Stoics’ Approach to Hedonic Adaptation

               Remember the time you craved the latest iPhone. After saving a few months of money, you finally bought one for yourself. You enjoyed it in weeks to come but after a few months you no longer as excited as you were when you have first had it. Hedonic adaptation is our natural tendency to return to level happiness after an initial surge of positive emotions (usually pleasure). After…

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How Stoics’ Negative Visualization Can Make You Happy

               When a friend is facing uncertainties from life challenges, we are almost always obliged to cheer him up. We give him hope by saying some of the most positive things we could think. Things like “It will be okay.”, “There is always a rainbow after the rain.” the list goes on. However, the Stoics argue that this is not the best way to calm an anxious friend. The…

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Premeditatio Malorum

[View Handbook]Premeditatio Malorum is a stoic exercise of expecting of terrible things that can happen at any event or time. Some people mistakenly view this practice as pessimism but it’s actually a great way to prepare for setbacks. Most of disappointment in people’s life came from an unrealistic view of a perfect world – that things ought to happen the way we want it to be. Obviously that’s not the case. When you expect the…

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Does Stoicism suggest pessimism?

On of the common practice of Stoicism is premeditatio malorum which basically means expecting the bad things that can happen in any event. For the stoics, its a way of preparing for the worst. As a result, a lot of people question whether this practice is a form of pessimism.  A pessimistic person cannot help but think of a negative series of events on a particular situation. For a simple health issue for instance,  a pessimistic person…

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Dealing with Anxiety Part 1: Expecting the worst and embracing it

“While doing something about a future terrible event, the stoics expects the worst case scenario and embrace it. Always remember , ‘memento mori’ “ I think one of the things that I constantly doing wrong in several years is that when I worry something in the future  such as health issue, financial difficulties etc. is that I don’t have the “so be it” attitude. I even make it worse by either suppresing  or  forcefully changing…

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