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The 3 Stoic Rules That Instantly Kill Your Anxiety (And Why You Break Them)
I was running on fumes, checking my phone every five minutes, convinced I was about to be fired. You are wasting 80% of your energy on things that don’t matter.
It was 3 a.m. I was wide awake, mentally arguing with an email I hadn’t even received yet. The root cause of this modern anxiety — this constant, low-level dread — is a profound miscalculation about where our power actually lies. We spend our lives reaching for levers that aren’t attached to anything, trying desperately to control outcomes, people, and events that are fundamentally external.
The ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus laid out the fundamental framework for psychological freedom, a concept known as the Dichotomy of Control. It is perhaps the single most important tool in the arsenal of resilience, yet it is the one we most habitually violate. The system is simple: Some things are within our power, and others are not. Our chronic anxiety proves we are confusing the two.
