The science of Stoicism: Does it really improve mental health?

At the beginning of 2020, Alexander MacLellan — a psychology researcher at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom — decided that it was time to put the revival of Stoicism under the microscope. He had noticed that a growing number of people were turning to the teachings of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius as a way of finding greater well-being. Books fusing self-help with proverbial advice — return to the classics — were all the rage. Interest in the supposed benefits of this philosophical doctrine was spreading both online and in person in the hundreds of groups that brought neo-Stoics together. Thousands of social media accounts were sharing quotes and aphorisms that went viral. “I saw that there was a large community that attributed many benefits to it, and I thought it would be interesting to provide a scientific perspective,” MacLellan says via video conference.

The first study to bring together the precepts of this Greco-Roman school of thought and contemporary research metrics was published in 2021 in the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research. Its results showed a significant drop in negative thinking among people with a strong tendency to worry. During the experiment, participants were asked to immerse themselves in selected readings and exercise basic Stoic principles. They were urged, for example, to understand the difference between facts and the judgment we make about them (the latter, the Stoics insisted, is almost always the true cause of our discomfort). In the second study on Stoicism and mental health, published in BMC Medical Education in 2022, MacLellan and other authors saw an increase in resilience and empathy among medical students. In this case, other types of techniques were added to the tools of the first analysis, with special emphasis on negative visualization. This therapeutic tool with Stoic roots involves imaging the worst possible scenario (including memento mori, the assumption that we will all die one day) and drawing on reason, humility and perspective to ward off catastrophism.

For his research, MacLellan works with Modern Stoicism (MS), an English platform that promotes the philosophy founded in the 3rd century BC by Zeno of Citium, while adapting it to today’s context. John Sellars, one of MS’ most active members and a professor of philosophy at the University of London, admits that “we are still at an early stage” when it comes to rigorously measuring the psycho-emotional benefits of Stocisim. But he has already jumped on the bandwagon by creating a specific research program that, he hopes, will begin to publish results at the end of this year. He also evaluates the response to Stoic Week, an event across the U.K. that MS has been organizing since 2012. “It is not really research that can appear in a scientific journal,” clarifies Sellars, who says that bias in the sample selection and the lack of a control group are “methodological problems” that undermine the validity of his findings. With this caution in mind, he nevertheless lists some of the effects of attending Stoic Week: “We have consistently observed a significant decrease in negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, sometimes by up to 20%. And an increase in the awareness that life has meaning.”

Brittany Polat, the U.S. founder of the NGO Stoicare, says that, in her experience, delving into Stoicism clarifies the search for a “life purpose.” And she believes that Stoicism’s ability to help answer our existential questions should be an area of study. Polat also mentions two other research topics: “Well-being understood as edudaimonia [Greek term that links human happiness with the possibility of flourishing or prospering] and resilience in the face of adversity.”

MacLellan, meanwhile, points to another pillar of Stoic philosophy that he believes has teachings and associated benefits that could be quantified: the famous Dichotomy of Control. This refers to the teaching that there are things that we can control (especially our actions and our way of judging what is happening to us), but many other things — most of them — are beyond our control. Accepting this was, according to Epictetus, one of the keys to inner freedom, which he cultivated during long years of captivity.

The muse of cognitive-behavioral therapy

In reality, research combining Stoicism and psychology did not begin — at least in the strictest lexical sense — with MacLellan’s pioneering work. Before that, there had already been several studies in which both words (or their derivatives) were linked. The problem stemmed from the conceptual confusion over the term “Stoic.” For centuries, the adjective was used to describe people who imperturbably endure whatever is thrown at them, without apparent complaints, elevating the restraint of feelings as a special don. Some researchers describe this reductionist vision as stoicism (lower s), and say it has a very different meaning (sometimes the opposite) to the profound reflections of the ancient sages.

In a 2022 study, Johannes Karl of Dublin City University looked at the mental health impact of adopting this misleading interpretation of the term, which he calls “naïve Stoic Ideology.” He found that it has a negative relationship to well-being. As an attitude to life, Stoic endurance does not seem like good advice. According to Karl, other research that has started from this misguided or downright erroneous notion of Stoicism suffers from a certain gender bias, since it pushes the idea that masculinity is based on repressing emotions. Karl offers a preview of his next study, which is expected to be published in the coming months: “People who identify with Stoicism with are much more open to receiving psychotherapy than those who opt for stoicism, who tend to think that it is not for them, or even that it is a scam.”

Curiously, if someone decides to go to a psychologist, it is likely that the professional will teach them to regulate their thoughts and emotions with Stoic methods. At least indirectly. The four experts interviewed for this article explain that Stoicism had a powerful influence on the founders of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), one of the most common (if not the most common) therapies in psychology offices. “Authors such as Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis explicitly acknowledged that they had been inspired by it,” recalls Sellars. In his works and articles, author Donald Robertson has detailed the parallels between Stoic philosophy and CBT. For Sellars, the abundant literature that certifies the effectiveness of CBT also applies, to a certain extent, to Stoicism. Although the latter “offers something more, a framework to structure our actions and attitudes” that transcends “those moments of crisis” in which, generally, one decides to seek the help of a psychologist.

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