People who know me well call me a lot of things, but calm isn’t one of them. Whenever I’m faced with a challenge, my first reaction is to go into fight mode. I don’t know what it is. And I try to fight it (pun intended), but sometimes I wish I could be a bit more unbothered.
This week, I read a piece by a modern Stoic who argues that the best defence against the anxiety of modern life is to train your mind to be indifferent to it. Stop being rattled by social media. Stop reacting to bad news. The Stoics, he says, understood something we seem to have forgotten: you can condition your mind to remain calm, whatever the outside world throws at you. I honestly wish I could. But I can’t. No matter how hard I try to be indifferent, it just keeps going round and round in my head.
I find Stoicism genuinely appealing. But I also think it’s only half right , and not just for someone like me, who tends to be anything but calm.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Stoicism, but let me give you a quick rundown. The Stoics were remarkable people. Epictetus was a former slave who developed one of the most sophisticated frameworks for human resilience ever written. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire while maintaining what seems to have been a genuinely examined inner life. There is real wisdom here, and it has lasted for over 2,500 years for good reason.
But here is what bothers me. The Stoic solution to a difficult environment is always internal. Strengthen your mind. Choose your response. The world is as it is. You are the variable.
Behavioural science has spent the last fifty years systematically dismantling this assumption. Daniel Kahneman's work on System 1 and System 2 thinking shows that the vast majority of our responses to the world happen before conscious reasoning gets anywhere near them. We do not choose our reactions. We have them, and then, occasionally, we reflect on them. The idea that you can simply decide to be unaffected by a context designed by thousands of engineers to trigger your fear and outrage response is not a training programme. It is a fantasy.
More importantly, it is a fantasy that conveniently lets the context off the hook. If the problem is always your reaction, then the environment that provoked it is never the problem. And so it never gets changed.
This is where Behavioural Design parts ways with Stoicism, respectfully but firmly. The question is not only: how do I become more resilient to a difficult environment? The question is: why are we accepting the environment as given?
Epictetus distinguished between what is "up to us" and what is not. His answer was that our judgements and responses are up to us, and everything else is not. Behavioural Design says: actually, more is up to us than that. The environment is designed. Which means it can be redesigned. The context is not fate. It is a choice someone made. And choices can be changed.
The Stoics were right that inner resilience matters. You do need to be able to function in imperfect conditions, because conditions will always be imperfect. But resilience without redesign is just endurance. And endurance, dressed up as wisdom, has a long history of being used to ask people to tolerate things that should simply be fixed.
The stubborn optimist in me refuses that deal.
How to use this insight:
The practical question is not whether to build inner resilience or redesign your environment. It is knowing which lever to pull when.
Inner resilience is the right tool when the context genuinely cannot be changed, when you are navigating a situation temporarily, when the discomfort is part of necessary growth, or when the alternative is waiting indefinitely for external conditions to improve before you can function.
Context redesign is the right tool when the environment is producing the same unwanted behaviour repeatedly, when multiple people are struggling in the same way, when the solution keeps being "try harder," or when the system is asking individuals to compensate for a structural problem.
The mistake most individuals and organisations make is defaulting to one at the expense of the other. Pure Stoicism becomes a way of tolerating bad systems without questioning them. Pure context redesign without personal resilience produces people who fall apart the moment conditions change.
The combination is where the real leverage sits. Build your capacity to function under difficulty, and at the same time ask yourself, honestly: is this difficulty necessary? Could the environment be better designed? Often, the answer is yes. And that is worth acting on.
In my case, that simply means I don’t watch the news anymore. And I’ve stopped scrolling social media. All of a sudden, I seem to master that Stoicism. As long as you don’t touch my morning coffee, I’m doing okay in staying calm.
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Why keeping a journal makes you more resilient, not less
There is a common assumption that writing about difficult experiences keeps you stuck in them. Research by psychologist James Pennebaker suggests the opposite. In a series of studies, people who wrote expressively about stressful or traumatic events for fifteen to twenty minutes a day over three to four days showed measurable improvements in immune function, fewer visits to the doctor, and better psychological wellbeing compared to people who wrote about neutral topics.
The mechanism appears to be cognitive processing. Writing forces you to organise an experience into a narrative, which shifts it from a raw emotional state into something the mind can categorise and file. An experience that has been narrated is less likely to intrude repeatedly into conscious awareness. The brain, having told the story, is more willing to let it rest.
This is not the same as rumination, which involves cycling through the same thoughts without resolution. Expressive writing moves toward meaning. Rumination moves in circles.
The practical implication is simple: when something is occupying too much mental space, writing about it for fifteen minutes is often more effective than either avoiding it or talking it over repeatedly. The act of putting it into words does something that thinking alone does not.
Here's to the stubborn optimists, who unlock the power of Behavioural Design for optimising work, life, and everything in between.
Until next week,
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
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