Pause when angry
Anger is one of the hardest passions to manage. One reason it’s so hard to handle is that it rushes upon you and grabs your attention quickly. This was Emma’s experience when working on being more prosocial during the Discipline of Action. She attempted to act the opposite of anger, but her main problem was that she didn’t realize she actually was angry until well after the fact! Things started to improve, though, when she took on anger through the Discipline of Assent. When Emma worked with pausing at the first signs of anger, she found she was able to know that she was angry, which helped her act the opposite more easily. This week, you’ll take your first steps in applying the Discipline of Assent to anger using this technique.
"Remember that foul words or blows in themselves are no outrage, but your judgment that they are so. So when any one makes you angry, know that it is your own thought that has angered you. Wherefore make it your first endeavor not to let your impressions carry you away. For if once you gain time and delay, you will find it easier to control yourself.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, 20
The Discipline of Assent builds on and refines the other two, in particular the Discipline of Desire. When Epictetus says that an insult itself isn’t an outrage but your angry reaction to it is, he is applying the Discipline of Desire, which uses the virtue of practical wisdom—the one that tells us what is truly good and truly bad for us. Insults appear to be truly bad, but they are not. Righteous anger in response to insults appears to be truly good, but it isn’t.
You may have noticed Epictetus’s mention of “blows” as likewise offensive. Nobody is suggesting that we should condone physical violence, but sometimes the best reaction is humor, not more violence. Consider this anecdote about Socrates, told by Seneca: “There are many ways in which anger may be checked; most things may be turned into jest. It is said that Socrates, when he was given a box on the ear, merely said that it was a pity a man could not tell when he ought to wear his helmet out walking.”1
Whenever we talk about anger from a Stoic perspective, even with fellow students of the philosophy, we find an incredible amount of resistance to this approach. People want to be angry. They feel entitled to it, even though modern psychologists agree with the Stoics and have argued that anger is just not good for us.2 Reacting properly to injustice doesn’t require us to be angry, simply animated by a sense of what is right (a positive emotion, in Stoic psychology). Indeed, anger—even when apparently justified—gets in the way of forming an appropriate response, since it makes us prone to act in a rash and often disproportionate manner.
Epictetus’s approach here is classic cognitive behavioral therapy: First, analyze the issue at the cognitive level. Know that “it is your own thought that has angered you.” Second, implement any number of techniques to alter your behavior, which mostly means whatever will allow you to gain time and so recover your composure: Count to twenty, mentally run through the alphabet, take deep breaths from your diaphragm, excuse yourself to go to the restroom, or get out for a walk around the block—whatever works to put some cognitive distance between your “passion” (again, in the Stoic sense of an unhealthy emotion) and what it is that you are going to do next. You won’t regret it.