Where are all the Stoic practices? One of the things that got wrong about the rising popularity of Stoicism was that with all the focus on self-improvement, I expected more authors and podcasters to talk about the psychological techniques used by ancient Stoics, but they barely mention them, for some reason.

When I was a student, I read Pierre Hadot’s books on “spiritual exercises” in ancient philosophy. I was puzzled by Hadot never attempted to compare these to psychological techniques in modern psychotherapy, because the parallels seemed obvious. I began working on a doctoral dissertation about Stoicism and cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) but couldn’t find a university in the UK who would supervise it because even if they did have anyone in the department who knew about Stoicism, which was rare, they told me they had no interest in CBT.

I ended up reworking my notes into a book and publishing it as “The Philosophy of CBT” (Routledge, 2010), which has now been cited in over 400 other books and articles. In that book, I surveyed the main parallels I could spot between Stoicism and CBT, and listed about eighteen different Stoic psychological strategies. Most of them appear to be very familiar to Stoic authors, especially Marcus Aurelius, who several times describes some of these exercises as part of his daily routine.

When we developed the first Stoic Week online course for Modern Stoicism, which tens of thousands of people have now completed, we incorporated a lot of techniques, based on Hadot. That seemed like the obvious way to put Stoicism into practice. I think we all assumed that, as we saw Stoicism spreading, people would practice these sorts of techniques and write about them. Oddly, that didn’t really happen. We get entire books about Stoicism as a form of self-help now that don’t even mention one of the actual techniques used by the ancient Stoics, or they mention only a small handful, perhaps 2-3 of them, rather than painting a more complete picture of Stoic practices.

These are the tools that allow people to put the philosophy into practice consistently in their daily lives. I think sometimes the problem is that many people who write about Stoicism aren’t actually attempting to apply it in their own lives. So it doesn’t occur to them to explain how the ancient Stoics actually trained themselves to improve their character. You can find most of this information pretty easily, though, by reading Hadot’s books, my own, or the Stoic Week manual, which is freely available online.