This is a YouTube video titled "Tips To Manage Your Mental Health | Lewis Howes" created in May 2023. It features a conversation between Lewis Howes and Marcus Realest discussing mental health management through Stoic philosophy, including concepts like training for adversity, the practice of memento mori, and maintaining perspective during challenging times such as the pandemic. The dialogue explores personal resilience, preparation, and mindfulness in the face of fear and uncertainty.
Chapters
One of the questions we ask ourselves when we're afraid of something, what about me? What would I do if? And Marcus Realest goes, you,'ll meet that with the same weapons you've met all your other problems. So remembering that, hey, you've been scared before and you're still here. Often what our fear is really doing is underestimating or undercounting how good we actually are at what we do. You're the same person you are today. And what will you do? You'll figure it out. If you quit your job, you'd be like, I'm quitting and I'm gonna go find a new job. But if you got fired, that suddenly feels like disempowered, whereas the other one feels very empowered. So remembering what you're capable of, to me, is really important.
Okay, that's one.
Number two, the Stoics say that we should always be training. So one of the reasons I think it's important to have like a physical practice, one of the reasons it's good to seek out adversity and difficulty Is so when stuff happens, you're right. Epictetus, one of the early stoics, he's actually a slave and he says, you want to get to a point where when stuff happens, you're able to say, this is what I trained for.
Right.
Like you knew this could happen. And you did the work.
Yes. Before you go into the next one, it's right when the pandemic happened, I was like, this sucks. And yet I've been training for this for the last 12, 13 years of my life.
Yes.
Because in 2008, Well, in 2007, I got injured and had surgery. And then 2008, the housing crisis and there were no jobs for someone like me without a college degree that was ignorant from school. I was like, I better develop myself so that when this happens again in 5, 10, 20 years, I'm ready to take on any adversity. Maybe it's not fun and it's still challenging, but I'm prepared and ready. And I spent 13 years training for that moment. And I felt a sense of, kind of weirdly, I felt a sense of peace that gave me the energy and the clarity to take action and shift where I needed to and lead from a place of courage as opposed to, and I wasn't perfect, but lead from a more calm, peaceful place as opposed to a frantic, fearful place.
Well, look, preparation makes you brave, right? You prepared so you were ready. And then I think also, because you remembered what you felt then.
Oh man.
You were also in a position to lead and understand what people who were not as prepared, what they're experiencing.
Yeah, what they're experiencing. It sucks. So you can have empathy like you talked about, you can connect with people in that way. Okay, so always be training, always be learning something new, training yourself physically, mentally, emotionally.
And the third one would be this stoic exercise of momento mori, which basically means remember, you will die. I actually carry a coin in my pocket that says this. But I think when you realize like, hey, life is already short and fragile, like, I don't need to, if I'm spending my time cowering in fear or worrying, I'm acting as if I have a certain power over things that I don't. There's this famous Stoic story where like the emperor Sees this stoic philosopher he hates and he's like, I'm threatening you to death, or I'm sentencing you to death. And he's like, I was already sentenced to death. At some point. Yeah. He's like, you have no more power over me than I had, than life itself. Exactly. And so realizing that life is fragile, I think sometimes people can miss this. Memento Mori doesn't mean like, oh, like, don't wear a motorcycle helmet or pretend the pandemic is not real. that's not what it's saying. But it's saying like, hey, focus on the parts of safety and concern that are in your control. But if you're wasting your time being afraid, that's something I thought a lot about in the pandemic. It's like, look, I don't know, especially early on, we don't know where this is going, don't know what it means, don't know what is ticking clock is in anyone's body, right? What pre-existing condition you might have or bad piece of luck you got, So you take it seriously, but within that, what are you doing with your time? What are you going to spend your time on? So if you're spending that time worrying, stressing, watching the news all day. Yeah, what you're actually doing is rejecting the life that you have in front of you.
It's kind of like a longer eclipse. It's like there's an eclipse that's happening. We don't know what this is, but You know, you could sit there and worry and fear for those five minutes of either clips or whatever, or you can look up and enjoy it and do something with your time and make the most of this and prepare and strategize and organize your time.
Yeah, James Stockdale, who spent seven years in a prison camp in Vietnam, who reads the Stoics, he says, you know, he gets there and he goes, I never lost sight of the fact that I controlled the end of the story.
Right?
So if he got out, that he would control the, he would decide what he said, and that I could turn this into something that in retrospect I would not have traded for.
Isn't that crazy?
That's incredible.
It's like Mandela as well. It's like 25 years or something.
So I think we have, it takes courage to say, this thing happened to me and I wouldn't have chosen it. I didn't want it. But now that it's here, I'm going to face it. I'm going to apply all my training and experience towards it. And then I'm not going to waste my life being bitter, resentful, afraid, passive about it. And I'm just going to get to work turning it into something.
Yeah. I'm not sure if this is 100% true or accurate, but I heard someone say that Bhutan is like the happiest country. I'm not sure if you've heard of this. It's because I don't know if everyone does this or just some people do this, they focus on their death five times a day.
Interesting.
They think about their death five times a day. And so there's an app, I think it's called Croaked or you will croak or something like that, where five times a day, I had it for a while, it sends you a reminder, you're gonna die with an inspiring quote that has you reflect on your death five times a day to remind yourself. Do you have this on your phone?
No, no, did I give you one of these? This is the one I carry in my pocket.
What do you see? Oh, nice.
You should just carry that. I spin it and the idea is-.
You- could leave life right now.
And the rest of that quote, so Mark says, you could leave life right now and then he says, let that determine what you do and say and think. And so to me, the power of meditating on your death is that it puts everything in perspective, right? It doesn't make things meaningless. It actually makes them meaningful. because in it says like, if this doesn't matter, I shouldn't be doing it. And if it does matter, I should be doing it as if it is the last time that you get to do it. Right. Like, I think one of the things, I don't know about you, but like as like an ambitious or driven person, I find myself like rushing a lot, right? Like, like, gotta go here, gotta go there. This is taking too long. I don't want to wait. I haven't found myself, like my son, he often naps in the car. So it's like, you're in the car as long as he's asleep. And I'll find myself, like, you're behind a slow driver. You're like, I gotta get around this. And then I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. Right? Like I'm rushing. And so what I've started to remind myself is like, what are you rushing towards? You're rushing towards death, right? Not just because speeding is unsafe, but you're rushing towards As you're rushing out of a moment, you're rushing away from life. Seneca talks about, he says, don't think of death as happening in the future. Think of death as happening right now.
Really? Why?
Because the time that passes belongs to death. So when you die, you're like, you've lived 80 years.
