Marcus Aurelius kept a journal. He was the most powerful man in the Roman Empire when he wrote it — ruler of territories stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia — and he never intended anyone else to read it. It was a private practice, probably written during military campaigns, full of self-correction and self-interrogation. He reminds himself of things he knows but keeps forgetting. He argues with himself. He reaches for Stoic principles the way someone might reach for a handhold in uncertain terrain.
This is one reason Meditations remains useful when a great deal of ancient philosophy does not. It is not a treatise. It is a man working on himself in writing.
For anxiety specifically, Marcus offers three reframes worth examining closely.
1. The View from Above
One of the exercises Marcus returns to repeatedly is a kind of deliberate widening of perspective. In Book VI, he writes:
“Look at the stars; see them gyrate, as it were, in their courses. And look at what has passed away. For ages upon ages this has continued. And how petty are the parts played by kings and kinglets, by philosophers celebrated for their wisdom, by tyrants, by other men of might.” (Meditations, VI.36, trans. Robin Hard, Oxford World’s Classics, 2011)
The Stoics called a version of this exercise hupsos — the view from above. You imagine yourself ascending to a vantage point from which the scope of your concern becomes visible against a larger field. Modern readers often find this deflating: your anxiety doesn’t matter because you are small against eternity.
But Marcus’s intention is not nihilism. The exercise is designed to produce what the Stoics called apatheia — not apathy in the modern sense, but freedom from pathe, from involuntary emotional reactions driven by misperception. The anxious mind typically treats local problems as cosmically significant. The view from above restores proportion.
For practical use: when a worry loops, try articulating precisely how much time horizon it actually occupies. Next year? Five years? Twenty? The honest answer usually contracts the sense of urgency without dismissing what is genuinely difficult.
2. The Dichotomy of Control — Applied Precisely
The Stoic principle most often cited in contemporary self-help is Epictetus’s opening line from the Enchiridion: “Some things are in our control and others not.” (Trans. Nicholas White, Hackett, 1983.) This has become a near-cliché — the productivity world loves it — but the clinical application is more exacting than most summaries suggest.
Marcus applies the principle not as a sorting device (“is this in my control or not?”) but as a continuous practice of attention. In Book IV, he notes that anxiety arises not when we encounter difficult circumstances but when we add a judgment about the difficulty. The event plus the interpretation of the event — this is the structure of suffering, not the event alone.
Modern cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) arrived independently at a structurally similar insight: the distinction between activating events, beliefs, and consequences. Albert Ellis, who developed rational emotive behavior therapy in the 1950s, acknowledged Epictetus as a forerunner. (Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, Birch Lane Press, 1994.)
For practical use: Marcus’s version suggests not just asking “can I control this?” but observing the moment when the story you tell about the event generates the anxiety. The commentary is often more distressing than the fact.
3. Premeditatio Malorum — Rehearsing What Could Go Wrong
The Stoic practice most counterintuitive to contemporary wellness culture is premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of evils. Rather than visualizing positive outcomes, you deliberately imagine what could go wrong. Marcus does this explicitly: he thinks about loss, illness, failure, betrayal, in order to discover which of these he is involuntarily assuming will not happen.
This is not pessimism. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, in her research at New York University, has found that purely positive visualization tends to reduce the motivation to act — because the mind treats the imagined outcome as partially achieved. Her method, which she calls WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan), incorporates obstacle-rehearsal as a necessary step toward effective action. (Oettingen, Rethinking Positive Thinking, Current/Penguin, 2014.)
Marcus’s practice goes a step further: the goal is not just to prepare contingency plans but to test whether your equanimity can survive the imagined loss. If imagining the loss produces panic, that’s information about where your sense of security is actually located.
For practical use: choose one thing you are currently assuming will remain stable. Spend five minutes seriously imagining its absence. Notice where the floor drops.
The Meditations will not cure clinical anxiety. But as a manual for the relationship between thought and distress, it remains — despite its age, its occasional repetition, its thoroughly Roman context — one of the more honest documents in the genre.
Go deeper: Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Harvard University Press, 1998) — the definitive philosophical commentary, establishing the Meditations as a spiritual exercise, not merely a collection of aphorisms.