Psychological Stoicism Part 6: The Stoic Test Strategy - Embracing Setbacks

You have minimal control over the setbacks you experience in daily life, but considerable control over how you frame those setbacks.

Hang onto your hats because I am about to reveal the Stoic technique that has had the biggest impact on my life above all others. Indeed, it is one of the most effective psychological techniques I have tried. A word before we start. I’m going to talk about Stoic gods, but don’t worry if you find that offputting. You don’t really have to believe in the Stoic gods for this to work (I don’t) or God (with a big G, either), although it doesn’t matter if you do. We will use them to play a trick on our minds. 

I first heard about the Stoic Test Strategy in a book by William B. Irvine, ‘The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient’. If you are interested in reading about it in more detail, I recommend you get a copy.

Framing

What I am about to describe is a psychological process known as framing. When thinking about framing from a Stoic's point of view, you should think of yourself as an art gallery employee whose job is to hang the paintings the gallery owner wants to display. Under these circumstances, you have little control over which paintings you exhibit but considerable control over how those paintings are framed. You can put them in frames that make them look ugly or frames that make them look beautiful. The choice is up to you. 

In much the same way, you have minimal control over the setbacks you experience in daily life, but considerable control over how you frame those setbacks. Your choice of a frame can have a profound impact on how those setbacks affect you at an emotional level. Using the Stoic test frame, we imagine ourselves playing a game against the Stoic gods. These gods, let me assure you, are imaginary. I know this sounds weird, but hear me out. Playing this game can have a profound impact on your future well-being. 

Experiencing Setbacks

Suppose you experience a setback. It might be a small setback, like realising your shoe is untied. It might be a medium setback, like your car breaking down or a water pipe bursting in your house. It might be a major setback, like a relationship breaking up.

One way to respond to a setback is by getting upset. This is a normal and understandable response. You might feel frustrated, angry, or defeated. You might even slip into a depression. You've likely seen this happen to other people and concluded that what's hurting them the most is not the setback itself, but their response to the setback. They're blowing this all out of proportion, you might think, and the agony they're experiencing is self-inflicted, especially if this reaction continues for a long time after the initial setback. Realise, though, that there's a very good chance that this is what other people think when they watch you respond to setbacks. 

Along these lines, let's turn our attention to the medium setback of having a water pipe burst in your house. In such cases, the broken pipe is the least of your problems. A competent plumber can repair it relatively cheaply in under an hour. Your bigger problem is all the water that the burst pipe released. The damage it causes can be considerable. Suppose the pipe broke in a first-floor bathroom, and the resulting flood caused the ceiling below the bathroom to become drenched, and water poured into the kitchen below. Oh dear! I say, “Oh dear!” because this happened in my house a number of years ago when my son left the bath running and then got lost in a game in his bedroom. I stood in the kitchen, boiling pasta, and felt drip, drip, drip on my head as the lights cut out. Ah, memories.   

The Stoic Test Strategy

Wouldn't it be great to have an easy-to-use strategy for preventing life’s setbacks from triggering a flood of negative emotions within us? It turns out that the ancient Stoics came up with one. This is what William Irvine calls the Stoic Test Strategy. When you experience a setback, you should imagine that the event is a test administered by the Stoic gods. They test you not to punish you, but to strengthen and prepare you for future challenges. The Stoic gods, in other words, are like coaches who, instead of pampering their athletes, toughen them up so they can succeed in future competitions.

What most people consider an undeserved setback, a Stoic will see as a challenge and will do her best to rise to the challenge in question. Irvine describes the process in detail in his book, but here is a summary of the basics. 

Putting the Stoic Test Strategy into Practice

To pass the stoic test, you must do two things:

• First, you must find and implement a workaround for the setback in question.

• Second, you must keep your cool while doing so. You must not, in particular, become angry, flustered, frustrated or despondent in the aftermath of the setback.

Then, you grade yourself. The grade you get on your response to a setback will have two components. 

• First, the effectiveness of your workaround.

• Second, your emotional response to the setback. 

Grading Your Workaround

Suppose, for example, that you respond to the untied shoe setback by stuffing the untied shoelaces down into your shoe. Yes, your danger of tripping is gone, but you're likely to end up with an irritated foot. Consequently, although you did find a workaround for the setback, it can best be described as a coarse workaround. You would end up with a low passing grade, maybe a C, on this component of the Stoic Test.

Suppose you instead respond to the untied shoelace by not only retying it but by double knotting it and then, when it's convenient, by replacing your current shoelaces with ones more likely to stay tied. You will not only have worked around the setback, but will have diminished the chances of having to deal with this setback again in the future. This elegant workaround will earn you an A grade.

A Stoic on top of his game will deal with life’s setbacks in a methodical manner. He will think carefully about the workaround options available and might engage in lateral thinking to discover workarounds that, although not obvious, are brilliant. He will then choose the best of the options that he has come up with. A practising Stoic, in other words, is what might be called a workaround connoisseur.

The Stoic knows that to pass a Stoic Test, you don't have to find a perfect workaround; you only need to find a workaround that gets you back on track to achieve the goal you were pursuing when you were set back.

Suppose then that we presented a Stoic with the story of Aaron Ralston, the mountaineer, who, on finding himself literally stuck between a rock and a hard place with no help available, cut off his arm to free himself and save his life. The Stoic would give this less-than-perfect workaround a passing grade but would likely point out how foolish it was for Ralston to have put himself into such a predicament in the first place.

I don't know whether Ralston was a practising Stoic at the time of his setback, but in his response to that setback, he acted in accordance with one of the most basic Stoic mottos. Do what you can with what you've got, where you are.

Grading Your Emotional Response

After you have graded your workaround, you must now grade the second component: your emotional response to that setback. If you got angry, you get an F. If you got flustered or frustrated, you get a low passing grade, maybe a D or a C. If you instead remain calm and cool while finding and implementing your workaround, you get an A. If you actually perked up a bit on being setback you get an A+. Perked up? I'll explain this in a little more detail in a moment.

Your overall grade on the Stoic Test will be the weighted average of these two component grades, with the greater weighting typically being given to your emotional response to the setback. This is because your emotional response will, in most cases, have a greater impact on your well-being than the setback itself does.

Realise, though, that the two components of a Stoic Test are intertwined, in as much as experiencing negative emotions in the aftermath of a setback will make it harder for you to do the careful thinking that is required to find the optimal workaround to that setback.

I should add that Stoic tests are self-graded. Grading your response to setbacks can be quickly done daily or weekly, but don’t leave it longer than that, as the details will soon fade away. 

The Five-Second Rule

Irvine, an experienced Stoic Test taker, offers a few tips on how to best succeed. One tip is to keep the five-second rule in mind. You have probably heard of the five-second rule for food. According to this rule, eating food that has fallen on the floor is safe if you pick it up within five seconds. The reliability of this rule has not been established by any reputable scientific authority!

The five-second rule, with respect to setbacks, says that when setback, you must implement the Stoic Test frame, or mindset, within five seconds. Otherwise, you'll likely experience negative emotions, with feelings of anger being the biggest danger. Anger is easy to trigger, and once triggered, it can have a profound impact on your life.

By quickly treating a setback as a Stoic Test, you can sidetrack the primitive component of your brain that is the source of your anger. “Do not worry,” you tell it; “this is just a test by the Stoic gods.” Oh, and that person who caused the setback. Don't blame him. He's just the Stoic gods’ lackey. I know this strategy for preventing anger sounds strange, but it can be very effective.

Step-by-Step

Here's another tip. It's sometimes helpful to break down a setback into a series of hurdles that must be cleared in order to overcome the setback. This is what I did when I recently lost my passport. I figured I would first have to check every coat, trouser pocket, luggage case, and then every possible place in the house that it could be. Then, as I didn’t need it immediately, I thought I would give my brain a few days to think about it. When I still couldn’t find it, the next step was to cancel the passport and pay to order a new one. Although seemingly annoying and relatively expensive, it was the only logical next step. Would it have helped if I’d got angry and frustrated and stomped around the house before having to do the inevitable? No. So, just stay calm and break down your workaround into manageable steps. 

When you start using the Stoic test strategy consistently, you soon encounter some strange side effects. Previously, setbacks routinely upset and stressed me out. Now, however, I find myself perking up a bit when I encounter them. Oh, a setback to work on! 

A Note on Suppressing Feelings and Self-Kindness

I should say before I finish that it’s not advised to bury or suppress your feelings. However, what the Stoic Test Strategy is doing, is reframing the situation or setback before those feelings take hold. You’re not suppressing them, you’re looking at the situation differently and immediately changing how you feel about the situation. In the face of major setbacks, like the break up of a relationship or a difficult illness, it is more than okay to feel sad at the loss of love or health. Accept those feelings and honour them, but also welcome the challenge and look for a workaround or change in lifestyle while remaining calm and focused. This can take a bit of practice, so if and when you don’t succeed, be kind to yourself and then take the opportunity to accept the challenge of responding to the test in a different way.

Homework

Here's a homework assignment. Start keeping track of the setbacks, both big and small, that you experience in everyday life. Describe the setbacks in question, the workarounds you came up with, the effectiveness of those workarounds, and your emotional state in the aftermath of being set back. Then, grade your setback responses. If you aren't happy with the resulting grades, you might want to experiment with a Stoic Test Strategy and add it to your psychological toolkit.