1603004118
Practical Stoicism

Advertise on podcast: Practical Stoicism

Rating
★★★★★
4.7
from
665 reviews
This podcast has
39 episodes
Language
English
Explicit
No
Date created
2022/01/03
Latest episode
2026/10/11
Average duration
12 min.
Release period
7 days

Description

Stoicism is the pursuit of Virtue (Aretê), which was defined by the Ancient Greeks as "the knowledge of how to live excellently," Stoicism is a holistic life philosophy meant to guide us towards the attainment of this knowledge through the development of our character. While many other Stoicism podcasts focus on explaining Ancient Stoicism in an academic or historical context, Practical Stoicism strives to port the ancient wisdom of this 2300-plus-year-old Greek Philosophy into contemporary times to provide practical advice for living today, not two millennia ago. Join American philosopher of Stoicism Tanner Campbell, every Monday and Friday, for new episodes.

Unlock Practical Stoicism podcast Email contact info,
Listeners & Audience details

Email contact information

Direct podcast contact details

Listeners

Audience numbers & engagement insights

Audience details

Podcast Insights

Podcast episodes

Check latest episodes from Practical Stoicism podcast


How to Get Over Your Ex
2026/10/11
In this episode, I'm talking about how to get over your ex, particularly when a relationship ends that you valued more than the other person did. Breakups can be especially difficult because, unlike losing someone to death, you have to watch someone you once shared a life with go on living theirs without you. Over time, the relationship can begin to feel like something that happened in another lifetime, and it's easy to get caught up in missing them, resenting them, or questioning what any of it meant. Join my free Stoicism community for earnest practitioners: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell I approach getting over an ex through three steps grounded in Stoic philosophy, beginning with understanding where your actual value comes from. For the Stoics, our worth isn't determined by our relationships, careers, wealth, or whether somebody wants to be with us. It resides in our rational faculty, the hegemonikon, which receives impressions, forms judgments, and directs our choices. This faculty makes us capable of acting as rational moral agents, and the character we develop through its exercise is what matters most. From there, I ask you to examine what you're doing with that faculty. Are your thoughts and judgments helping you become someone you respect, or are you allowing resentment, longing, and frustration to shape your character? I use some admittedly ridiculous metaphors involving moral auras, coloured plastic, and keeping the inside of your mind from becoming a pigsty, but the point is serious: the quality of our inner lives affects how we show up in the world. Finally, I explain why recognising your responsibility to develop good character changes how you think about your ex. You have something more important to attend to than a relationship that's ended: becoming a decent, rational, virtuous person, not just for your own sake but for the benefit of everyone who shares the cosmopolis with you. The Stoic approach isn't to make your ex irrelevant by pretending the relationship never mattered. It's to recognise that your value was never theirs to give you or take away, and that your attention belongs to the person you're becoming rather than the relationship you've lost. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to Stop Masturbating
2026/10/05
This week, I’m answering a question I genuinely never expected to cover on Practical Stoicism: how do you stop masturbating? More specifically, what do you do when masturbation has stopped being an ordinary sexual behaviour and become something compulsive that you no longer feel reliably able to choose? Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join I start by clearing up something important: there’s no particular reason to think the ancient Stoics regarded masturbation itself as morally problematic. Sexual pleasure isn’t the issue. The Stoic concern begins when our pursuit of pleasure starts overruling reason, self-command, our responsibilities, or our ability to live appropriately. So this isn’t really an episode about how to stop masturbating. It’s about what to do when your relationship with masturbation has become compulsive enough to interfere with your life. I work through seven practical steps: identifying the triggers that precede the behaviour, changing your environment around those triggers, developing replacement behaviours, addressing any emotional problems you may be using masturbation to regulate, seeking professional help when you repeatedly cannot regain control, considering reputable support groups, and measuring the problem by control and consequences rather than an arbitrary number of times per week. I also talk about the difference between ordinary sexual behaviour and compulsive behaviour. The important question isn’t simply how often you m********e. It’s whether you can reliably choose not to, whether you continue despite wanting to stop, and whether the behaviour is interfering with your work, relationships, responsibilities, health, or ordinary life. There’s plenty of room for humour when talking about masturbation (and I certainly take advantage of it), but compulsive sexual behaviour can cause genuine distress, shame, isolation, and disruption. The Stoic response isn’t to treat sexuality as dirty or shameful. It’s to recognise when pleasure has begun governing us rather than remaining something we rationally choose. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to Journal Like a Stoic
2026/09/30
In this episode, I’m challenging one of the most common assumptions in modern Stoicism: that journaling is somehow an inherently Stoic practice. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t keeping a daily diary, Epictetus wasn’t assigning journal entries to his students, and the kind of expressive writing we now associate with “Stoic journaling” is largely a modern self-improvement practice. Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Purchase the journaling program: https://stoicjournaling.com Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join That doesn’t mean journaling is useless. Regular reflection, planning your day, reviewing your behaviour, and expressive writing can all be helpful. But they’re no more uniquely Stoic than they are Christian, Buddhist, atheist, or useful to an anthropomorphised and literate potato. So if we’re going to talk about “journaling like a Stoic,” I think we need to invent a better standard for what that actually means. I break Stoic development into three parts: study, practice, and living. First, we learn the philosophy from people who know more than we do. Then we practise applying what we’ve learned until new patterns of thinking and behaviour become habituated. Finally, we put down the books and training aids and go out into the world to see whether any of it actually stuck. That middle stage is where I think writing can be genuinely useful to a Stoic practice. Rather than simply recording what happened during your day or writing about your feelings, I suggest explorative writing: take a difficult question or real-world situation and try to reason through it Stoically without reaching for a book, ChatGPT, or a cheat sheet. The purpose is to discover what you actually understand, where your reasoning falls apart, and what you need to return to your studies to learn. That’s also the approach behind my year-long program at StoicJournaling.com, available for a one-time purchase of £72. So, ironically, my advice for journaling like a Stoic is to stop journaling, at least in the conventional sense, and start using writing as a place to practise the philosophy instead. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to Think About Lindsay Clancy
2026/09/22
In this episode, I take on the Lindsay Clancy case, but not to tell you what you should think about her. Instead, I use this extraordinarily difficult case to explore how a Stoic should think when confronted with terrible acts, mental illness, questions of responsibility, and our very human desire for punishment. Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join I begin with the facts as I understand them and an important limitation: I don't know every detail of the case or trial. Clancy killed her three children and attempted to take her own life, but she had also sought extensive psychiatric help before the killings. The defence has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and that her condition had previously been misdiagnosed. For Stoicism, that raises an important question. The acts were hers in the causal sense, but to what extent were they hers in the moral sense? Stoic ethics places enormous importance on our capacity for rational assent. If someone's rational faculty is profoundly impaired by psychosis, then determining their responsibility requires us to consider how capable they actually were of perceiving, judging, and responding to reality rationally. That does not mean pretending the acts didn't happen, nor does compassion require us to ignore the safety of everyone else. If someone remains dangerous, restraint may be entirely appropriate. Justice has obligations both to the person who is ill and to the people who require protection from them. Drawing on Seneca, I distinguish justice from vengeance. Restraint or punishment may be appropriate when it protects others, prevents further harm, or contributes to correction and treatment. Making someone suffer simply because their actions caused suffering is something else. Ultimately, I suggest three things we should hold simultaneously: Clancy is a seriously mentally ill human being; she may require restraint for as long as she presents a danger; and where treatment and restoration are possible, justice should concern itself with those things too. Stoicism should make our responses to cases like this slower, not faster. We should resist the satisfaction of immediate condemnation, examine the context carefully, ask what Justice actually requires, and only then decide how we ought to respond. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How To Live Forever
2026/09/09
Most of my listeners are somewhere between 35 and 45, which means quite a few of us are reaching the age when mortality starts feeling a little less theoretical. In this episode, I explore one reason the idea of death can trouble us that has less to do with fear and more to do with something deeply human: the desire not to feel disposable. Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join I begin with a conversation I recently had with a private coaching client about why believing in something after death can be comforting. My suggestion was that the comfort may not necessarily come from imagining rewards, avoiding punishment, or even continuing our conscious existence. It may come from believing that we remain important to something beyond ourselves, that we continue to have a place. Stoicism offers an interesting answer to this without requiring a supernatural afterlife. The Stoics understood the Cosmos itself as God: the complete, contained system of Nature of which every one of us is presently a part. Within that system, nothing simply disappears. The matter and energy that presently constitute us return to the Cosmos and continue participating in it. The individual person, with their name, memories, career, possessions, and personality, may not continue indefinitely, but that from which the individual is constituted remains part of the whole. In that limited but meaningful sense, I suggest there is something resembling immortality available within the Stoic worldview. Stoicism doesn't promise a celestial city, an eternity spent with deceased relatives, or reincarnation as some other creature. Instead, it offers the idea that we were never separate from the Cosmos in the first place, and that what constitutes us continues to belong to and participate in that same whole. If what troubles you about death is the thought of becoming irrelevant or disposable, perhaps there's some comfort in that. You aren't something the Cosmos eventually throws away. You are part of it now, and what constitutes you remains part of it after the particular arrangement presently called "you" is gone. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
A Reflection on "Inner Peace"
2026/09/04
Marcus Aurelius famously reminds himself that we don't need to retreat to the countryside or the seashore to find peace. In this episode, recorded from my new office in an old textile mill in Dundee, I reflect on why I think Marcus was theoretically right but practically wrong, at least for those of us who aren't sages. Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join Check the LinkedIn post: https://lnkd.in/p/emRAsNbz Get alerted when the book goes on sale: https://livingstoicism.tannerocampbell.com Inner peace may ultimately be a state of mind, but we're not perfect practitioners. Our surroundings affect us. Sometimes getting away from the noise, finding somewhere that feels comfortable, familiar, and peaceful, genuinely makes practicing Stoicism easier. Since moving to Dundee, I've noticed a quieting in myself that I can't really attribute to anything else. Life hasn't become less demanding. I'm currently cramming roughly 40 hours of work into Monday through Wednesday, then spending Thursday and Friday as a full-time dad while protecting my weekends for my family. If anything, I'm doing more than ever. Yet something about this place feels different. My little office overlooking Dundee, the seagulls and church bells outside the window, our flat beside a park, the city's working-class character, and even the coastal air remind me of places and people from my childhood. After several enormously busy years of marriage, fatherhood, building a business, raising investment, working full-time, and moving repeatedly, I feel unexpectedly at home here. So this episode isn't really a lesson. It's a reflection on the role our environment can play in our ability to find some peace. Theoretically, Marcus was right: the perfect Stoic shouldn't need a particular place in order to achieve tranquility. But none of us are perfect Stoics, and sometimes finding the right place can make the work of becoming better considerably easier. I also share a few updates at the end of the episode, including a request for help choosing the subject of a TED talk I'm working on, some early details about my forthcoming book Living Stoicism, and an invitation to a free community Q&A. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to have healthy self-esteem
2026/08/24
A healthy Stoic practice requires an accurate view of yourself. Think too little of yourself and you misunderstand your capacities; think too much of yourself and you do the same. In this episode, I explore self-esteem through a Stoic lens and explain why accurate self-knowledge matters to our pursuit of eudaimonia and sagehood. Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join I begin by separating self-esteem from the popular idea that “ego is the enemy.” Rather than treating a positive view of ourselves as something inherently suspect, I argue that Stoic practice requires us to understand ourselves accurately: our capacities, our roles, our duties, our individual nature, and the ways we are positioned to contribute to the world. That means avoiding two extremes. A depressive view of ourselves causes us to underestimate what we are capable of and what our duties require. A grandiose view causes us to overestimate our importance and abilities. Neither gives reason an accurate picture of the person whose life it is trying to direct. I also look at criticism and the effect other people's judgments can have on our self-understanding. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in Meditations 2.1 that we will encounter difficult, arrogant, ungrateful, and mistaken people because they misunderstand good and evil. Criticism can contain useful information, and we should examine it when it does, but another person's judgment of our value is not automatically authoritative simply because they have expressed it. Finally, I offer a practical Stoic basis for healthy self-esteem using four areas of reflection: our shared nature as human beings, our individual nature, the circumstances and contexts we have been given, and the roles and paths we have deliberately chosen. The goal is neither humility for its own sake nor inflated confidence. It is accuracy. Understand what you are, understand what is appropriate for you, and then work seriously to fulfil those roles and duties well. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to defend your standards kindly
2026/08/19
In today's episode I discuss whether pursuing a dream is a Stoic thing to do, and how to talk about your ambitions without accidentally insulting the people who don't share them. Before digging in please be aware of all the ways this podcast is able to exist without ads or formal sponsorship: Private Stoic Life Coaching Practice: https://stoicismpod.com/coaching Stoic Journaling Program: https://stoicjournaling.com Courses: https://stoicismpod.com/courses Elective Listener Support: https://stoicismpod.com/members First, some genuinely wonderful news. 134 Labs Limited, the company I started in December of 2025 to buy back my intellectual property from Front Porch Media, has closed a pre-seed round of 74,000 US dollars. That means I get to do philosophy full-time for the next 12 months. It took 5 years to get here and 7 months of chasing venture capital to close, and I'm honest in this episode about how ugly it got along the way (including a couple of months where my family had to be on Universal Credit to bridge the gap). Nothing about the podcast changes. No third-party ads, no unaligned sponsors, same content. But this next year is make or break: either I find a morally just way to make a living in philosophy or I walk away. Then we get into the episode proper, which is about the pursuit of dreams. When you tell a friend that a regular life wouldn't be enough for you, they often hear "so my life isn't enough either," and that misunderstanding can wreck relationships. I use my sister as an example of someone wise enough to hear "your life wouldn't make me content" as a statement about alignment rather than a criticism of her choices. To unpack why, I reintroduce the Stoic Daimon. I walk through how logos permeates everything, how different degrees of tonos produce different manifestations, and how in beings like us that becomes rational cognition (I use an electricity-in-a-building analogy to make this digestible). The daimon can incline us toward certain pursuits, but here's the catch: an inclination doesn't guarantee our interpretation of it is correct, and it doesn't guarantee success. An inclination toward music doesn't mean your role is professional musician, and measuring daimon-alignment by material success is measuring poorly. I also talk about how a poorly trained rational faculty confuses things all the time (lust for love being the classic example), and how "follow your heart" guru advice can lead people into neglecting real duties. I share that I have two coaching clients right now whose husbands have been chasing startups for years with nothing to show for it, and I own the awkward fact that my own funding chase could look exactly like that from the outside. The difference, I argue, isn't outcomes. Stoics decide based on role ethics: reasoning about duties, roles, justified risks, and what we're asking others to bear. The episode lands on this: the Stoic answer is neither "follow your heart" nor "settle for whatever falls into your lap." Take your inclinations seriously without treating them as commands, bring them before a properly trained rational faculty, and pursue what is appropriate without making your happiness depend on how the world responds. And, one more thing: if you haven't already, please join my free Stoicism community on Skool: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to find your own Stoic path
2026/08/10
Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join In this episode, I explore why there is not always a single answer to the question, “What would a Stoic do?” Stoicism gives us a shared ethical framework, but it also takes seriously the particular roles, relationships, capacities, dispositions, and circumstances of each individual. I begin with the common search for “the Stoic position” on a given issue. Sometimes a general answer is appropriate, such as returning a lost wallet. But more complex situations, such as war, require us to consider what our particular roles and circumstances demand of us. I turn to Epictetus and his discussion of preserving our proper character, or prosōpon, in Discourses 1.2. His examples of Agrippinus and another man facing the same pressure under Nero show how two people can reason well and still arrive at different actions because their characters, roles, and circumstances differ. From there, I explain how to begin identifying your own path toward sagehood. Start with your roles: parent, employee, neighbour, citizen, friend, carer, and so on. Then consider your individual nature, including your dispositions, strengths, weaknesses, resources, limitations, and circumstances. I also discuss Hierocles' circles of concern and the Stoic responsibility we all share toward the cosmopolis. Everyone has that responsibility, but nobody will fulfil it in exactly the same way. The goal, then, is not to ask, “What would a sage do?” as though there were one universal answer waiting to be discovered. The better question is: “What would I do if I were the sage version of myself, given my roles, capacities, dispositions, circumstances, and context?” Stoicism gives us the same philosophy to guide us, but the path toward sagehood is necessarily particular to each person. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
New book announcement: Living Stoicism
2026/08/07
Pre-order today to get the audiobook and the paperback upon release in December. Pre-order here: https://livingstoicism.tannerocampbell.com Cheers! Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
Do outcomes really not matter?
2026/07/31
I'm responding to a thoughtful question from listener Alex Stevenson: if good decisions require us to learn from outcomes, then which outcomes should we actually value? Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Join my free community: https://stoicismpod.com/join I begin by revisiting a LinkedIn post about decision-making and the common mistake of judging the quality of our choices by the outcomes they produce. Using the example of helping an elderly woman across the street only for an unforeseeable accident to occur, I explain why outcomes alone can never determine whether a choice was right or wrong. From there, I address Alex's question by drawing an important distinction in Stoic ethics. The Stoics never argued that outcomes are meaningless. Rather, they argued that outcomes cannot determine our moral character because they are never fully within our control. To illustrate this, I use the example of parenting. We cannot guarantee that our children will become good people, yet their flourishing is still something worth pursuing. Their eventual character also provides valuable information that helps us become wiser parents in the future. Outcomes therefore matter in two important ways: they are often preferred indifferents worth aiming toward, and they provide feedback that strengthens our future reasoning. What outcomes cannot do is tell us whether we acted virtuously. Moral worth belongs to the reasoning behind our choices, not to events that unfold long after those choices leave our hands. This episode explores one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of Stoicism: how to value outcomes without allowing them to become the measure of your character. It's a more theoretical discussion than usual, but an important one if you want to understand how Stoic ethics approaches decision-making. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to become more confident
2026/07/20
Join the free community: https://skool.com/tannerocampbell Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Desktop Wallpaper: https://canva.link/bl4qrgp1mb1w65u Phone Wallpaper: https://canva.link/eqpekigl4ga1ctr In this episode, I explore one of the most valuable—and most misunderstood—benefits of practicing Stoicism: genuine confidence. Not the kind that's built on ego, status, or pretending to know everything, but the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you're living according to a standard you can defend. I argue that a lack of confidence is almost always rooted in uncertainty. We seek the approval of friends, family, colleagues, or society because we haven't yet established ourselves as the primary authority over our own choices. Stoicism asks us to reverse that order. While other perspectives can be valuable, no one else has direct access to the reasoning behind our decisions. They can judge only our actions and their outcomes, never the full context in which those choices were made. To explain why our own rational faculty deserves the highest regard, I present a simple syllogism showing that the only authority capable of judging our choices completely is the one with access to our complete reasoning. Confidence begins when we genuinely internalize that idea and stop outsourcing our self-worth to people who can never possess all the relevant evidence. From there, I discuss the importance of building a personal standard—a set of principles that defines the boundaries of what you're willing and unwilling to do. Rather than offering an exhaustive ethical framework, I provide three practical questions you can use to begin constructing that standard for yourself. These questions are designed to help you identify your non-negotiables, decide what you'll do when every available option seems compromised, and determine how you'll remain steadfast when doing the right thing comes at a personal cost. Ultimately, confidence isn't something you discover. It's something you build. The more consistently your choices align with a carefully reasoned standard that you've freely adopted, the less dependent you become on the approval, praise, or condemnation of others. That's the kind of confidence Stoicism offers, and it's available to anyone willing to do the work. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to relax like a Stoic
2026/07/17
Fill out the survey, get free stuff: https://stoicismpod.com/survey Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members In this episode, I explore what it actually means to relax from a Stoic perspective, and why so much of the advice we're given about relaxation misses the mark. I begin by questioning the common idea that relaxation is something we can simply decide to do. We often tell ourselves to "just relax," but anyone who has ever sat on a beach while worrying about work, money, or family knows it doesn't work that way. I also push back on the Stoic idea—at least as it is often presented—that we should be able to relax anywhere, regardless of our surroundings. While that's true in theory, none of us are Stoic Sages, and our environment does influence how easily we settle our minds. From there, I argue that the real obstacle to relaxation isn't tension in the body but rumination in the mind. We don't fail to relax because we're busy. We fail to relax because we carry unresolved judgments with us wherever we go. The constant internal dialogue about uncertain futures, unfinished work, and imagined disasters prevents us from ever being fully present. I explain that the Stoic solution isn't to eliminate the things worth worrying about. Rather, it's to distinguish between the appropriate actions we should take and the outcomes we cannot control. Once we've reasoned through a problem and made the best choices available to us, continuing to rehearse those same worries serves no purpose. At that point, rumination becomes a choice rather than preparation. Using the example of potential job loss, I show how Stoicism encourages us to prepare well, fulfill our roles responsibly, and then allow ourselves to return our attention to the present moment. Relaxation isn't pretending problems don't exist. It's knowing you've responded to them appropriately and refusing to let imagined futures rob you of the life that's unfolding right now. Ultimately, I argue that relaxation is another expression of Stoic practice. It isn't found by escaping life's difficulties, but by learning to trust your own reasoning, accept what lies beyond your control, and remain fully present with the roles that require your attention today. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to overcome our internal struggles
2026/07/13
Apply for private coaching: https://stoicismpod.com/apply Support this podcast financially: https://stoicismpod.com/members Episode Summary: In this episode, I explore why so many of us stay stuck for years—even when we genuinely want to change—and why Stoicism, while powerful, is often only one part of the solution. I begin by sharing an update on my coaching practice and explain why one-on-one philosophical coaching has become the most rewarding work I've ever done. Working directly with people has reinforced something I've long believed: lasting change rarely comes from information alone. It comes from changing the way we habitually choose. From there, I examine how our early experiences shape our patterns of judgment and behavior. Children learn quickly, but they also absorb unhealthy habits before their rational faculties are mature enough to question them. Those habits can become deeply ingrained ways of navigating the world, remaining with us well into adulthood. I argue that overcoming these patterns usually requires more than willpower. Therapy can help us understand where our habits came from. Stoicism provides a framework for deciding what to do with that understanding. In some cases, appropriate medical treatment may also be an important part of recovery. Rather than competing with one another, these approaches can work together. The central message is simple: if you've been struggling with the same problem for years without making meaningful progress, it may not be because you're incapable of change. It may simply be that your current strategy is incomplete. Listening on Spotify? Leave a comment! I'd love to hear which ideas resonated with you most. Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me
How to stop procrastinating
2026/07/06
In this episode, I explore procrastination from a Stoic perspective and argue that it isn't a problem of laziness—it's a problem of judgment. Drawing on Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and my own experience with ADHD, I explain why we often mistake temporary discomfort for a good reason to delay action. We tell ourselves we'll start when we feel ready, but readiness is rarely something we possess before beginning. More often, it's something we discover after we've already started. I discuss Seneca's reminder that time is the only thing we truly possess, and Marcus Aurelius' advice to stop waiting for motivation and instead remember what we are made to do as human beings. The Stoics didn't believe motivation came first. They believed right judgment came first. I also talk about procrastination and ADHD. While ADHD can make starting tasks significantly more difficult, it doesn't remove our capacity to choose well. It simply means some of us have a denser forest to cut through before we can begin moving. That reality calls for better strategies, not despair. Finally, I share the surprisingly simple tool that has helped me overcome procrastination in my own life: externalising the consequences of inaction. By making the impact of procrastination visible, I stop seeing the task as something that's merely uncomfortable for me and start seeing how my delay affects the people I'm trying to serve. To make that process easier, I've built a free interactive procrastination tool that walks you through the same decision-making process I use myself. You can find it at https://procrastination.tannerocampbell.com Listening on Spotify? Leave a comment! I'd love to know what causes you to procrastinate and what strategies have helped you overcome it. I am a public philosopher; it is my only job. I am enabled to do this job, in large part, thanks to support from my listeners and readers. You can support my work, keep it independent and online, at ⁠https://stoicismpod.com/members⁠ Looking for more Stoic content? Consider my weekly newsletter Stoic Brekkie: ⁠https://stoicbrekkie.com⁠ Overcome decision-making anxiety in 14-days: https://anxiety.tannerocampbell.com Mentioned in this episode: If you're interested in booking a call with me, please click below to do so ⬇️ Schedule a call with me

Podcast reviews

Read Practical Stoicism podcast reviews


4.7 out of 5
665 reviews
★★★★★
VilkingBadAss 2026/05/12
PURE GOLD
Thank you so much for your good work.
★☆☆☆☆
JimmyDubs76 2026/05/06
Not really practical at
My experience with this podcast was a mind numbing mental yoga session focused on the academic and theoretical aspects of stoic philosophy. Also seems...
★☆☆☆☆
Weiniss 2026/03/09
Politically Bias
This is yet another politically bias philosophical podcast. The entire point of stoicism is transcending politics and alleviating the need to engage i...
★★★★★
A{nickname} 2026/01/30
UPDATE (no more) Holy ads Batman
Great content and LOTS of respect for TC for going to the effort and expense to buy his IP back and make it available without being stuffed with ads! ...
★★★★★
Bee Bop a Luba 2025/10/27
Interesting and useful
I have been listening to this podcast for a couple of months now. I have scrolled back to much earlier episodes and also listened to the recent ones. ...
★★★★★
Adastra56 2025/08/11
A great companion on the Stoic journey
Been a listener for a while now and it has been a great addition to my Stoic practice. Tanner knows his stuff and isn’t afraid of tackling nuance and ...
★☆☆☆☆
Gotchayeah 2025/08/10
Focus on words of stoicism
Keep your opinions and political beliefs off the podcast.
★★★★★
Houston2005 2025/06/07
Great Podcast
Thank you Tanner! The Stoic teachings help so much to filter out the noise of life and you have been so helpful with your approach to putting “theory ...
★★★★★
Simply-Di 2025/06/01
A hidden gem
More people need to know about this podcast! I have been looking for a good podcast on Stocism, and I finally found the perfect one. The host has a cl...
★★★★★
BobinNM 2025/05/29
Addicted!
And no…I will not be seeking treatment. Found something so helpful and relevant to my midlife issues.
check all reviews on apple podcasts

Podcast sponsorship advertising

Start advertising on Practical Stoicism relevant audience podcasts


What do you want to promote?