The Daily Stoic

Seneca wrote about our natural, involuntary physiological responses. Someone pours cold water on you, and you shiver. They jump out of nowhere to scare you, and you let out a scream. Someone drives rudely, cuts you off, prevents you from passing, and you get upset. These are natural and understandable reactions to external events. Who we are, Seneca said, is not revealed in how we react in those moments. It’s revealed in what happens next. It’s in that space between stimulus and response, psychologist Viktor Frankl liked to say, that shows who we are. Do we speed up and follow dangerously close behind the person that pissed us off? Do we shout and scream and carry rage with us all day? Tara Swart, neuroscientist and author of The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain, gave us a better technique in our interview with her for DailyStoic.com:Learn how to STOPI used this exercise when I was working as a child psychiatrist. It’s a technique that is often used by family therapists with child