Use This As Practice | 3 Stoic Exercises For Your Best Month Yet

What It Covers

Ryan Holiday presents three Stoic exercises drawn from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca to help listeners reset habits, manage emotions, and maintain daily discipline as spring begins in March.

Key Questions Answered

• •Morning Motivation (Marcus Aurelius): Reframe reluctance to get out of bed by asking what you were made for. Marcus Aurelius, himself an insomniac, used this self-questioning technique in Meditations to override comfort-seeking instincts and activate a sense of purpose and service each morning.
• •Chain Method (Epictetus): Track consecutive days of breaking a negative habit — anger, procrastination, distraction — on a calendar. Epictetus documented moving from daily anger to every other day to monthly, noting that after thirty consecutive days, a habit begins to lose its grip permanently.
• •Present-Task Focus (Marcus Aurelius): Treat every task, regardless of perceived significance, as worthy of full attention. The Stoic principle "how you do anything is how you do everything" means that quality of engagement in small moments directly determines quality of engagement across all moments.
• •Daily End-of-Day Audit (Seneca): Each evening, ask four specific questions borrowed from Seneca's letters: What bad habit did I curb today? How am I better? Were my actions just? How can I improve? Seneca recommends scaling this practice to monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews.