Stoic exercises: 9 daily practices from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus

The Stoics did not think philosophy was something you finish learning. You could know every argument in the book and still be anxious, angry and easily flattered. What changed a person was practice: small mental routines repeated until they became habits of thought.

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is largely a record of these routines. It was never meant for publication; it is an emperor reminding himself, over and over, how he wanted to see the world. The historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot called practices like these “spiritual exercises”, and the name stuck.¹

Below are nine of them. None needs special equipment or much time. Most take a few minutes; a couple take a few days.

1. Prepare for the day in the morning

Before the day starts, think through what it is likely to bring, especially the people who will test your patience. The point is not pessimism but readiness: if you expect some rudeness, it loses its power to surprise and provoke you.

Marcus goes on to remind himself that these people are his kin, and that “we are made for co-operation”. The exercise ends not in contempt but in resolve.

Try it: over your first coffee, name one or two situations today that are likely to irritate you. Decide now how you want to respond.

2. Review the day in the evening

The evening review is the morning preparation in reverse. Seneca describes doing it daily: going back over the day, noting where he acted well and where he fell short, without excuses and without self-punishment.

In his essay On Anger he credits the habit to an earlier philosopher, Sextius:

Try it: before bed, write three short lines: what went well, what went badly, and what you would do differently.

3. Sort what is up to you from what is not

This is the foundation of the rest, and the first line of Epictetus’s Enchiridion. Some things are in your power: your judgments, your intentions, how you act. Most things are not: other people, the past, your reputation, the weather. Distress usually comes from treating the second kind as if it were the first.

Try it: when something is bothering you, split it into two lists: the parts you control and the parts you don’t. Put all your effort into the first list. Read more in the dichotomy of control.

4. Rehearse misfortune in advance

This is often known by its Latin name, praemeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils. You calmly imagine things going wrong: losing a job, an illness, a plan collapsing. It sounds grim, but its effect is the opposite. Fear feeds on vagueness; looked at directly, most feared outcomes turn out to be survivable.

Try it: pick one thing you are worried about. Imagine it has happened. What would you actually do next?

5. Practise a little voluntary discomfort

Seneca advised Lucilius to set aside a few days now and then to live on the plainest food and clothing, as if poor, and to ask himself whether this was really what he had been afraid of.

The aim is not hardship for its own sake. It is to learn, from experience rather than argument, that you need far less than you think, so that the fear of losing comforts loosens its grip.

Try it: a cold shower, a day of simple meals, or a walk instead of a taxi. Notice how quickly you adjust.

6. Take the view from above

When a problem feels enormous, zoom out. Picture your city from above, then your country, then the whole earth with its billions of lives and its long history. Your problem is still real, but it takes up its proper, smaller place.

Modern psychology has studied something similar under the name self-distancing. People tend to reason more wisely about other people’s problems than their own, and experiments find that simply viewing your own problem from a distance, as an observer would, closes much of that gap.²³

Try it: next time you are stewing over something, spend two minutes deliberately widening the frame.

7. Describe things as they are

Marcus had a habit of stripping things of their glamour by describing them in plain physical terms. Fine wine is “a little grape-juice”; a purple robe is sheep’s wool dyed with shellfish blood.

The same technique works on anything that has too strong a hold on you: a status symbol, an insult, a craving. Describing it accurately takes away the extra meaning you have attached to it.

Epictetus used it to prepare for loss, starting with the smallest things:

Try it: take something you want too much, or something that has upset you, and describe it in the flattest terms you can.

8. Remember that you will die

Keeping death in view, memento mori, was for the Stoics a way to stop postponing life, not a way to be gloomy. If you might not have long, you stop wasting time on what doesn’t matter.

Epictetus gave his students the same advice:

There is some modern support for the idea. In one study, people asked to reflect vividly on their own death reported more gratitude afterwards than people in a control group.⁴

Try it: ask of what you are about to do: if this were one of my last days, would I spend it like this? More in memento mori.

9. Take one thought for the day

Seneca’s advice on reading was not to consume as much as possible but to choose one idea each day and really digest it.

Try it: pick a single passage in the morning, from the Meditations or the Letters, and come back to it once or twice during the day. Our quote finder can help you find one that fits what you are dealing with.

Where to start

You don’t need all nine. A good place to start is three: the morning preparation, the evening review, and sorting what is and isn’t in your control. Do those daily for a couple of weeks before adding anything else.

The research on Stoic practice as a whole is still young, but early results are encouraging. In a 2025 randomised controlled trial run as part of a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, people who followed a two-week online programme of Stoic exercises reported lower depression symptoms than a waitlist group, with anxiety improving by the one-month follow-up.⁵ As Marcus kept reminding himself, the point is to do it, not to admire the idea of doing it.