How the Stoics Made and Broke Habits
Assemble your life… action by action.
“It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment.” - James Clear
“If you want to do something, make a habit of it, if you don’t want to do that, don’t, but make a habit of something else instead.” — Epictetus
At 6:47 one morning, I came home from the hospital with the taste of stale coffee still in my mouth and a small rule waiting for me- before I touched my phone, I had to write for forty-five minutes.
I had kept the rule for eleven days. That morning I was still in scrubs, too tired to shower, and the document I had been working on was open on my desk. I told myself I’d answer one message while the kettle boiled, then begin.
I sat on the edge of the bed and opened WhatsApp. There was a link in the message, then another beneath it, and when I next looked at the time, forty minutes had passed. The water in the kettle had gone cold. And I closed the laptop without writing a sentence.
The next morning, I checked the phone again. By the weekend, my notebook was buried beneath hospital papers and receipts, and the routine already felt like something I used to do.
What bothered me was how little it had taken. One tired exception became a precedent. The second decision came more easily. By the third, it was already unconscious.
Epictetus would have recognized the sequence immediately. He’d have paid little attention to the promise I had made eleven days earlier. Promises exist in the mind; our habits are built through acts.
Every time I reached for the phone, I strengthened that movement. Every time I abandoned the writing, I made abandonment more familiar. The old routine returned because I had begun feeding it again.
I had to get to the bottom of it.
Further reading,
what a habit actually is
Epictetus had been born into slavery and later became one of the most influential teachers in the Roman world. By the time he opened his school in Nicopolis, young men were travelling there to study philosophy under him.
They learned how to define courage, temperance and freedom. They could discuss human nature, argue about logic and repeat the doctrines of the Stoics. But then a servant made a mistake, someone insulted them, or an attractive person walked past, and their education didn’t translate.
Epictetus saw the problem. His students had learned the ideas of philosophy while their daily conduct still repeated old habits.
In one lecture, he asked them to consider how every capacity grows. Walking makes sustained walking easier. Running develops the runner. Reading strengthens the ability to read attentively. The same process governs character. Each angry response makes anger easier. Each act of restraint makes restraint easier to call upon. Each hesitation teaches you to hesitate again.
“Do not feed the angry habit,” he warned. “Don’t add fuel to the fire.”
The image explains more than most elaborate systems of habit formation. A fire responds to what fuels it. It has no interest in the promises you made in January, the kind of person you intend to become, or the guilt you felt after yesterday’s failure. It grows through what you give it.
You may sincerely wish to become patient while spending every day feeding irritation. You may dream of becoming a writer while teaching yourself to escape whenever writing becomes difficult. You may want a disciplined life while repeatedly treating discomfort as a reason to stop.
The wish matters less than the repeated act.
The ancient philosophers called the result hexis- a settled disposition. An individual act begins to harden into a tendency. The tendency becomes easier to express. Eventually it feels natural, though much of what we call natural is conduct practiced so often that we’ve forgotten learning it.
Cicero described the process as choice becoming a fixed habit. At first, you perform the act. After enough repetition, the act begins to express the kind of person you’ve become. That’s why Aristotle said excellence is a habit.
This usually happens without notice. You procrastinate on the work once. You reach for the phone during a difficult paragraph. You complain after one inconvenience. You snack beyond fullness on one tiring evening. Nothing seems to change, so the act feels insignificant.
The result appears later, when you find yourself doing the same thing with less resistance.
Further reading,
Benjamin Franklin against imperfection
Benjamin Franklin once decided that he would achieve moral perfection.
He drew up a list of thirteen virtues, including temperance, order, resolution, industry and humility. He made a small book with a page for each virtue and columns for the days of the week. Whenever he failed, he placed a mark in the appropriate square.
His plan was methodical. He would concentrate on one virtue each week while continuing to observe the others. After thirteen weeks, he could begin the cycle again. Four complete cycles each year, he thought, might gradually remove his faults.
The experiment immediately exposed the distance between admiring a virtue and possessing it.
Order caused him the most trouble. His papers refused to remain where they belonged. Business interrupted his schedule. Visitors arrived unexpectedly. He had imagined that a rational plan would bring his conduct into line. Instead, his life became ever stressful.
Franklin compared himself to a man who asked a blacksmith to polish an axe until its entire surface shone. The work at the grindstone became exhausting. When the smith pointed out that the axe remained speckled, the man finally replied, “I think I like a speckled axe best.”
Franklin understood this temptation. After failing often enough, we begin defending the fault. We declare ourselves naturally disorganized, naturally impatient or simply incapable of consistency. The explanation saves us from the discomfort of continuing to work on it.
Franklin never achieved the moral perfection he had planned. He believed the attempt still made him better and happier than he’d have been without it. His little book showed him the repetitive faults, which circumstances drew them out and where further effort was needed.
Epictetus recommended a similar practice for anger. Count the days, he told his students. First you were angry every day. Then you managed one day without it. Later, two days passed, then three. When you reached thirty days, you could offer thanks to the gods because the old disposition was losing strength.
The main idea he wanted you to remember is that one instance of anger doesn’t restore it to its former strength. Progress survives imperfection because dispositions change through accumulation.
But once failure becomes our identity, further failure begins to feel inevitable.
Further reading,
Anthony Trollope on the bare minimum
Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, several volumes of short stories, travel books and biographies while working for the British Post Office.
He did much of the work before breakfast.
Every morning at 5:30, a servant brought him coffee. Trollope placed a watch on his desk and began writing. He expected himself to produce 250 words every fifteen minutes. He counted the words as he went and continued for several hours before leaving for his ordinary employment.
When he finished a novel before his writing time had ended, he took out a fresh sheet and began the next one.
There was no need to decide each morning whether he felt inspired. Once the coffee came and the watch was well on the table- the next 250 words were due.
This is where many habits fail. We build them around distant outcomes. Write a book. Become fit. Control your temper. Read more. Save money. The ambition is so large that each day’s contribution feels too small to matter.
Trollope reduced a literary career to a unit he could complete before breakfast.
The Stoics approached character in the same way. They rarely spoke as though a single courageous decision would make someone courageous forever. Courage was today’s act in the presence of today’s fear. Temperance was today’s limit placed on today’s appetite. Discipline was the next duty begun while the body preferred comfort.
Marcus Aurelius faced this argument each morning.
Despite ruling an empire, commanding armies and carrying responsibilities few people could imagine, he still had to persuade himself to leave his bed. In the Meditations, he records the body’s case for remaining under the blankets. The bed is warm. Rest is pleasant. More sleep feels deserved.
His answer was that he was rising to perform the work of a human being. Plants, birds, ants, spiders and bees were already doing their part in the world. He also had work that belonged to him.
Most of us wait for a grand feeling about duty. He told himself he needed to place his feet on the floor ASAP.
The beginning of a habit should be concrete enough to perform before our lazy minds have a chance to negotiate. Sit at the desk when the coffee is ready. Walk after lunch. Read two pages before switching off the lamp. Write one paragraph before opening WhatsApp.
The size of the action may seem beneath the scale of your ambition. But that’s its advantage. A small beginning gives the mind lesser resistance.
Further reading,
Maya Angelou on our environment
Maya Angelou rarely wrote at home.
In every town where she lived, she rented a hotel room and kept it for months. She left home early in the morning and reached the room around six-thirty. She asked the staff to remove the pictures and decorations from the walls. She didn’t sleep in the bed. She brought writing materials, a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a bottle of sherry.
The room had one purpose.
At home, there were possessions, domestic responsibilities and people who might need her. In the hotel, the range of possible actions narrowed. She arrived to work, and the room made that intention harder to forget.
Our surroundings are full of instructions we barely notice.
The phone beside the bed asks to be checked before we’ve fully awakened. The food on the counter asks to be eaten. The open browser invites another tab. The chair facing the television makes one evening resemble the fun evening before it. The shoes hidden in a cupboard make exercise require one more decision.
We often treat these details as irrelevant. Epictetus bids us to put them as part of training.
When a temptation was strong and the desired disposition remained weak, he advised his students to create distance. Leave the situation. Avoid company that strengthens the fault. Give the impulse time to pass. Stop placing yourself where the old response receives constant encouragement.
There is no virtue in making every good decision unnecessarily difficult.
Someone who wants to read can leave the book on the pillow and charge the phone in another room. Someone who wants to eat differently can decide what enters the fridge before they’re hungry. Someone trying to drink less can stop arranging evenings around places where drinking is the default activity.
The surroundings are already influencing your behavior. Angelou understood this well enough to pay for an empty room.
Further reading,
Haruki Murakami on breaking a habit by building another life
When Haruki Murakami became a full-time novelist, he was smoking around sixty cigarettes a day. His fingers had turned yellow. For years he and his wife had run a jazz club, working late into the night while he wrote whenever he could find the time.
Selling the club changed the structure of his life.
They moved to a rural area and began waking early and going to bed earlier. Murakami spent long hours writing at a desk, so he took up running to keep his body active. As the distances grew, smoking became harder to reconcile with the kind of runner he wanted to become. He quit.
The running supported the writing. The earlier nights supported the mornings. The move separated him from the life of the club. Several changes began reinforcing one another.
Murakami built a daily life in which smoking had less room to survive.
This is one of the strongest ways to break a habit. Give the old behavior fewer cues to appear, then place another response where it used to live.
Epictetus told his students to set a contrary habit against the old one. When insulted, practice restraint at the exact moment anger expects you to speak your mind. When desire becomes insistent, delay your response. When comfort tells you to abandon the work, remain with it a little longer.
The trigger becomes the place where the new the new habit begins.
Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’s teacher, applied the same principle through voluntary hardship. He recommended simple food, plain clothing, exposure to heat and cold, hard beds and occasional hunger or thirst. These exercises trained the student to experience discomfort without immediately obeying it.
Musonius had earned the right to speak about hardship. The emperor Nero exiled him to Gyaros, a barren island used as a place of punishment. Students still travelled there to hear him teach. Ancient accounts even credit him with helping discover a spring on the island. Philosophy had to survive outside the lecture hall or it had achieved little
His exercises were meant to prepare a person before greater difficulties arrived. Someone who always gave in to comfort would be governed by discomfort. Someone who had practiced small acts of endurance would have another response available- options equals freedom.
The same principle applies to ordinary habits.
Leave the phone untouched for ten minutes after waking. Finish the page before checking the message. Sit with the craving for five minutes before deciding what to do. End the meal while some appetite remains. Take the stairs when the lift would be easier.
The purpose is to learn that an urge can appear and it’s not a dictatorial directive.
A bad habit usually serves a purpose, even when its consequences are costly. Scrolling may help you avoid a difficult thought. A drink may mark the end of a demanding day. Anger may produce a brief sense of power. Procrastination may protect you from discovering that your best effort has limits.
Removing the behaviour leaves the need behind.
The replacement should answer some part of that need. A walk can create a boundary after work. Calling someone can answer loneliness. A shower and a meal can replace the ritual of pouring a drink. Writing one rough paragraph can help you approach the fear beneath procrastination.
Murakami’s running worked because it became part of his identity, his health and the structure of his work. The new life made the old habit increasingly expensive.
seneca’s post-mortem
Seneca ended each day by questioning it.
He borrowed the practice from the philosopher Sextius, who asked himself before sleep- What fault have you corrected today? Which failing have you resisted? In what respect are you better?
After Seneca’s wife had gone to sleep and the room had become still, he reviewed his words and actions. He concealed nothing from himself. When he found a fault, he addressed it directly- you argued too aggressively; next time, avoid that dispute. You spoke harshly; remember that people can be corrected without humiliation.
Remember, this was an examination, not a prosecution. Stoics don’t believe in self-flagellation.
Most failed habits remain vague. You tell yourself that you lacked discipline, wasted the day or behaved badly. These judgements offer little information. They turn a specific event into a general attack on your character.
Seneca’s method asks for details.
What happened before the behaviour? Where were you? What were you feeling? Which excuse did you accept? What made the useful action difficult to begin? What could be changed before the same situation returns?
“I’m lazy” explains almost nothing.
“I opened my phone when the paragraph became difficult” identifies the moment of escape.
“I eat badly” offers no useful correction.
“I arrive home hungry, with nothing prepared, and order the first meal I see” reveals where the next decision should be made.
“I have a terrible temper” makes anger sound like a permanent possession.
“I respond before the other person has finished speaking” gives you an action to interrupt.
A useful review ends with an adjustment. Tomorrow the phone begins in another room. The meal is prepared earlier. The first response to provocation is delayed. The running clothes are placed beside the door.
Seneca used the day that had passed to improve the conditions of the next one.
returning after failure
No routine survives life untouched.
Franklin’s pages accumulated marks. Trollope had mornings when the work came slowly. Maya Angelou sometimes left the hotel with pages she would later discard. Murakami still had days when he didn’t want to run. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself of principles he had already failed to follow.
The need for repetition proves that understanding doesn’t permanently settle the struggle.
Marcus’s answer was to return. When he fell short of his principles, he told himself to go back to them without disgust. Philosophy remained available like a therapeutic remedy that could be applied again whenever it was needed.
This changes the meaning of a lapse.
You missed the morning. The next morning is still there for you.
You lost your temper. The next irritation becomes another opportunity to respond differently.
You spent the evening doing what you had promised to stop doing. The conditions of tomorrow evening can be changed before it begins.
The most important habit may be the act of returning before failure has time to become a new pattern.
Epictetus will ask you one last question- which disposition will your next act strengthen?
The fire is continuously being fed.
You decide which one.
I really needed to get this message!
I only read your personal note at the beginning, but will get to the rest of this.
I was doing pretty good for a few days on this type of "goal setting" such as your goal of writing first, and then I started to let it slip.
Especially with this phone and all I can access with it, I find I keep frittering my time away IF I AM NOT conscious and intentional.
Thank you so much!🎉