Stop Losing Sleep Over Work Stress with Stoicism
If you are like me, you have lost more than a few nights of sleep over your job. Negative interactions, a boss that may be impossible to please despite your best efforts, reviews you disagree with, ever moving goal-posts, and stress-build up can send your head spinning down a funnel of stress-thinking as soon as your head hits the pillow. Or, if you do fall asleep, heaven forbid you need to use the restroom in the middle of the night, or take a drink of water. The moment you gain those 30 seconds to 2 minutes of awareness your mind goes off to the races again, replaying and reliving that work situation that is causing you grief.
In the throes of a particularly difficult two years at a job in which my stress became palpable to my loved ones, I was asked: “Why do you care so much?” Wanting some relief, I decided there was nothing to be lost and no harm to be done by dissecting that question. “Why do I care so much?” I began to pay attention to my thoughts and analyze them as though I were a disconnected outsider. I got out a scalpel and a fork and began slicing up my mentality into small identifiable pieces, categorizing them, naming them, and putting them in little imaginary boxes.
The conclusion that I came to was this: “I don’t.” I realized that I was pretending to care, and pretending very hard. Pretending so hard that I was believing my own subconscious dishonesty, and reacting emotionally to that belief. But at the core, at the foundation of values that make up who I am, after all the bits and pieces had been sliced and scraped to the side, I found that what I really cared about was something else.
The Stoic Truth: You’re Pretending to Care About Your Job
Let me explain what I mean. If the whole company were to collapse in fiscal doom tomorrow, if the CEO were to announce that the company went broke overnight, and all of its workforce is immediately laid off, every single soul in the building would be just fine. Every single one of us would go off and have another source of employment, another source of livelihood, after a relatively brief respite. Then we’d be pretending very hard to care deeply about the success of the next one. This circumstance will not last. This company will not last. On a long enough timeline, it is already doomed. Who remembers the successful businesses of the Roman Empire, or can name one? On a pretty short timeline, enough of the faces that make up this company will have revolved to render it in essence a different organism, a being with so few of the same cells left in its body that it is fundamentally altered.
While it matters far more, we need to understand that our relationships with co-workers and bosses will not last either. In a sense, we are pretending to care about those as well. While our deep desire for their well-being and health is real, and we wish the best for them, very few of us would be mortally wounded if we never saw or spoke to one another again. Think about past work, how you sweated and labored and worried trying to be liked, or at least accepted or respected, by everyone. How much it bothered you if one person seemed to have a low opinion of you, despite all your best efforts, and how hard you worked to change their opinion. Is that person still in your life? When was the last time you thought of them? Do you think they lie awake thinking of you at night? As I think of mine, I wish them well and hope they are living in health and prosperity. But I also feel entirely neutral about ever seeing them again in this life. How would your stress and worry be affected if you were to actually work in the present as if you understood this thing that we don’t speak out loud? These relationships are fleeting and all come to an end, some sooner, some later. When they do end, we’ll be so busy pretending to care about the next one that we won’t give a thought to this one anymore.
Two Paths After This Stoic Realization
A person who comes to this realization has two paths ahead of them. For the sake of my point, I’m going to call them the “low spirited” path and the “high spirited” path. If you take the low spirited path, you might begin to approach work with apathy and maybe laziness. Maybe the lazy, underperforming set that exists in every work-space has understood a simple version of a deep truth, and is simply living according to this philosophy in the way that a person in low spirits reaches a natural conclusion. On the other hand, if you take the high spirited path, you would work and interact in your present job in accordance with a set of identified, carefully selected, personal core values, rather than chasing the carrots that are presented to you by external shadows. You would do this for the respect of self that every person inherently desires, and you would put this respect of self on a higher plane than any fleeting, malleable respect that comes from others. As Marcus Aurelius said:
“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”
Aurelius isn’t advocating for selfishness and arrogance. He is pointing out the folly of chasing the admiration of externals, rather than chasing the growth and improvement of the internal.
For some, this set of core values would be driven by faith or religious belief, the belief that a higher power watches and cares what we do, and will reward the good even when fellow humans don’t. For others, it might be driven by a desire to set the best example we can for the children we are rearing. Sorrowfully, many who delve deep enough into their own motivations will find that personal wealth and prestige is the real driver for their actions. If you begin to dig in the sandpit of your motivations and find this at the very bottom, I would highly recommend a complete overhaul of your core values and worldview. That will not bring happiness, but that is a topic for another post. The point that I’m trying to make is that when you adhere with persistence and fortitude to the set of core values that make you the type of person that you would respect, you can begin to let go of the myriad of conflicting external inputs from your boss, your coworkers, the ever-changing new policies and performance review metrics passed down from higher up, which are driving you like a leaf in a crosswind. You can become Aurelius’ “cliff against which the waves continually break.” You can traverse through the various circumstances, positions, and people that will inevitably drift and shift through your career with an ever-building foundation of self-respect.
This self-respect cannot help but show itself on the surface. The ripple effect will be noticeable to you and others within a relatively short span.
Set Your Own Wins: A Stoic Map of Value
Putting this into practice myself, I have carefully chosen the core values that I respect. They are diligence, integrity, perseverance, honesty, calmness, humility, and kindness. At the end of the day, I judge my “success” on the basis of how well I have adhered to these core values. These are my wins. When my boss sits down and reviews me on the basis of externally imposed metrics that have changed three times in two years, I listen. I say, “ok.” I’ll point my diligence and perseverance in the direction indicated. But that review, positive or negative, no longer affects me in the same way that it used to. I no longer stress over it. I no longer get upset that the goal post was moved without my knowledge or consent. If I have worked every day in accordance with my core values, I do not lose or gain an ounce of self-respect as the result of anything they say, good or bad. I set my own wins, and I know what they are.
The Benefits of Stoicism: Peace and Confidence
I’ll admit, I’m not fully there yet. I wrote from the perspective of the man I aim to be in two years, not as one who has mastered this. But the journey’s begun. By applying Stoic philosophy, I’ve already noticed less anxiety, more peace, and growing confidence. Self-respect radiates outward, subtly shifting how others perceive you too. Why not try it? Pick your core values and judge your day by them—not by your inbox or your manager’s mood.
Next Steps in Your Stoic Journey
Why these six values; diligence, integrity, perseverance, honesty, calmness, humility, and kindness? That’s for another post. For now, experiment with Stoic principles for stress relief. Figure out your core values and start defining your own wins. Let go of what you can’t control. As Seneca, another Stoic giant, might say, focus on what’s in your power… your mind… and leave the rest to providence.
Support the Blog:
The best way you can support the author is by liking this post, subscribing to the blog and sharing the content with others. Follow on X and engage with your own thoughts and comments. This not only provides the encouragement needed to keep writing quality content that inspires real thought and leads readers toward a more contented life, but it also tells the search-engines that this content is valuable and should be shown to more people. Without your support, Apostoic will remain in obscurity, so like, subscribe, and share!
Blog: https://apostoic.com/
Use my Logic Slap app, a meme weapon for destroying logical fallacies in internet debates: https://logic-slap.replit.app/
Drop a penny in the tip jar. This blog is entirely reader-funded.
Leave a Reply