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A Stoic morning and evening routine

The Stoics thought of philosophy as something you do, not just something you read. The most common formats in the surviving texts are a morning preparation and an evening review. Together they take about ten minutes.

Morning: prepare

1. Remind yourself what is up to you today and what is not.
2. Anticipate difficulty. Marcus Aurelius began his day by expecting to meet interfering, ungrateful or dishonest people, so as not to be thrown by them.
3. Choose a virtue to practise: patience, courage, honesty, fairness.
4. Name the work of the day in one sentence and begin.

Evening: review

1. Seneca described a habit of examining his whole day each night, asking what ailment he had cured, what fault he had resisted and where he was better.
2. Review without prosecuting yourself. Write two or three lines: what went well, what went badly, what I will do differently tomorrow.
3. End with gratitude for one thing you were given today.

Make it stick

Attach it to something you already do: coffee in the morning, brushing teeth at night. Keep a short notebook. Missing a day is not failure; return the next day, which is itself a Stoic habit.

In their own words

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.1 (George Long translation)

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Keep reading

• The dichotomy of control
• Marcus Aurelius and the Meditations
• Seneca and his Letters