For most of my adult life I had a low-level hypervigilance running in the background. I tried to fight it with books, breathwork, control techniques, willpower. The harder I fought, the worse it got. This episode is about the breakthrough that came when I stopped fighting and started welcoming — a Stoic and Nietzschean reframe called amor fati, the love of fate.
Prefer video? The full episode on YouTube.
The two layers of suffering
When anxiety first registers — the tight chest, the knot in the stomach, the urge to escape — that is one layer. Then you resist it. You tell yourself this is bad, that it shouldn't be here. Now you have two layers: the anxiety, and the anxiety about the anxiety. The second is often worse than the first. And the fight itself tells your nervous system there must be a real threat, so the tension amps up. The Stoics understood this two thousand years ago; modern neuroscience is catching up.
Amor fati, pointed at anxiety
Epictetus said: do not seek for things to happen as you wish, but wish for things to happen as they do, and you will go on well. Not tolerate — wish for. Marcus Aurelius wrote that a blazing fire makes use of whatever is thrown into it; the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Anxiety, in Stoic terms, is an indifferent. Not good, not bad — what matters is what you do with it. Pointed at anxiety, amor fati goes further than acceptance. Acceptance says: I have anxiety and I'll let it be. Amor fati says: I welcome it. It's my training ground. Like a boxer's sparring partner — you don't keep one to get punched in the face, you keep one to learn to move, defend, counter.
The practice
Next time the familiar stirring arrives, don't breathe through it or push it away. Say: I see you, and I welcome you, and you're okay to stay. Show me what you want to show me. I'll listen. The mantra I use most: I see you, anxiety. Thank you for being here, but I'm okay — I don't need you right now. Honouring the guard dog instead of caging it.
For the full practice of loving what happens, see the complete guide to amor fati. This episode pairs with Overthinking Is Not a Thinking Problem from the same month.
Sources: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Hays); Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion (Hard); Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
I struggled with anxiety for most of my adult life. Not the kind of anxiety that you see in movies — hyperventilating in a bathroom, freaking out, having insane panic attacks, although I did have a few — but the kind of anxiety that keeps you up at night or makes you want to leave a situation just because you have this impending fear of something happening.
I remember when I was living in the Czech Republic and I would be walking around the streets and there'd be armed guards and my mind would play tricks like, what if they just decided to shoot me? Or I'd be on a tram and someone would leave a bag on the train and I would think, well, what if that's a bomb? And it would make me actually want to get off the tram. It would give me this fear that would feel so real. It would give me this impulse to act and to leave the situation. If I was in a bar and a little fight would break out, I would feel like I'm going to be somehow involved in this fight and hit and hurt. If I'm walking down the street and there's a dog, I imagine that this dog's going to attack me. So my mind would play these kinds of tricks on me, this sort of low-level hypervigilance that would be there, and it was very uncomfortable, to be honest.
I read a lot of books, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I spent a lot of time fighting my anxiety. I saw it like this intruder in my system that I needed to get out, to remove, to control, to breathe through. And so I kept fighting it. And eventually I hit a breakthrough that changed everything. I discovered that the fight was the problem. Not the anxiety — the fight.
Now I'm not going to tell you that anxiety feels good, because it doesn't. I'm going to talk about something that the Stoics understood 2,000 years ago that modern neuroscience is now catching up to: the more you resist an internal state, the stronger it becomes. When your brain first registers anxiety, you get the tightness in your chest, that clenching feeling, the knot in your stomach, the desire to escape, to run away. And then you resist it. You say to yourself, this is bad. It is bad that I'm feeling anxious. And now you have two layers of suffering. You have the anxiety, and now you have the anxiety about the anxiety. And oftentimes the second layer is even worse than the first. And secondly, because you're fighting the anxiety so hard, you're showing your nervous system that there must be a real threat. There's a reason why you're fighting. So the cortisol and the tension and the stress amp up.
But what if I told you there's a completely different way to approach this? There's a way of getting out of the anxiety trap that a lot of us spend years in without realising that there's even a door. So here's the radical question I have for you. What if instead of fighting your anxiety, you welcomed it? I don't mean just low-level acceptance, gritting your teeth and accepting it being there, but actually wanting your anxiety to be there.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a phrase for this: amor fati, which means the love of fate. He called this the formula for greatness in human beings. The idea is that instead of just accepting life, we fully and wholeheartedly embrace it — all of it, even the bad parts. Every aspect of our fate we fully embrace and choose to love, because it is here, because the past is unchangeable, it is not within our control, and the present moment as we find it right now in this instant is also unchangeable.
Nietzsche wasn't a Stoic, but the roots of amor fati trace back to the ancient Stoics. Epictetus said: do not seek for things to happen as you wish, wish for things to happen as they do, and you will go on well. He didn't say just tolerate what happens. He said to wish for it, to want it, to choose it — even though on some level it's been chosen for you, you choose it again for yourself voluntarily. Marcus took it further with his famous line: the impediment to action advances action; what stands in the way becomes the way. He wrote that a blazing fire makes use of whatever is thrown into it. It doesn't just accept it — it converts it and transmutes it into fuel. A fire doesn't burn away complaining about the things that it's burning. It grows bigger and stronger and brighter no matter what is put into it.
And so the question is: what happens if we take this frame, this principle, this practice — amor fati — and we point it at our anxiety?
I started experimenting with this about five years ago. I was on a retreat in Costa Rica and I was having a difficult time. And instead of fighting against the anxiety that I was feeling and telling myself to think more positively, to breathe through it, to be more mindful of it, I instead asked myself: what would happen if I became grateful for this experience? What if I actually wanted my anxiety to be here? What if I welcomed it in and asked it to stay? A part of me thought this was absurd. Why would I do this? But as I actually did it, I felt less anxious. The anxiety softened, and I felt more compassionate towards myself and my relationship towards the anxiety. I felt that the anxiety was there to help me rather than harm me. Did the anxiety completely go? Not quite. But it definitely lessened, and now I felt more in control. I was less dominated by the anxiety, and I could choose my next response in a way that felt more aligned to my values, instead of feeling hijacked and forced to act by my fears.
Here's how I think about it from a Stoic perspective. The Stoics divided the world into three categories: good, bad, and indifferent. They said that the only thing that is truly good is excellence of character, or virtue — courage, justice, temperance, wisdom. And the only thing that is bad is vice, or corruption of character — foolishness, injustice, excess, cowardice. Everything else was indifferent: body, health, relationships, pleasure, pain, status, reputation, possessions. These external indifferents were not things you shouldn't care about, or things that didn't mean anything — rather, they were not intrinsically good or bad the way vice and virtue are. It was what you did with them that mattered.
You can apply this framework to anxiety as well. Is anxiety good or bad? Neither. It's technically an indifferent. What matters is what you do with it. When anxiety comes, you ask: does this harm my character or does it help my character? Well, it depends. You can use the anxiety as fuel on the fire to develop your character — as another obstacle to work with instead of fighting. What if anxiety can actually train you in virtues like courage and temperance and justice and wisdom? Suddenly anxiety is a source of practice. Something to be grateful for instead of something to get rid of.
This is where amor fati comes in. Acceptance would say: I have anxiety, I'm okay with having anxiety, I accept it being there. That's pretty good — a lot better than a war with yourself, an internal battle within your own mind. But amor fati asks us to go further. Amor fati says: I have anxiety and I'm glad to have anxiety. I welcome it being here. It's my training ground and my friend and guardian, and it keeps me safe. This is not said in a toxic-positivity way — "yay, I'm suffering, this is great." It's more like a boxer having a good sparring partner. You don't have a sparring partner just to be punched in the face. You have a sparring partner to teach you how to defend yourself, how to move, how to strike, how to counter. Anxiety can be that very thing for you — or any difficult emotion, including anger and sadness. Life is a gym you can show up to and train in every day.
When you practise amor fati regularly, something remarkable can happen. You start feeling gratitude for all sorts of difficult emotions. I think the ancient Stoics saw their emotions like this. If they got frustrated, or hit an obstacle, or faced some kind of challenge, they saw it literally as a form of training — emotional training, something to work with and practise on. And if you start applying amor fati to your own anxiety, you'll drop that second layer of suffering — the anxiety about the anxiety — and you'll find you recover a lot more quickly from the initial surge.
I'm not saying you're never going to feel anxiety again, because part of the point is that anxiety is not necessarily bad in the first place. It's indifferent. It's there to show you something or teach you something. Part of the problem with anxiety is how we relate to it, especially if we've spent years trying to push it down. The analogy I like: we're in a house and we have a guard dog, and that dog is barking, telling us there's a threat. And instead of listening to the dog, feeding the dog, training the dog, we shout at it, cage it, lock it in a different room. Do you think that dog is going to bark more, or less? The alarm system stops working properly because we're not taking care of something that is ultimately trying to take care of us.
So the practice for today, as anxiety keeps showing up. The next time you feel that stirring — maybe it's familiar to you — instead of trying to breathe through it, push it away, control it, or think other thoughts, you say: I see you, and I welcome you, and you're okay to stay. Show me what you want to show me. I'll listen. And you can incorporate the fuller amor fati and literally say to your anxiety: I'm glad you're here. You will be my training partner today. You might be surprised what happens.
The mantra I use most, if I have anxiety: I see you, anxiety. Thank you for being here, but I'm okay — I don't need you right now. It's a little acknowledgement and a reminder that I'm okay. That way I'm honouring it, still seeing it as a friend, as something that is welcome — just not really needed in this moment.
Go deeper
If you want structured practice, the 7-Day Stoic Challenge is free. Nine audio lessons and a 42-page workbook.