By Sergeant Steve Sweeting
As I write these newsletters week after week, you might think that I have a plan or that I follow a schedule of topics or ideas that I want to share… Nope, not at all. I go out there, work the streets and live my life, and at some point every week the topic reveals itself to me.
This week it was a phrase that I heard during a podcast. The host and guest were talking about modern life and how prevalent anxiety is nowadays, when the guest said something that really struck home. He said:
“Anxiety hates a moving target.”
As I heard the phrase, I knew it was true and I knew what this week’s newsletter would be.
Reduced anxiety is one of the main benefits that I first noticed when I started practicing Stoicism, and I’ve heard many of my students comment on how following the Stoics has helped them with their own anxiety.
See more content from StreetStoic.com
But why? At first, I thought maybe that increased confidence was why the philosophy reduced anxiety. It makes sense that if you are more confident in yourself, you will worry less about yourself… Maybe? Next I thought that maybe the answer was in Stoicism’s focus on rational thought and facing things head on. I suspected that because most fears and anxieties are irrational, exaggerated, and overblown, and that once you started insisting on logic that a lot of that would naturally fall away. I still think that maybe it is something like that. But now with this new phrase on my mind, I have a new theory. I’m thinking that the reason why the practice of Stoicism does so much to eliminate anxiety is the Stoic bias towards action.
The bias towards action is a thread that runs through all the writings and lives of the Stoics. Act, do, engage, take initiative, take responsibility, take ownership, or as my friend Bryce Lee sometimes says, “Be the main character in your own life.”
When you have this inclination to take action, you very much become a moving target. It makes it very hard for anxiety to take aim at you.
I know from personal experience that it is hard to be actively engaged in doing something about the problem and worry about the problem at the same time. When I am productively working in the here and now, I don’t have much time or bandwidth to worry and fret about the future or dwell on the past.
Maybe the simple answer to a lot of anxiety is “do something.” Maybe the trick is to be too busy to be anxious.
“Not in passivity, but in activity lie the evil and the good of the rational social animal, just as his virtue and his vice lie not in passivity, but in activity.”
– Marcus Aurelius
I’m a big fan of Jocko, and I think one of his famous sayings applies to this. He tells people that they should “default aggressive.” I think maybe he’s not saying that you should be confrontational with people all the time, but instead be aggressive about your life. If you have a problem, attack it. If you have a worry, confront it. This is very much a bias towards action.
When you look at Stoicism, this way of thinking is built into the Dichotomy of Control. It’s not just “don’t worry about the things you don’t control.” <– That’s the rookie version. The actual lesson of the DOC is that you actively focus on and work with the things that you DO control and the choices you CAN make. When you practice the DOC and actually use it, you learn to ask yourself constantly, “what can I do?” As long as you are alive, there is always something that you can do. The thing you learn through repetition is that if you only focus on internals, you never fail. The outcome is entirely up to you, and that is nothing to be anxious about at all.
“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”
– Epictetus
When we experience trauma or situations that induce PTSD, I think this bias towards action can be a real lifesaver. After 20 years of living it and seeing it play out in the lives of others, I can tell you with a lot of confidence that the only wrong answer is to do nothing. Your action might be talking to a friend, your move might be to go get some therapy, you might attack a stack of books or a new philosophy like I did, you might get up and go to church, or maybe you get busy doing some good in the world or improving things. However you choose to be a moving target, I think that strategy is going to work out much better than staying still, doing nothing, or inaction.
If you deal with any anxiety, worry, or dread this week, maybe it’s time to turn yourself into a moving target and see if you can’t dodge the worst of it.
Amor Fati
– Sgt. Steve
