The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

Anxiety is the thing I have spent the most time wrestling with, so this episode is less a lecture and more a report from someone still doing the work. I share what actually helped me, where Stoic practice fits, and the difference between fear and anxiety: fear is a sane response to a real threat in front of you, anxiety is your mind running drills against threats that may never come. I also point...

Dan Munro is back for a fourth conversation, and this might be my favourite one yet. Dan is a coach and the author of "The Naked Truth", and his whole project is honesty: what it costs to tell the truth, and what it costs not to. This time Sami Marcus from Beyond Stoicism joins me to dig in. A lot has changed for Dan since his last visit. He has become a father, which has forced new ques...

"Self-mastery is the ability to live by choice and not by chance." That line from Eric Brown sets the tone for this whole conversation. We range widely: personal growth, what self-mastery actually requires day to day, honesty in relationships, and what he calls the discipline of surrender, which he describes as submitting to a practice that slowly molds you. We also get into the quieter...

Dan Munro is back, and this time we go after the validation addiction: the quiet habit of arranging your life around being liked. Dan is a coach and the author of "The Naked Truth", and his angle is always the same uncomfortable question, where are you lying to keep the peace, and what is it costing you? We get into self-deception and the biases that protect it, the link between shame an...

Most of us measure success by whether we hit the target. The Stoics would say that is the wrong place to put your attention, because the target was never fully in your control to begin with. This episode is about a different definition of success, one that holds up even when things do not go your way. I use Cicero's arrow analogy and the dichotomy of control to build what I think of as the St...

I love Stoicism, which is exactly why I want to be honest about where it falls short. In this lesson I lay out three places modern Stoicism tends to go quiet: trauma healing, mindfulness, and ecstatic or peak experiences. My worry is that the modern version leans so hard on resilience and "coping" that it can start to worship rationality over wisdom, which was never the point. The ancien...

Distraction is rarely a willpower problem. It is usually a setup problem: we sit down to focus without ever preparing the ground. This episode walks through a six-step process I use to prepare for meditation, and then shows how the same steps carry over into work, relationships, and how you see yourself. We cover showing up with a clear intention, dealing with distractions before they arrive rathe...

When you put your work out in public, the criticism comes. I am an introvert who ended up making content for a living, so I have had my share of being told I was doing the wrong thing in the wrong way. This episode is about how I handle that, with a lot of help from Epictetus. I lean on his Enchiridion to talk through staying with your own path when people doubt it, and how to tell the difference...

The Stoics treated journaling as a tool, not a diary. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations was basically his private notebook. In this episode I show how to build a philosophical journaling habit that actually sticks, and why it overlaps so neatly with modern cognitive behavioural therapy. Along the way we go through the four cardinal virtues and how to use them as a check on your day, and I share ho...

A guided Stoic meditation on awe. We slow down and try to see what is usually invisible to us: the sheer unlikeliness of being here at all, the scale of the universe we are a small part of, the ordinary things we have stopped noticing because they are always there. The Stoics used this kind of perspective shift, the view from above, to put their worries back in proportion. This is a few minutes to...

We make most decisions on autopilot and only notice afterwards that we reacted instead of chose. This episode lays out a six-step mental checklist you can run before you act, so you meet a situation with a clear head rather than a hot one. It is built on Stoic practice: pause, check the impression, ask what is actually in your control, then choose your response on purpose. Short enough to use in r...

If you set your goal as winning, you have handed your peace of mind to other people and to luck. Epictetus had a fix for this, and it is the heart of Chapter 19 of his Enchiridion: aim at things that are actually yours to control. In this episode I work through the difference between external goals, the contest, the prize, the verdict of others, and internal goals built on your own character and e...

A short guided meditation for the moment before you act, when nerves or overthinking are pulling you off course. We use a few Stoic ideas to settle the mind: what is actually in your hands, what is not, and how to step into the next thing with a steady rather than scattered head. This is not about emptying your mind, it is about calming it enough to move well. Use it before a hard conversation, a...

Henry Shukman is a Zen teacher and meditation instructor who has woven together meditative practice, psychotherapy and plant medicine on his own road from eczema, anxiety and despair toward something steadier. This conversation sits on the line between two words people often blur: healing and awakening. Healing is mending what is broken. Awakening, in Henry's telling, is seeing that at some l...

A bad weather forecast, a worrying noise from the car, a small omen that something is about to go wrong. These little signals can sour a whole day if you let them. This episode is about a Stoic move for handling them: treating apparent bad luck as raw material rather than a verdict. I lean on the dichotomy of control to separate what the situation actually demands from the story you are spinning a...

Becoming a parent stripped my time down to almost nothing, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to my focus. This episode is about what I learned from Greg McKeown's "Essentialism": that the constraint was not the problem, it was the teacher. I get into the MoSCoW method for deciding what actually matters, why waiting for inspiration is the amateur's move a...

A lot of anxiety hides behind being nice. Dr. Aziz Gazipura has a PhD in clinical psychology and spends his time helping people build social confidence, and his work named something I had felt for years but never had words for. We walk through four ways of explaining where anxiety comes from: avoidance, distorted thinking, biology, and the one that hit hardest for me, the hidden emotion model, whe...

You can be a genuine victim of something terrible and still refuse to live as a victim. That distinction is the whole episode. As I put it in the conversation, "the victim mindset is not just disempowering, it's also foolish, inaccurate, and irrational." I look at where the victim mentality comes from, often childhood, and the hidden payoff that keeps it in place. Then I bring in th...

A friend kept telling me I had to talk to Dan Munro, so I did, and this is the first of what became several conversations. Dan is a confidence coach with an unusual back story: he was a probation officer working with offenders before he started coaching, which gives him a very clear-eyed read on people who do not want to change. His angle is honesty. As he puts it, calling yourself "a loser&q...

Donald Robertson is one of the people who has done most to bring Stoicism into the modern world, partly because he comes at it as a clinical psychologist who sees how closely it tracks cognitive therapy. His book "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor" is part biography of Marcus Aurelius, part practical guide, and as he writes, the Stoics can teach you "how to face adversity, how to co...

Eric Brown is back, and this conversation is about the unglamorous engine room of change: habits. As he puts it, "your daily disciplines cast a vote for the person you want to be and the person you're becoming." Eric is the co-creator of Phoenix Culture and the creator of Warrior 100, both built around discipline and wellbeing. We get into self-discipline as something you build rath...

Donald Robertson describes Stoicism as "a kind of psychological toolbox", full of strategies for handling anxiety, anger and pain, and that framing runs through this whole conversation. We trace the history of the philosophy and pull practical use out of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca rather than treating them as museum pieces. One note: I originally recorded this a few years ago...

We tend to think of discipline as punishment, something you do to someone, or to yourself, when they get it wrong. This episode argues the opposite: at root, to discipline is to teach. Once you see it that way, both parenting and self-improvement start to look very different. I share a simple framework I use, the Why, What, How technique: work out why someone (including you) is behaving this way,...

Trying to be everything to everyone is a fast route to feeling stretched and resentful. The Stoics had a cleaner idea, role ethics: at any given moment you are playing a specific role, parent, friend, colleague, citizen, and the work is to play that one well rather than all of them at once. In this episode I unpack how thinking in terms of roles clarifies your duties and quietly lowers your stress...

Almost everyone who reads a bit of Stoicism gets the dichotomy of control. Far fewer actually feel any relief from it. You can recite "some things are up to us and some are not" and still lie awake at 3am. This episode is about why that gap exists and how to close it. As Epictetus put it, "the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have." I dig into the p...