Marcus Aurelius Had Anxiety Too — Stoicism for People Who Overthink

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Marcus Aurelius Had Anxiety Too — Stoicism for People Who Overthink<br>The Examined Life · Issue #4

maheen ahmed<br>Jun 01, 2026

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Three issues in, we’ve covered your attention, your gut, and your ability to spot manipulation. This week we step back even further — into history, into philosophy, and into a set of ideas that have survived 2,000 years because they keep being true. This is the issue I most wanted to write.

There is a book that has never been out of print.<br>It was written by a man who never intended it to be published. He wrote it in fragments, over years, in military camps on the frozen banks of the Danube and in the intervals between imperial audiences in Rome. He wrote it in Greek, which was not his native language, perhaps because the distance helped. He wrote it to himself.<br>The man was Marcus Aurelius — Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, commander of the largest army on earth, ruler of 70 million people across 5 million square kilometres. The book is the Meditations.<br>And it reads, in places, like the private journal of someone in the middle of an anxiety spiral.<br>“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” He wrote that not as confident wisdom dispensed from a throne — he wrote it as a reminder to himself, on a day when the outside events were very much getting to him.<br>This is the thing most people miss about Stoicism. It was not invented by people who had it figured out. It was invented by people who were struggling — and who built a philosophy to help them struggle better.

Who was Marcus Aurelius, really?

Marcus Aurelius — the philosopher king who ruled the Roman Empire while privately wrestling with self-doubt, grief, and exhaustion.

He inherited an empire already in crisis. During his reign, Rome faced simultaneous catastrophes on almost every front: the Antonine Plague (an epidemic that killed five million people), wars on the northern and eastern borders, internal revolts, and a succession of personal losses — Marcus buried several of his children during his lifetime.<br>He was also, by his own account in the Meditations, slow to wake in the mornings, prone to irritability, and deeply uncertain whether he was doing enough good in the world. He worried about becoming corrupted by power. He worried about his temper. He found people exhausting and had to remind himself repeatedly that they were not trying to be difficult — they were simply operating from the limits of their own understanding.<br>He was, in other words, recognisably human.<br>And in the margins of a life of extraordinary external pressure, he developed a set of mental practices that modern neuroscience is only now beginning to understand.

The three Stoic tools — translated for 2026

Tool 1: The Dichotomy of Control

This is the foundational idea of Stoic philosophy, stated most clearly by the former slave and Stoic teacher Epictetus, who was one of Marcus’s primary influences:<br>“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”<br>The practice is deceptively simple: before any situation that causes you distress, draw a line. On one side, everything you can directly control — your response, your effort, your attention, your values. On the other, everything you cannot — other people’s opinions, outcomes, the past, the weather, the economy, what happens after you die.<br>Stoics do not say the second category doesn’t matter. They say that directing your energy toward it is structurally irrational — it cannot change the outcome and it costs you the energy you need for the first category.<br>The Stoic practice of journaling — examining what is in your control — is one of the most evidence-backed tools for anxiety management modern psychology has found.

What neuroscience now confirms: Psychologists call this the distinction between “primary control” and “secondary control” coping strategies. A 2019 meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin found that acceptance-based strategies — focusing on your response rather than trying to control the uncontrollable — were among the most effective interventions for chronic anxiety and stress. The Stoics got there two thousand years earlier.<br>The anxious mind tends to do the opposite: it focuses almost exclusively on the uncontrollable. It replays conversations it cannot undo, worries about events that haven’t happened, and rehearses catastrophes over which it has no power. The dichotomy of control is not a passive acceptance of suffering — it is a precision instrument for redirecting the mind toward where its energy actually produces something.<br>Marcus wrote: “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with...