expectations and accepting everything that arises, regardless of whether you want or like, for instance, the emotions swirling around inside of you. Accepting what arises means watching the reaction unfold from start to finish. Both of these methods have merit, so don’t hesitate to experiment and find what works for you.)

Irvine says that once you’ve attended to your emotional response, you can focus on your practical response by looking for a way to overcome the problem.

Over time, Irvine says, practicing this strategy will condition you to feel less frustration or anger when troubles come along. It’ll become habitual to maintain your tranquility and solve your problems, and your instinct to react emotionally will weaken over time. You might even begin to look forward to adversities—and that’s a sign that you’re well on the road to Stoic-style success.

(Shortform note: Irvine’s assertion that the Stoic strategy will become habit has an indirect empirical basis. A growing body of neuroscience research supports the notion that what we do repeatedly becomes more automatic—that is, ”what fires together, wires together.” Studies show that brain volume generally increases in the areas that correspond to different emotional regulation strategies and that the areas that grow depend on the strategy used. One such strategy, expressive suppression, involves feeling but not externalizing your emotional response to a situation. Regular expressive suppression correlates with an increase in the volume of the insula, a brain region involved in various cognitive and affective processes.)

Practice and Apply the Stoic Strategy

Having discussed the Stoics’ strategy, how it works psychologically, and how you can use it today, we’ll now turn to implementing it in daily life:

• To begin, we’ll explain how you can practice the strategy in advance so that you’re prepared for real-world adversities.
• We’ll then detail how, according to Irvine, you can apply it to three key types of adversity—failure, reversals of fortune, and death—in order to live a better life today.

Train Yourself to Use the Stoic Strategy

We’ll first discuss two methods of training you can use to practice the Stoic strategy before you actually need it. Both training methods involve actively seeking out opportunities to use the Stoic strategy, and they’ll help you develop resolve and resourcefulness.

Expose Yourself to Unpredictable Adversities

Irvine’s first recommendation is to prepare for real-world setbacks by putting yourself in positions that will probably confront you with unpredictable adversities. If they come along, you have the chance to practice handling the situation as a Stoic would—reframe it as a test, diffuse negative emotions, and find a solution. The point of this training is to get used to the unpredictability of troubles and the task of remembering your strategy, since in normal life, you won’t see adversities coming.

(Shortform note: Another way to look at this is that Irvine advocates for a sort of personal antifragility. That is, his training recommendations put you through exactly the sort of productive stress tests that increase the overall toughness of a system (such as your body and mind). In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that antifragility is a natural response to the innate unpredictability of reality. Natural systems, such as forests or the human body, evolved an antifragility as an adaptation to unforeseeable hardship, and you can make use of this capacity by following Irvine’s advice to train for adversity.)

To expose yourself to unpredictable adversities, Irvine says that you should find opportunities to challenge yourself. This could be simple and mundane, like riding your bike to work instead of driving (forcing you to navigate unforeseen troubles along the way) or more ambitious, like learning a difficult new skill. Whatever you choose, it shouldn’t take you too far outside your comfort zone. So if you’re someone who, for instance, doesn’t hike, you’d start with a local forest trail rather than a days-long alpine trek.

According to Irvine, building a new skill is the best kind of challenge you can take on because to learn any skill means navigating numerous unforeseen challenges. This is especially true if you pick a skill that relies on capacities you aren’t strong in—for instance, a powerlifter would likely experience more unpredictable adversities in learning childcare skills than he would from switching to CrossFit.

(Shortform note: For an immediately actionable approach to skill building, you might look to Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours, where he argues that you can pick up the basics of any skill in around 20 hours. Doing so involves five steps: choosing a skill, moving through preparatory research, breaking down the challenge into subskills, overcoming emotional barriers to learning, and practicing effectively.)

When you start to challenge yourself, Irvine says that you’ll come face to face with an internal instinct to be lazy. While this impulse exists in all of us, he recommends following the Stoic example and exerting control over it. That is, encountering your inner laziness is a signal to bolster your willpower and lean into the challenge rather than retreat from it. By persistently striving past the discomfort and the pull to take it easy, you’ll assert self-dominance and, in the process, amplify your autonomy.

Over time, opting to keep pushing when the going gets tough will develop your resolve—that is, you’ll get grittier. You’ll become more steadfast in the face of tough challenges, and you’ll get in the habit of not letting your inner laziness control your choices.

(Shortform note: Notions of laziness are historically and morally complex. Early conceptions arose amidst a European religious landscape that viewed productive, hardworking people as morally upright, and thereby favored by God—and over the centuries, this perspective became enmeshed with the fabric of American capitalist society. To call someone lazy has long connotated a sort of moral weakness, but contemporary psychologists have argued that this oversimplifies the issue. So, as an alternative to Irvine’s “just push through” approach to idleness, consider that if you experience laziness, it might have deeper roots in anxiety, depression, or a reasonable lack of motivation to do work that doesn’t feel meaningful enough.)

Seek Out Direct Discomfort

Irvine also recommends that you undergo training that expands your comfort zone. Whereas the challenge-based training above has you seeking possible adversity, this training involves going out of your way to get uncomfortable. In this case, the adversities won’t be unexpected (you’ll train for that as above) but rather intense and challenging.

(Shortform note: When thinking about what sorts of stressors you might expose yourself to, consider the Yerkes-Dodson law—a psychological principle stating that stress benefits performance, but only up to a point. When you experience just the right amount of good stress, or eustress, you’ll have sufficient motivation to work well or face up to some challenge. When eustress tips over into distress, however, you’ll become physiologically too uncomfortable to perform. Given this, don’t jump into the deep end all at once. Rather, start with just a bit of stress, then ratchet up the difficulty until you have a good sense of your own tolerance curve.)

Irvine explains that actively seeking adversity will expand your comfort zone, empowering you to remain tranquil and even experience delight in a wider range of circumstances. The greater the levels of intensity you can get used to, the better equipped you’ll be to handle intense, real-world adversities. This training has two dimensions: emotional toughening and physical toughening.

Emotional toughening is when you practice facing your fears in order to expand your comfort zone. Irvine recommends that you gradually expose yourself to what you’re afraid of (such as handling dogs) and intensify the challenge over time.

(Shortform note: Pivoting away from the “toughness” framing, Irvine’s recommendation sounds a lot like modern exposure therapy. Exposure therapy can help with conditions including PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and it ranges from the gradual form (described above by Irvine), called graded exposure, to “flooding,” or an all-at-once confrontation with the object of your fear.)

Physical toughening is when you train your body by exposing yourself to increasingly intense physical stressors. Irvine suggests extreme temperature training, physical exercise, dieting and fasting, and endurance training.

(Shortform note: For one specific approach to physical toughening, you might try the techniques outlined in The Wim Hof Method. This method involves intense cold exposure, breathwork patterns, and mindset practice—all of which contribute to a serious physical toughening of your body.)

Irvine explains that an added benefit of training in these ways is that the Stoics would experience greater pleasure from lesser indulgence. That is, toughening yourself up with Stoic-style training—living in bare, austere conditions and seeking out challenges—has the side effect of making worldly pleasures seem all the more wonderful if they happen to come along.

In contrast, people who constantly indulge grow used to pleasure and thereby lose their ability to enjoy it. They become so physically and emotionally soft that even slight discomfort will seem unbearable. According to Irvine, this implies that in the long run, intentionally seeking and getting used to discomfort reduces it better than avoiding it does.

(Shortform note: Here, Irvine’s ideas evoke the notion of the hedonic treadmill, a theory from psychology that explains why pleasures and hardships tend not to make much difference to our long-term happiness or unhappiness. In short, our brains gradually adapt to repetitive experiences of pleasure or displeasure until they seem more or less normal. In practice, this explains why the honeymoon phase of a relationship always ends, or why the third cookie doesn’t taste quite as good as the first. With regard to Irvine’s work, it means that the ancient Stoics were right—an endless pursuit of pleasure doesn’t increase your happiness and, in fact, might do the opposite.)

Approach Key Adversities Like a Stoic

Now that we’ve covered how to train like a Stoic, we’ll pivot to Irvine’s discussion of three key areas of life in which you can apply this training. Namely, we’ll discuss how to approach failure, falls from high places, and death as a Stoic would.

Approach Failure as an Opportunity to Learn

Irvine suggests that you use the Stoics’ method of reframing to improve your relationship to failure. Specifically, he suggests that you reframe failures—which most of us perceive and thereby experience as adverse events—as learning opportunities.

If you never acknowledge your mistakes and failures, Irvine argues, you’ll never learn anything. This is because our failures show us exactly what we did wrong and, in this way, suggest what we need to do differently to improve the next time around. Failure, then, is profoundly useful. In fact, it’s a core ingredient of success. According to Irvine, anyone who achieves anything of note does so not in spite of failure, but because they learn from their failures. This is true of world-class athletes, entrepreneurs who change the world, parents who raise good humans, professional musicians, and anyone else who’s succeeded.

Learning Derives From Failure

Much as Irvine discusses above, Matthew Syed argues throughout Black Box Thinking that failure is the key ingredient in learning and that it drives human progress on both the personal and systemic levels.

Like Irvine, he says that examining our failures reveals the gap between our knowledge and reality—for instance, reviewing a poorly shot arrow can tell you much about how to improve your form and hit the target. Or, reflecting on a botched business presentation (not to mention getting feedback) will help you do better next time.

This may seem obvious, but it’s easier said than done. Both Irvine and Syed agree that to make better use of failure, we need to change our mindsets. Practical strategies to achieve this include meditation, which can help you stay calmer when you mess up, and noting positives that have resulted from past failures.

Irvine recommends that to embrace failure, you should break your goals into actionable steps and anticipatable obstacles. Then, take action, make mistakes, learn from them, and push ahead. You’ll either succeed or fall short having learned a lot. And if you fail, don’t worry—it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. (Shortform note: Beyond simply taking action, Robert Greene argues that you can more effectively learn by engaging in hands-on practice: Find a mentor or guide, then commit to following that person’s lead, building momentum, and staying the course.)

Approach the Loss of Good Fortune With Grace and Humility

Next, Irvine turns to what he calls a particularly pernicious form of adversity—when things are going well, you’re high on success and good fortune, and then suddenly everything takes a catastrophic turn.

The Stoics noticed this phenomenon and would practice humility as a way to allay the risk of such catastrophic reversals of fortune. According to Irvine, any extended period of good fortune tends to lead into a particularly brutal or unexpected misfortune. To avoid this, he recommends that you do as the Stoics did: Take good fortune in stride and stay humble. More specifically, enjoy it without announcing your joy to the world. Doing so can attract envy; and envious peers, Irvine says, are the most common source of reversals of fortune. Such people will try to sabotage or ruin your good times, like a workplace colleague who’s jealous of your recent promotion.

(Shortform note: The Stoics might’ve derived this principle from the tale of Icarus, an ancient Greek myth about a boy who, wearing wax wings, flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. Some interpret this myth as a story about power and the hubris it can create in those who aren’t ready to wield it. For instance, a young executive handed his career on a silver platter—someone who carries all the overconfidence his circumstances produce in him—will inevitably draw the ire of colleagues and direct reports who worked hard to be where they are. Noting this, one practical way to find humility in the face of good fortune is to attribute it largely to luck, which can reduce your possible self-aggrandizement and defuse others’ envy.)

Approach Death as the Final Stoic Test

Last, Irvine turns his attention to how the Stoics approached death. He says that today, we typically ignore the reality of death. We sweep it under the rug or operate on naive childhood understandings of death as leading to a happy afterlife. And because we ignore our inevitable deaths, we never realize the true value of our lives.

(Shortform note: Looking at it from the other side of the coin, Irvine might say that we all take life for granted. Psychologically, taking something for granted means that you assume automatically that you won’t ever lose it. In other words, it becomes more or less an unconscious habit to go on living like life will never end—rather than a choice we consciously make, as Irvine alludes to above.)

According to Irvine, the Stoics related to death differently. First, they actively practiced acknowledging human mortality in order to better appreciate their lives in the present. They did this with a variety of techniques that involve briefly thinking about worst-case scenarios. This makes use of the anchoring effect, a psychological phenomenon wherein priming yourself with a reference point helps you see something in a new light. The Stoics’ techniques include:

• Realizing that this could be the last time you’re doing something—be it cooking a meal, hugging your best friend, or sitting down to work.
• Contemplating that someday in the future, you’ll likely wish you could return to this present moment—to an old and enfeebled version of yourself, earlier life could seem a wonderland.

Both of these techniques help you candidly see the reality of your eventual death and thereby appreciate your life more now. This may seem paradoxical, but knowing deeply that you’ll one day die can bring you more fully into living your life today.

Alternative Ways to Appreciate Your Life

If you’d prefer something a bit less macabre, try a regular gratitude practice. Contemporary research has linked gratitude practice to a general increase in well-being, and a wide variety of gratitude practices show promise. While you might not want to feel grateful that you’ll one day pass on, you can achieve a similar result to Irvine’s techniques by pausing daily to appreciate how alive you are, here and now.

If you do like the macabre, you might try a Buddhist charnel ground meditation, which traditionally involves meditating in a setting (such as a graveyard) where the reality of death is made concrete. The point was to break down any habit of clinging to existential hope (hope for salvation) and confront the nature of life as inevitably leading to death. This can help you to see life as it really is—replete with adversity and hardship, as Irvine says—and thereby live more fully now.)