Stoicism and the Art of Happiness – Ancient Tips For Modern Challenges: Teach Yourself

Socrates showed us that we all have the power to heal ourselves and change our characters, at any stage of our lives; we might not become perfect sages like him, but I believe we can all become a little wiser and happier.’

Focus on what you can control, and accept what you can’t.
2 Choose your role models wisely, a lesson he takes from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
3 Keep track of your thoughts and behaviour

Externals are not under my control; volition is under my control. Where am I to look for the good and the evil? Within me, in that which is my own.’

Running, vigorous walking, or yoga stretches are simple forms of exercise, which can challenge us to push our tolerance of physical effort

We will train both mind and body when we accustom ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, scarcity of food, hardness of bed, abstaining from pleasures, and enduring pains

renouncing unhealthy, or unnecessary, food and drink can be used as a way to practise developing the virtue of self-discipline, or ‘moderation’ in our diet.

living as if we were seeing the world for the first and last time,

sense of kinship with all mankind which makes the wellbeing of humanity the chief preferred outcome of all moral action.

The basic feeling of serenity, freedom, and invulnerability that comes from accepting that there is no evil but moral evil, and that the only thing that matters in life is moral integrity or what the Stoics call ‘honour’ and ‘virtue’.

The spiritual awareness that humans are not fragmentary, isolated beings but are essentially parts of a bigger whole