The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

Start the day with the most useful Stoic distinction there is: what is up to you, and what is not. In this 6-minute guided morning practice you will gently name a current worry, notice where it sits in the body, and let go of everything outside your control. Through short teaching, a simple visualisation, and a daily intention, you will practise meeting the day with calm and a clear sense of what...

Martijn Schirp and I have known each other for nearly a decade. He first reached out after reading a meditation article I posted on Reddit, a message that ended up changing my life and led to us co-founding HighExistence and running retreats together in Costa Rica. Since then Martijn has lived several lifetimes. Professional poker player who finished 102nd at the World Series of Poker. A crisis of...

Most of us feel we have too much to do and not enough time to do it. The Stoics had a different diagnosis: the problem is rarely a shortage of time, it is how much of it we hand away without noticing. In this episode I draw on Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus to make the case for spending your attention on what actually matters and letting the rest go. We look at why a finite life is a gift r...

What if the way into real gratitude is not positive thinking, but imagining loss? In this 12-minute guided meditation I walk you through an old Stoic practice called praemeditatio malorum, the premeditation of adversity. Used by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus, it trains you to appreciate what you have before it is gone. We imagine a vivid scene: a sudden accident that changes everything. No...

The Greek terms are where a lot of people get stuck with Stoicism. This episode is a plain-English guide to the vocabulary that actually matters, so the ideas stop sounding academic and start being usable. I walk through the key Stoic words and what they really mean: arete (excellence of character), apatheia (freedom from being ruled by passion, not apathy), prohairesis (the choice that is always...

Ever feel like you are drifting without a clear sense of what actually matters? The Stoics had an answer: four virtues to steer by. In this episode I break down the four cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus used to handle everything from private anxiety to running an empire. Wisdom is seeing reality clearly and focusing on what is yours to c...

A short, practical guide to staying calm in a world of group-chat drama and constant notifications. This 12-minute guided practice works through Epictetus' twenty social rules from Chapter 33 of the Enchiridion. You will practise pausing before you react, turning gossip into something useful, handling criticism without your ego getting involved, and choosing the company that actually lifts yo...

Let me guess. You have read Marcus Aurelius. You know some things are up to you and some are not. And you still lie awake replaying conversations, spiralling over outcomes, feeling like a failure when things do not go your way. Yeah. Me too. Here is the problem: the dichotomy of control is brilliant philosophy and terrible instructions for real life. People hear focus on what you control and eithe...

What if real confidence is not positive affirmations or fake-it-till-you-make-it, but a handful of skills the Stoics spent centuries practising? In this episode I walk through five: clarity of purpose, holding outcomes loosely, closing the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be, a sense of self-worth that does not depend on other people, and actually enjoying your own company. Together...

That moment when the craving is right here, right now, and it feels like the only option is to give in. The drink, the scroll, the binge, the text you will regret, the thing you do not need. The pull is real. The urgency feels total. But here is the Stoic version of the truth: the craving is an impression, not a command. This 5-minute guided drill teaches you to put one act between impulse and act...

Most advice for men hands you tactics. Adam Rice wanted to talk about something underneath that: how to become harder to knock off balance in the first place. We get into spotting an ego flare in your body before it runs the show, the language of conscious communication, and why intimacy tends to beat performance. Adam is an evolution coach, yoga teacher, shamanic guide and men’s work facilitator,...

If "just be nicer" has never once fixed your hardest conversations, this one is for you. I sat down with coach Hans van Veen to put Nonviolent Communication to work in the messy real world: the moment your jaw tightens mid-argument, the urge to take everything personally, the conversations that keep going in circles. Hans walks through the OFNR model (observations, feelings, needs, reque...

Your child says "no" and something in you surges before you have decided anything. This is a short guided reset for that exact moment. We slow the breath to settle the nervous system, set a one-line intention, and use the cue phrase "good kid, tricky moment" to hold two things at once: kind and firm. You will pick one calm sentence or boundary, picture setting the shaken snow g...

A calm Stoic meditation to close the day. We move slowly through mindful presence, a gentle review of the hours behind you, quiet acceptance of how the day actually went, and the wider view from above that lets the small stresses shrink back to their real size. It leans on a few old Stoic ideas about gratitude and letting go, shaped into something you can listen to in bed with the lights off. Use...

One complete Stoic meditation, built to be repeated. The idea is simple: a single practice you can return to every day, so the ideas stop being something you read and start being something you rehearse. Press play in the morning to set the tone, or any time you need to come back to a steadier frame of mind. The more you repeat it, the more it does its work. Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallen...

A short clip with Erick Cloward, Stoic author and host of The Stoic Coffee Break Podcast, on the one idea that quietly runs most of our reactions: it is not the event, it is the judgment you make about it. Change the judgment and the emotion changes with it. Erick puts it plainly: "it is just the way that you are thinking about this, not the thing." Three minutes, one practical handle fo...

Five minutes to find your calm centre when everything around you is shaking. This short guided meditation uses a steady 4-2-6 breath, then asks you to name the turbulence rather than be swept up in it, and repeat one line: "I am the pilot, not the turbulence." It works at your desk, in the car, or standing in a hallway between two hard moments. The aim is not to make the storm disappear....

Amor fati means "love of fate", and it asks something harder than acceptance. Not just tolerating what happens, but learning to meet every turn of your life, the good and the painful, as if you had chosen it. This is a full walk through the idea. I cover where the phrase comes from, what the Stoics and Nietzsche actually meant by it, the quotes worth keeping, and the part that matters mo...

Ten minutes to start the day with a steadier mind. This guided morning meditation draws on Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus to help you anchor your attention, soften the reactivity that runs on autopilot, and meet whatever is coming as something to practise on rather than dread. You will scan body and mind, reframe whatever you carried over from yesterday, and quietly rehearse the tests the d...

If you could only ever recommend one book, what would it be? For Donald Robertson, the writer behind How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, the answer is Plato's Apology: Socrates on trial, defending his way of life and refusing to flinch in the face of death. In this clip Donald explains why this short text sits underneath so much of what came later, the seeds it planted that Marcus Aurelius and...

Most of what upsets us is not the event but the story we wrap around it. This short morning meditation, about seven and a half minutes, walks you through the Stoic practice of objective representation: looking at a recent experience and gently pulling the plain facts apart from the feelings stacked on top. You will pick one situation, see it as it actually is, and reframe your response from there....

Eight minutes to set a clearer head before the day gets hold of you. This guided Stoic meditation moves through three simple steps: observe what is actually happening, notice the judgment you have quietly attached to it, then choose a steadier way to see it. The point is not to feel nothing. It is to stop being run by the first reaction, so you can watch your thoughts instead of being dragged alon...

Socrates' wife Xanthippe has come down to us as the original nightmare spouse. But how much of that is fair, and how much is two and a half thousand years of bad press? I sat down with philosopher and author Donald Robertson to look at what we actually know about their marriage. We get into whether she was genuinely difficult, whether Socrates was the easy one to live with, and how much of th...

Where did Socrates' wisdom actually come from? It was not raw intellect alone. In this conversation, Donald Robertson and I look at the daily habits, the charisma, and the genuine love of people that made Socrates the figure everyone after him kept arguing with. Donald reaches for an unlikely comparison, Jimi Hendrix, to make a point about total immersion: what it looks like when someone give...

You can read every word Marcus Aurelius wrote and still fall apart the first time someone cuts you off in traffic. That gap, between knowing and doing, is what this clip is about. Donald Robertson, one of the leading Stoic authors and a cognitive-behavioural therapist, makes the case that Stoicism is something you train, not just something you study. We dig into the common misconception that readi...