A Stoic Day

The ancient Stoics did not regard philosophy as a set of opinions to be held, but as a regimen to be practised, much as an athlete trains or a musician rehearses. They spoke of philosophical exercises, deliberate acts of attention and reflection performed daily until they reshaped a person’s habits of mind. The scholar Pierre Hadot revived the phrase spiritual exercises for these practices, and showed that texts like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are best understood not as treatises but as a record of someone actually doing them. This article walks through a day arranged around those exercises, from the moment of waking to the last reflection before sleep, drawing throughout on what the Stoics themselves wrote.

The Greek word for this kind of training is askesis, from which we get our word ascetic, though the Stoic sense is broader and gentler than self-denial. It means the disciplined practice by which a skill becomes second nature. The Stoics held that right ideas, however true, change nothing until they have been worked into us by repetition, and that the place to do this work is ordinary life, with its steady supply of provocations, disappointments and demands.

What follows, then, is not a checklist of obligations but a set of recurring practices, each tied to a particular moment of the day, that the Stoics used to keep their principles awake and ready. None requires special conditions, equipment or much time. Each asks only for a few honest minutes and the willingness to return to them tomorrow.

The Stoic day begins with a brief act of preparation. Before rising into the day’s business, one looks ahead at it, picturing what it is likely to bring and deciding in advance how to meet it. The most famous example opens the second book of Marcus Aurelius’s notebook, where he tells himself at daybreak that he will meet with the meddling, the ungrateful, the arrogant and the dishonest, that these people act so through ignorance of good and evil, and that none of them can implicate him in ugliness or make him hate them. He rehearses the difficulty before living it, and so arrives at it already composed.

Elsewhere Marcus addresses the simpler reluctance of getting out of bed at all, reminding himself that he was made not for comfort under the blankets but for the work of a human being, and that even the bee and the ant rise to do what they are for. The morning preparation, in both forms, is an exercise of the will at the outset of the day: a deliberate setting of intention, a quiet anticipation of the day’s likely frictions, and a decision to meet them as one’s better self rather than be ambushed by them.

Closely allied to the morning preparation is a practice the Latin tradition called the premeditation of adversity, the calm rehearsal in imagination of the misfortunes that may befall us. Seneca returns to it often. He counsels rehearsing in advance the prospect of poverty, exile, loss and death, not to torment oneself, but to take away their power to shock. What we have foreseen, he argues, strikes us less heavily when it comes; the blow that falls upon the prepared mind is softened.

It is important to distinguish this exercise from ordinary anxious worry, which it can superficially resemble. Anxiety circles helplessly around a feared outcome and treats it as a looming catastrophe. The Stoic exercise does the opposite. It looks the possibility calmly in the face, sees that it could be borne, and then sets it down again, returning to the present with a steadier grip. It has a second fruit as well. By picturing the loss of what we have, we are jolted out of taking it for granted, and the ordinary goods of life, the people and comforts we expect to be there tomorrow, are felt once more as the gifts they are.

If the morning sets the day’s intention, the body of the day calls for a different exercise, one the Stoics regarded as the fundamental attitude of the practising philosopher. They called it prosoche, attention: a continuous, vigilant awareness of what one is doing, thinking and assenting to, moment by moment. It is the discipline of assent carried into the ordinary hours, the habit of catching one’s judgements as they form rather than being carried off by them.

In practice, attention means noticing the small gap between an event and one’s reaction, and stepping into it. An impression arrives, an email that stings, a delay, a careless word, and before the familiar surge of irritation can build, the attentive Stoic pauses to ask: is this within my power or not, and is my first reading of it actually true? Marcus repeatedly urges himself to concentrate on the task immediately before him, to do each thing as though it were the only thing, and to live in the present rather than in the regretted past or the imagined future. Attention is also, therefore, a return to the present moment, the only stretch of time in which we ever actually live or act.

For the moments when matters feel overwhelming and a difficulty swells to fill the whole horizon, the Stoics kept a particular exercise of perspective, which Hadot named the view from above. One steps back in imagination and pictures one’s situation from a great height: the room, then the building, the city, the country, the turning earth, the immense reach of time before and after. Marcus does this again and again in his notebook, surveying human affairs as if from the heavens and noting how small the empires, quarrels and anxieties appear from there.

The purpose is not to belittle our concerns into meaninglessness, but to restore their true proportion. Seen from above, the grievance that felt enormous finds its actual size, the urgent recovers a sense of what genuinely matters, and the mind, momentarily lifted out of its narrow agitation, can settle. It is a deliberate widening of the lens, available in a few seconds, that loosens the grip of whatever has us in its hold.

The Stoic day closes as it opened, with a brief and deliberate act of reflection. At nightfall one looks back over the day just lived, reviewing it honestly, neither flattering nor savaging oneself. Seneca describes the practice in detail, attributing it to his teacher Sextius. Each night, when the house had fallen quiet, Sextius would call his whole day before him and examine it: What fault have you cured today? What vice resisted? In what respect are you better? Seneca tells us he kept the same habit, pleading his own case before himself before he slept.

The exercise has deep roots; a version appears in the verses attributed to the school of Pythagoras, which counsel not to let sleep close the eyes until one has three times gone over the day’s deeds, asking where one has done wrong, what one has done, and what duty was left undone. The point is neither to wallow in guilt nor to congratulate oneself, but to turn the raw material of the day into learning. Where did I act well, and where did I fall short, and what will I do differently tomorrow? Done steadily, this nightly accounting is how experience is slowly converted into character.

Read all at once, these exercises can seem like a heavy programme. They are not meant to be taken up all together or performed with grim thoroughness. The spirit of the thing is consistency rather than intensity. A single honest minute of morning preparation, a few seconds of attention recovered during a difficult conversation, a brief review before sleep, repeated day after day, will do far more than an elaborate routine kept for a week and abandoned.

It is also worth seeing how these practices map onto the deeper structure of Stoic training. The morning preparation and the rehearsal of adversity exercise the discipline of desire, ordering what we hope for and dread. Attention through the day, applied to our dealings with others, exercises the discipline of action. The examination of impressions and the evening review exercise the discipline of assent. The shape of a Stoic day is simply the three disciplines distributed across the waking hours, so that the philosophy is not something one believes but something one does, from the first thought on waking to the last before sleep.