The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

One Marcus Aurelius line has stuck with me more than most: stop arguing about what a good person should be, and just be one. It cuts straight through the temptation to theorise instead of act. In this one I sit with that quote and the way it feeds into self-discipline and getting free of approval addiction. The distinction I keep coming back to is the gap between what you would do and what you cou...

I have trained martial arts for years, but my real love is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It has changed how I relate to my body, my sense of who I am, and the world around me. More than anything, it taught me how to learn. That is what got me thinking about the overlap with Stoicism. In this one I make the case that you absorb Stoic ideas far faster when you treat the philosophy like a martial art you dril...

Epictetus had a deceptively simple claim: it is not events that disturb us, but our judgements about them. Sit with that long enough and it changes how you meet almost everything. In this lesson I break down his view of the emotions and how we work with them in a world that is often cruel and chaotic. The idea sounds plain, but I would argue it is the single most important principle in all of Stoi...

One of the best meditation books I have read is The Mind Illuminated by John Yates, who writes as Culadasa. He holds a doctorate in neuroscience and tens of thousands of hours on the cushion, and it shows on every page. In the appendix he shares a practice he calls the Daily Mindful Review, the strongest method he found for carrying mindfulness into ordinary life. I adapted it with Stoic elements,...

I read a lot, so it feels strange to say this, but reading books is a poor way to actually learn something. Exposure to ideas is not the same as living them. In this one I lay out how I think about learning, and why a book only earns its keep once you already have a framework to hang it on. Read without that, and you finish the book having met the ideas but changed nothing. Free 7-Day Stoic Challe...

A Stoic Handbook reader wrote in about pornography addiction, and I do my best to give it the careful answer it deserves. It is a nuanced subject and I try not to flatten it. Part of what makes it hard is that it is a continuum addiction, with no clean line marking when it becomes a problem, which sets it apart from more binary habits. If you struggle with any kind of compulsive behaviour, I think...

Work-life balance gets talked about as if it were a fixed point you could reach and hold. I think that framing sets us up to fail. In this one I share how I actually approach it. It should be useful for anyone busy who wants to get more done while carrying less stress. Along the way I point to a few things that shaped my thinking, including Alain de Botton on success, Greg McKeown on essentialism,...

One of the prompts in my morning writing is simple: what three things will make up my power hour? It is the question that decides whether a day actually moves forward. In this short one I explain what a power hour is and how I use it to get real work done while looking after a two-year-old half the week and running several business projects on the side. If you are short on time and tired of feelin...

Have you ever had a moment that made it suddenly obvious how much of what you worry about does not matter? For me it was the instant my son was born. The view from above is a way to reach for that clarity on purpose. It is one of the most powerful Stoic practices. By stepping back from a difficult situation in the mind, you see it with more perspective and less stress, which makes for calmer judge...

Each night, once the house had gone quiet, Seneca would go back over his whole day, what he had done and said, hiding nothing from himself. This guided meditation is built on that practice. It follows on from the morning meditation I shared last week. Both stand on their own, but together they bookend the day nicely. If the aim is to grow in character, we need to notice where we did well, see wher...

This is a Stoic contemplation to settle into each morning before the day gets hold of you. It draws on Marcus Aurelius and his practice of premeditation of adversity, the habit of reminding yourself, on waking, that you may meet the meddling, the ungrateful and the difficult, and resolving to meet them with patience. Practise it this way and you arrive at the day already braced for it, able to tak...

Someone pointed me to a Tucker Max tweet calling Stoicism a dead philosophy, backed by a study suggesting that a naive endorsement of Stoic ideology might actually be bad for wellbeing. It is a serious challenge, so I wanted to take it seriously. In this one I dig into the study itself, into the claim, and into the common misreadings of Stoicism underneath both. The real question I am chasing: doe...

In this guided meditation you will imagine an apocalyptic scene, the end of the world, as a way of bringing your most important values sharply into focus. It draws on the Stoic practice of premeditation of adversity. Picturing what could go wrong leaves you better prepared, lets you rehearse meeting hardship calmly, and quietly deepens your gratitude for what is still here. So much time gets lost...

Seneca used the image of a fighter to make his point about hardship. The boxer who has never been hit cannot enter the ring with real confidence. The one who can is the one who has seen his own blood, been knocked down, and got back up more defiant than before. In this short one I read that passage and sit with why it has stayed with me. There is a way of looking back at your own past hardship tha...

In Chapter 4 of the Enchiridion, Epictetus lays out a simple three-step way of making plans, one that keeps you steady whether things go your way or not. This guided exercise walks you through it. Like anything worthwhile, the value is in the doing, not the hearing. So try committing to run through this process each time you make a plan. Practise it enough and it stops being a technique and become...

The first chapter of Epictetus and his handbook deals with the dichotomy of control: the line between what is up to us and what is not. This meditation is a training exercise to help that principle sink past the intellectual level and into how you actually live. Epictetus made big claims for it. Hold this distinction, he said, and you become genuinely free, free of resentment, free from anyone hav...

Death is natural and inevitable, neither good nor bad in itself. What causes us so much anxiety is the judgement we lay on top of it. This is the full guided contemplation for sitting with that judgement and softening it. When the mind grows more accepting of death, life takes on a quiet urgency. The smaller anxieties fall away and what is left is room for joy, compassion and attention. As Sam Har...