Marcus Aurelius: How to stop being angry

Two Ways to Overcome Anger According to Marcus Aurelius

Here are two ways to overcome anger according to Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations. These two ways have really helped me as an individual. Had I not learned these things from Marcus Aurelius and others, I would be a different kind of person now, one more prone to anger and losing control. So without further ado, here are the two ways that Marcus Aurelius says you can overcome anger.

1. Remember Your Death

This might seem strange, and he doesn't quite put it that bluntly, but in Book 11, Section 18, he says, "when you lose your temper or even feel irritated, [remember] that human life is very short. Before long all of us will be laid out side by side."

His point is clear: you're going to die at some point. Everybody will die, your life will end. And you can choose at least two ways to live. One way can be bitter, grumpy, angry, frustrated, always digging in, always entrenched, always fighting—but you'll never feel good when you do that. You'll be distracted from the things that matter most in life, and you will almost always regret it.

Very rarely does anyone do something in anger and afterwards think, "ah, that was awesome. I wish I did that all the time." Almost always, you don't. When life seems short, why waste your time on petty grievances? Instead, imagine looking back 10 years from now and saying, "I didn't let those things overcome me. Instead, I moved forward, I had success, I won." That's where you want to be. You don't want to be someone who wastes their life away with angry, bitter stupidities. If that's you, stop it now.

You will fail in life if you continue this way, and at 60, 70, or 80, you'll look back on your earlier years as you near the end and say, "why did I waste my life on these petty things?" I don't want that for you, and you don't want that for yourself.

2. Change Your Perceptions

The second reason, to me, is more profound and helpful. Marcus Aurelius discusses this in various places (and I might be confusing him with Epictetus as well). But let me share another passage from Section 18 of Book 11:

"That's not what they do that bothers us. That's a problem for their minds, not ours. It's our own misperceptions. Discard them. Be willing to give up thinking of this as a catastrophe [Don't catastrophize] and your anger is gone. How do you do that? By recognizing that you've suffered no disgrace and unless disgrace is the only thing that can hurt you. You're doomed to commit innumerable offenses—to become a thief or heaven only knows what else."

And here's a key line: "How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them?"

What he's saying is that terrible things can genuinely happen to you. People can be cruel, mean, rude, or short with you. And if you say, "you've hurt me, your words have done something irretrievably, irreversibly to me that's destroyed me," what you've done is accept their perception of you as truth, and consequently damaged yourself. Unless you've found things more sturdy and strong than the opinions of others.

If you base your well-being on how others perceive or think of you, then your emotional state isn't based on something sturdy, strong, and infallible within you, but merely on the fluctuating perceptions of others. At the end of the day, as Marcus Aurelius says, it's your perception that catastrophizes these things.

You make them worse than they are. People don't think about you as much as you think. They may say a cruel word to you and not think about you for the rest of the week. It's only you who keeps thinking about you. We are all narcissists at heart. What ends up happening, therefore, is that the bitterness, cruelty, and grief we feel when someone mistreats us are so much worse in our own mind than in reality. We are our own worst enemy. We fight against ourselves.

There is a beautiful freedom through the state of impassibility—the state that makes you think "I am not affected by those things outside of me such that I catastrophize inside of me." This doesn't mean that if you're hungry you can't feel hunger, or if someone punches you in the face it doesn't hurt. That's not what I mean by impassibility.

I mean you're impassable in the sense that you're sturdy and strong through the virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and self-control. You know what is right, you've pursued what is right, you're controlled—so when something external challenges you, you may take it on the chin, it may be terrible, but you're sturdier than the external thing, and your perception of it is what matters most.

If you perceive great misfortune based on what someone says against you, you will become a misfortunate person. But if you perceive whatever is said or done against you as something that may be true, but exists outside of you and cannot affect who you are inside, you can find the courage and fortitude to overcome it.

This is a necessary skill set. It makes you impassable, mobile, strong, powerful. You cannot catastrophize the opinions of others by saying, "this must be true, all is lost. If they don't like me, it's all over. My status is down here. I've been degraded, distressed," or whatever it is.

No, no, no, no. What makes you virtuous, what makes you honorable is not anything that you can lose. It's not anything that can be said about you. It is precisely the attainment of what you know to be good through prudence and the courage and self-control to possess it.

And that could simply be love, kindness, gentleness, the ability to not be overcome by anger, the ability not to be overcome by resentment. That is a superpower.

I hesitate to close this article without sharing one other line from the same book at the end of Section 18 by Marcus Aurelius:

"When you start to lose your temper, remember: There's nothing manly about rage. It's courtesy and kindness that define a human being—and a man. That's who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners. To react like that brings you closer to impassivity—and so to strength. Pain is the opposite of strength, and so is anger. Both are things we suffer from, and yield to."

If you are overcome by anger, you are weak and you have been overcome, so be strong. Fight for gentleness and kindness. When you have control of your faculties and are impassable to the insults hurled against you and the misfortunes you encounter, then you have become truly human. Then you have become impassable. Then you have achieved that virtuous condition to which you have strived.