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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom and temperance.

And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time.

And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of Daily Stoic. It must have been, of course, stressful to be Marcus really. So it must have been stressful to be Santa Cah. These were people with a lot on their shoulders who were brilliant, who had things they were trying to do.

And so like the rest of us, they would have gotten frustrated, they would have gotten upset. And I think it's impossible to dance around the fact that Marcus really has clearly had a temper. How could he not have had a temper when you read meditations and you see how much he talks about managing your temper.

People who never get angry don't have to talk about why you shouldn't get angry. And so with Santa Cah, I mean, Santa Cah even writes an essay on anger. And in some respects, this is a, you know, a warning to the young emperor and hero, but clearly he's drawing on personal experience.

And he's also a person who's been in leadership for decades, who'd been at the whim of anger, who'd clearly lost his temper in his own life and was talking from experience about the perils of temper and anger and the passions.

You know, we said before we have this challenge, the the team your temper challenge, we say like just because you don't have an anger problem doesn't mean anger is not a problem in your life. Of course, it's a problem. It's a problem for everyone. No one is glad after they lose their temper.

And then you've gotten angry, said something out of anger and I'm like, I am so glad I did that. And honestly, you know, you tell yourself that you feel better. But like, do you ever actually feel better? Like when you go punch a pillow, because you're so upset, you scream.

And that's sort of one of those primal yells, you know, after you get away from something that's really driving you nuts, is it actually let anything out? No, it didn't. The anger still there still eating you anger is a toxic emotion to the stokes. It's one of the main emotions they were trying to work really hard to be free of to get to a place of apotheo or ateraxia where they were not.

You know, it did not have that course in through their veins. So in today's episode, we're going to look at some of the stoic strategies for taming your temper, for controlling your anger and for forgetting to that place of peace and stillness and that's not to say there aren't going to be things in the world that you should be upset about.

Being angry, being driven by anger is not where the stokes wanted to come from. So today, here we go. How to use stoicism to control your anger. And of course, if this video is a good starting point for you, you want to go deeper down this rabbit hole, be sure to check out our team, your temper challenge.

You can do it daily stoke.com slash temper.

You can imagine that for someone like Marcus Relius, temper and anger are going to be things he's really thinking about concerned about because he's overseeing an empire of millions of people, the stakes are constantly high.

He's overseeing court cases, he's building projects, he's leading an army. In some cases, it's the worst, most frustrating problems that make their way up to his level.

And so he does, in meditations, he talks about sort of the importance of controlling one's temper, of managing our anger because it was such a critical part of the reality of his life. He says how much more harmful the consequences of anger are than the thing that causes it.

What he means is that when you get upset about something, when you're going to angry about it, what you do in response is often worse than whatever the consequences of the thing that caused the problem were in the first place.

At one point in meditations, he actually quotes Europeans, the playwright who said something like, why give in to anger as if the world would notice. He's basically saying like, our anger is impotent and totally pointless.

And so he talks constantly about anger and there's a bunch of proven strategies, a bunch of ideas that we get from Marcus Relius that I think we can apply in our lives to make us not only less angry but to reduce the consequences or costs of anger in our life.

The first thing we get from Marcus is he says like, just accept responsibility. Whatever the problem is, whoever caused it, you have to accept responsibility.

It's when you're blaming other people you get really mad. So he says like, blame yourself or blame no one.

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