Everyone wants less stress. With this in mind, we might do well to call up the words of the American psychologist William James: “our greatest weapon against stress Is our ability to choose one thought over another.” To see how this might work in practice, consider the following. Someone cuts me off in traffic. I think, “this guy is a jerk,” and immediately start to get angry, and maybe even drive a little crazily. Using James’ strategy, what if, instead, I reached for an alternate thought, for example “for all I know this guy may be rushing home to a family emergency.” If I can choose this thought (and who’s stopping you) my rage level, and hence my stress, would go down significantly.
The above is an example what is known in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a cognitive reframe. Cognitive reframing is a therapeutic process intended to help clients discover, challenge, and modify or replace destructive, irrational thoughts. Now, most people don’t walk into therapy thinking they are going to have their thoughts restructured; rather, they often want to feel different i.e., less depressed or anxious. However, what they quickly learn (at least if they go to a cognitive therapist) is that these feelings are ultimately driven by thoughts, so that if they want to change their feelings, they will have to work at changing the related thoughts.
One problem with the particular cognitive reframe described in the first paragraph is its limited applicability. For example, the person in the checkout line in front of you who seems determined to become the BFF of the cashier while everyone behind her stews is certainly in no hurry to get home. This situation, then, requires a completely new cognitive reframe. One way around the necessity to generate a new reframe for every situation is a generic reframe that can be useful to a wide variety of situations. Thankfully, this is precisely what Marcus Aurelius provides us in the Meditations. I refer to it as the mother of all cognitive reframes.
There are versions of the following claim throughout the Meditations:
“When anyone offends against you, let your first thought be, under what conception of good or ill was this committed.” [7.26] Once we know this, we will realize they “had no real choice” than to act other than to act other than they actually did.
What’s going on here? Marcus is invoking the Stoic doctrine of determinism and applying it to human behavior. Everything that happens, including all human actions, is result of causes sufficient to determine it. When it comes to people, the implication is that they could not have acted other than they actually did. To expect people to behave differently than they actually do, as Marcus says elsewhere, is like expecting a fig tree not to produce its fruit.
We readily accept determinism when it comes to things like appliances, automobiles or household repairs. When a microwave malfunctions, a fan belt breaks or a roof leaks, we don’t think that the oven or belt or roof could have done anything other than it actually did. And though we may slam our fist into the offending oven if we had hoped it would heat our long-anticipated dinner, we recognize it is irrational to get angry at the object for doing what it inevitably had to do. That is, if we realize an action is the inevitable result of a causal chain, that given everything we know about the universe that action could not have happened in any other way than it actually did, our anger at the event or object tends to dissipate. If someone is walking across a parking lot on a windy day, is picked up by the wind, transported across the parking lot and knocks me over, I do not get angry at them. They were the victim of circumstances beyond their control. So according to the Stoic view, since people’s actions even when they aren’t being blown across parking lots are likewise the result of causes, and they could no more have acted differently that the microwave or roof or fan belt, it makes no sense to get angry at them for acting as they do.
Our wiser self recognizes the validity of the inevitability of human action.Rude people generally speaking act rudely while kind people as a rule act with kindness. Why they act in the way they do might be a matter for a therapist’s couch, but it is usually nothing to be surprised by. What is surprising is that we expect things to be other than they inevitably are. Our irrational response to people’s behavior, specifically when we get angry at them for behaving as they inevitably do, has a couple of implications
First, when we get angry at an individual, it harms us physiologically, sending the body into fight or flight. Fight or flight is an ancient evolutionary adaptation, a sort pulling of the biophysical fire alarm, where we signal to the body that there is an imminent threat. As a result, the body goes into hyperdrive, allotting all available energy to the task of engaging in battle or running away. One researcher has compared this to withdrawing all your savings from the bank. As you might imagine, this response is incredibly stressful on the system and was intended to be activated only rarely. Doing so on a regular basis, as we do when we express regular irritation at people for behaving as they do, is extremely destructive to our bodies.
Second, anger impairs our ability to respond skillfully to the situation. This is because when our fight or flight system is activated, the thinking part of the brain goes off line. When you reflect on it, this makes perfect sense. In fight or flight, all of the body’s energy is devoted to engaging in battle or in running away. Thinking is not a big component of either of these activities. In fact, the thinking part of the brain consumes an amazing amount of energy, so it only makes sense for the body to use the energy that would be devoted to that task to the more pressing need to run or fight. But when the thinking part of the brain goes off line, we rarely act in our best interest, which is why we do all sorts of stupid stuff when we are angry, much of which we come to regret.
Rather than getting angry, reaching for the thought, “this person cannot have acted other than they did” when a person behaves in a way that irritates or outrages us can go a long way towards calming our system and ensuring a wise response on our part.