When a conversation keeps replaying in your head, it can help to separate what happened from what you are adding to it. This episode offers three ways to try that. Its title is a provocation, not a diagnosis: the content and amount of thought can matter too, and no single Stoic exercise explains every kind of overthinking.
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The Stoic model: impression, assent, response
The Stoics called what appears to the mind an impression, or phantasia. It can include a perception, an involuntary idea or a thought already carrying an interpretation. Assent is agreeing with what the impression presents. Epictetus asks us to test a forceful impression before treating it as the thing itself (Enchiridion 1).
That distinction gives us something to practise. It does not mean the first jolt of fear is chosen or that genuine harm is small. Seneca distinguishes involuntary reactions from later agreement in On Anger 2.2–4. Learning to examine a judgement takes practice; it is not perfect control on demand.
The Marcus Aurelius passage in the episode is Meditations 8.47. He is reminding himself to inspect his judgement about an event. Treating that reminder as a guarantee that anyone can remove distress at once would ask too much of it.
Three moves to try
1. Separate fact, story and uncertainty. Write what an accurate record could confirm, what you have inferred, and what remains unknown. Then ask what the situation requires. A real threat or wrong still deserves protection or action. The Objective Representation guide develops this practice in more detail.
2. Find the next action that is up to you. You cannot settle another person's private thoughts or change what happened yesterday. You may be able to ask a question, apologise, make a plan or decide when to return to the issue. The Dichotomy of Control guide explains the distinction. If no useful action is available now, you can leave the question open without pretending it does not matter.
3. Borrow a steadier point of view. Ask what a wise and compassionate friend would notice, what they would refuse to assume, and what they would do next. Seneca passes on the practice of keeping a respected person in mind in Letters 11.9–10. The episode's 'rational observer' is my modern adaptation of that older role-model practice.
Give the reflection an ending
Try this as a small experiment. Give yourself ten minutes to find new evidence, choose one action or decide to leave the question open. That time limit is a modern stopping rule, not an ancient prescription. If you keep circling the same material, record where you stopped and return to an ordinary activity.
Do not turn the questions into a ritual you must repeat until every thought feels safe. If thinking and repeated checking are affecting sleep or daily life, speak with a qualified professional. The NHS guidance on obsessive thoughts and compulsions explains why more checking is not always useful.
For a week, note one trigger, the fact, the meaning you added and the action you chose. Check whether the exercise gave you a workable next step or became more rumination. If it makes the loop worse, leave it out.
This builds on the dichotomy of control, and pairs with The Anxiety Trap: Why Fighting Makes It Worse from the same month.
Sources
Epictetus, Enchiridion 1 and 5; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47; Seneca, Letters 11.9–10; Seneca, On Anger 2.2–4. The exercises above are modern applications of these passages.
Editorial note, 30 October 2026: the transcript below preserves the episode's wording. The article above qualifies its claims about neutral thoughts, small events and complete control, and adds a stopping rule. The three moves are an experiment in reflection, not a diagnosis or treatment.
Full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
Okay, have you ever had this experience? You're lying awake in bed, replaying a conversation that you had. Something that didn't go so well. Maybe you're replaying what you should have said or shouldn't have said, and it's keeping you awake. You can't let it go. You're ruminating and going over and over and over in your mind. And then you go beyond just thinking about this conversation. You're now thinking about what it means about you personally, about your life, about everything in your world.
The crazy thing about these thought loops, this type of overthinking: nobody talks about the thought itself. It's often not that serious. It could be a look that someone gave you, something that was implied, something that wasn't said, maybe an email. But the meaning that we give it makes it snowball, makes it pick up its own sort of gravity. Your mind took this thought and went wild with it. And that's something people don't address when it comes to overthinking. Overthinking is not a deep analysis. It's not a neutral report. It's a loop. It's often something small that just gets bigger and bigger, loops more and more, gets more meaningful every time it loops around.
My goal here is to give you a Stoic diagnosis of overthinking and to give you practical tools that you can start using today. It's probably going to contain advice that you've never heard before if you're quite new to Stoicism. Most of the common advice when it comes to dealing with overthinking has you look at the thoughts themselves. You're having too many thoughts. You're having the wrong thoughts. So let's journal about it. Let's unpack it, dissect it. Maybe we can replace the negative thought with a positive one. We can breathe, we can run, we can meditate. They're focused a lot on the thoughts — the content of the thought. Where the Stoic view is: what if the thoughts themselves aren't the problem? Maybe the thoughts themselves are neutral. Maybe it's more to do with what we are doing to the thoughts that causes the issue. It sounds kind of radical, but what if overthinking is not even a thinking problem?
Epictetus was a first-century Roman Stoic philosopher. He was originally a slave, and then he earned his freedom and taught, usually outside, to whoever would listen. In the end he had some pretty influential students, and he's widely regarded as one of the greatest Stoic thinkers of all time. And Epictetus had this idea that he kept coming back to. You may have heard it before — it's been borrowed and rehashed many times in popular self-improvement — but I'll say it again. It is not events that disturb us, but our judgements about the events.
Say you're stuck in traffic. The traffic isn't the problem, as tempting as it is to believe that it is. It's the thoughts that we are going to be late, and what that means, and what we're going to miss, and what this will mean for our reputation. The meaning that we give to the event is what disturbs us. The Stoic diagnosis isn't trying to get you to think better thoughts. It's trying to get you to notice when you add a judgement to what is otherwise a neutral event. It is that judgement that causes the disturbance and the suffering. And if we don't notice the judgement, then we're just going to assume that the event itself — reality itself — is inherently bad, and we are a victim of this bad circumstance.
The Stoics had this word, phantasia, which means impression. We're always getting these impressions as we go through life — knee-jerk reactions, the first storyline that pops into our head about a situation. And then we are asked: do we assent, not assent, or withhold assent — which means agreement — to this impression? To give assent means to endorse it. So if someone looks at you in a strange way, a Stoic would ask: do you assent to the impression that they disrespected you? A seasoned Stoic would say, I can't bet the house on that, because I don't really know. I couldn't say with a hundred percent certainty that they looked at me that way because they disrespected me. So I'm going to withhold assent. The untrained mind says: no, they disrespected me, because I felt that was the case. They give assent — they endorse, they agree, they fully believe the impression that first hits them.
Marcus Aurelius had a great line: if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but your estimate of it. He's paraphrasing Epictetus here, but I like that word — the estimate of it, not the thing.
So coming back to overthinking: it's not a thinking problem. The Stoics would say the reason you're lying awake, ruminating several layers deep, is because somewhere along the line you added a judgement. And your job isn't to stop thinking, isn't to replace the negative thoughts with positive thoughts, but to locate the judgement. What was the first judgement you added to this event? And more importantly: when I examine this judgement, does it hold up?
The first practical exercise is really simple: find the first impression. Ask the simple question, what actually happened? In a lot of CBT exercises, right at the top, before you do anything else, they'll say: describe the event in neutral terms. Not your judgement, not the storyline — what actually happened. And when you've located that, ask yourself again: okay, but what really happened here? What was my initial impression? As you ask, you'll find your mind still wants to interpret and add judgements. Just keep going. What actually happened? This is not to dismiss how you're feeling — it's to find the actual event, before we added any judgements. To our surprise, we'll often find that not much happened. It's usually pretty small.
The second exercise is to filter the thoughts through the dichotomy of control. Most of us are familiar with it: the world divides into things that are completely up to us and things that are not. The weather is not up to us; how we respond to the weather is. But it can also be applied to thoughts. Some thoughts just come to us. They sneak up in the middle of the night. Minds are not blank — they're thinking machines. So when a thought comes, ask: is this thought up to me? Usually it's not. It just comes. But what you do with the thought is up to you. When a heavy, difficult thought arrives, ask: what part of this is up to me right now? Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes it's one or two things. It can be quite liberating to see that a thought is asking you to do something literally impossible — change the past, predict the future, control other people. You can say to that thought: you're asking me to do something that is not up to me. End of the road. But sometimes you do have an opportunity — to send a message, to put right a wrong. The overthinking loop is often a substitute for taking action, and that's why the dichotomy of control is useful here: it takes you out of the abstract chain of rumination, puts you back in the driver's seat, and asks where you're going to spend your effort now.
The third exercise is the rational observer. The Stoics often contemplated role models — what would Socrates do in this situation? Or they contemplated the sage, the ultimate wise person. I don't think we need to go that far. Just ask: what would a very calm and rational person do in this situation? How would they process this event? To make it tangible, think back to a time when you meditated, did yoga, went for a long run — something that made your body feel grounded and calm. Imagine what that version of you would think, say, or do in response to this event. It creates a nice bit of separation between you and the overthinking. The question isn't whether you suddenly feel good about the thoughts. It's: do I check my phone for the ninth time? Do I catastrophise? Is that what the wisest, calmest version of me would do? We usually know the answer, and it gives us a push out of the loop.
So those are the three Stoic moves. Strip back the impression — go back to the original event and keep asking what happened. Ask what is within my power here, using the dichotomy of control. And the rational observer — what would a role model, or the wisest version of myself, do. You don't need all three every time. Sometimes one is enough. The idea is that we stop treating overthinking as a thinking problem, and realise it's the subtle judgements we're adding that cause the suffering. These tools get you out of the loop — they give you something concrete to do the next time you're stuck in a spiral.
If you want one simple practice to start today, even when you're not in a loop: ask, what has actually happened, and what am I adding to it? Journal on it, think it through, meditate on it. If you get good at answering that — here's what happened, and here's what I added — it becomes an automatic skill, and you'll be shocked. Overthinking happens far less, and you'll have a much clearer head to deal with situations as they come.
Go deeper
If you want structured practice, the 7-Day Stoic Challenge is free. Nine audio lessons and a 42-page workbook.