The case for a bit more stoicism

The one thing we all know is that being in touch with your feelings is good for you. Except the evidence is actually much more in the other direction and it is not clear our obsession with being ‘true to our emotions’ is helping us one little bit.

There is a not zero chance that you are unaware of a debate about stoic philosophy which has been kind of, well, 'raging' in certain circles. There is a better chance that you could take a guess that it is something to do with Maga bros. But it does pose questions I've been struggling with for a while now.

How much suffering is an acceptable amount of suffering? How much emotional expression is too much emotional expression? There must be a sort of rough crossover point. Where is it? This is a more important question than it might first appear.

I'm just going to have to be entirely open and honest about this, even though (particularly though) it may not make me sound sympathetic. What prompted it was the story about Ross Greer being hospitalised twice as a result of what he describes as bullying inside the Scottish Greens.

This is my honest part – no matter how much I know rationally the importance of empathy, no matter how much I've argued for a less abusive society, nevertheless I am congenitally incapable of not rolling my eyes at this. Hospitalised? By the high-stakes internal politics of the Scottish Greens? It's not exactly cancer is it? How bad could it be?

I don't really have any control over this response since it is hard-wired into me. It has various sources – the enduring effect of Scottish Calvinism, growing up with grandparents who were inevitably shaped by world war, the culture of West of Scotland masculinity, the fact I played rugby (football being men pretending to be hurt for 90 minutes, rugby being men pretending not to be hurt for 80), the quiet Quakerism of the peace movement.

The assumption that you sacrifice, you do the right thing, you don't make a fuss, you get on with it, you don't show weakness, you keep soldiering on regardless. All of these are fundamental to me, my upbringing, my environment, the culture of my friends.

I can't tell you why but I know that when I do something I often take pride in it which is directly correlated to how much suffering it caused. Shifting five tonnes of type two aggregate by wheelbarrow? Aching back? Blistered fingers? Exhausted and cold? Job well done...

I am, therefore, a Stoic by nature. Now here are the problems with that.

For a start, it is most certainly not necessarily good for you. Working class men and women of a certain age in Scotland just won't complain or make a fuss even when they should – for example, when they are clearly showing early symptoms of cancer but 'don't want to bother the doctor'.

For a second, it is clearly not endlessly expandable. There is clearly a line somewhere where you're going to say 'right, no, this is way too much suffering'. Where is it? How are we supposed to know? What do we do when we get there? Who is ever going to explain any of this to me? And then there is of course the whole 'bottle up your emotions'/'suicide' thing.

Thank goodness for our happier, more caring-and-sharing era where people are much less inhibited in expressing their emotions and we are all more in touch with our feelings, right? That is the solution is it not?

Well, is it? We've been becoming 'more emotional' for years now. In the battle between the traditional British stiff upper lip and the emotional freedom of the West Coast hippie liberal legacy in the US, I suspect the stiff upper lip never stood a chance. What isn't in doubt is that people all seem to be feeling everything all the time now.

Great, right? Except again, is it? Has mental health got better as a result? Is public debate in a better place? Are we really more in touch with our feelings or are we just more driven by our whims? Fundamentally, would a young, male politician 30 years ago have been likely to be hospitalised over what seems to me to be the everyday reality of being in any political party I've ever seen?

A long time ago now I started to see if there was something that looked like a consistent answer. Is there any science that can help with this? It was so long ago I'll never find the references but it crystallised in my mind when I read about a bit of psychological research carried out by an academic at Harvard University.

When we draw on or speak out loud about a memory we reinforce it, but we also change it. It's as if each time we take a memory out we adapt it a bit before we put it back. So if we keep talking about any given incident or emotion, we reinforce it and make it more prominent, more influential in our lives. Talking about emotions amplifies them.

Another study looked at the idea that you can 'work emotions out' by acting to 'release them'. For example, if you're angry, can you just keep hitting a punching bag until the feeling is gone? Again, the answer is very much no. All you do is boost your adrenalin production while thinking over and over of how angry you are.

Flip this the other way. Yet another study looked at how Buddhist monks experience pain in comparison to other people. Does their mindful, meditative training make a difference? In as far as you can normalise the experience of pain then no, the 'peak pain' of a monk is the same as anyone else.

But that doesn't mean there is no difference. What actually happens is that the onset of the pain is slower (the rest of us start to sense it through anticipation) and the pain passes quicker (the rest of us dwell on the experience of the pain and thereby prolong it).

“The overall lesson from the science is basically that if you feel you are doing fine and not really experiencing negative symptoms then definitely try not to spend time reflecting on negative emotional experiences, particularly if they’re in the past”

So we should bottle up our emotions and get on with it? Well, not exactly. Something else the Harvard study showed was that there was a pretty significant exception to that rule. Sometimes (as we all know) repressing emotions just causes them to leak out in other, often more damaging, ways. Suppressing and not acknowledging them can make it worse.

The overall lesson from the science is basically that if you feel you are doing fine and not really experiencing negative symptoms then definitely try not to spend time reflecting on negative emotional experiences, particularly if they're in the past. You only make them worse if you keep thinking about them.

So the Stoics were basically right? Yes – but that doesn't mean every interpretation of Stoic philosophy is. The debate I mentioned at the start shows that. Worried (like me) that the new era of emotional incontinence was not helping people, about a decade ago a couple of guys set up a website called the Daily Stoic (which is how I got wind of this issue). It is basically an argument for a kind of philosophical mindfulness.

And then came the Maga bros. For them stoicism is just a doctrine that glorifies tough guys and 'proves' that anyone who complains is a snowflake. That is very markedly not what the Stoics themselves thought, but 'suck it up' is a great stance for people who don't care about others.

This has very direct public policy features in a plethora of ways. A number of years ago the concept of 'social resilience' took hold, not least in Scottish chattering class circles. And then of course it quickly turned into 'how do we help the poor resign themselves to their poverty?', the mindset of the Scottish bureaucratic classes since at least John Knox.

But it also relates to virtually everything we are doing in the field of mental health. The dominant philosophy in Scottish public policy is that all your feelings are 'valid' and all your emotions should always be affirmed. This doesn't help; it is just a cheap way for decision-makers to signal that they’re 'be kind' kind of people – without really doing anything.

And so then your valid emotions must be labelled and thus everyone gets a diagnosis. And, again, the evidence strongly suggests that this doesn't help one bit. After a brief feeling of validation, you're back where you were to begin with. Except now you have this idea in your head, this idea that you're a thing, a defined thing, and that that explains you. So now it changes you.

The truth is that telling people you don't feel safe will increasingly make you feel unsafe. You are reinforcing a story about yourself again and again and it is a story about emotions which will amplify and embed those emotions.

Another recent study argued that you can't 'teach mental health in schools', that the evidence says it doesn't work. I had real problems with this research because it was predicated on starting that education after the negative outcomes have presented. I have long favoured a kind of preventative mindfulness training for young people at every stage in education (along with anger management, deescalation, negotiation and means of non-violence).

I think we can help people frame their emotions much more helpfully and much more effectively if we could only quit the performative emoting that so often passes for decency these days. It is undoubtedly true that if you set a goal of trying to avoid all pain and suffering in your life, you'll fuck yourself up. There will be pain. What you need to learn is that it doesn't have to harm you.

I certainly don't agree with Ross Greer on everything and he sometimes gives me the 'ambition heebie-jeebies' (I have a fundamental mistrust of excessive personal ambition). But from Gaza to Monarchy to Flamingo Land, Ross Greer has been head and shoulders above most backbenchers in terms of making a genuinely valuable contribution to political life in Scotland.

I absolutely don't want him ending up in hospital. It's just that there is this part of me that is pretty sure that this reaction is probably made significantly worse and certainly not made better by our era's obsession with chasing after every feeling we have, thinking about it, talking about it, reinforcing and growing it.

I would be 100 per cent supportive of steps to 'just make things nicer' if I thought there were any or if I thought they'd work. So I think there is a lot more of an answer to our current problems in the work of Seneca or Cato than in the oeuvre of Oprah Winfrey or Ellen DeGeneres. In part I really do think we need to learn to get over ourselves a bit.

I recognise it is a really difficult balancing act and I'm sure there isn't really a reliable 'sweet spot', but I am virtually sure we're currently going in the wrong direction and I'm virtually sure that our current attitudes are actually making things worse. It would be better if we could talk about this.

Because as Marcus Aurelius put it: “It’s time you realised that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.” There is more to you than your fleeting emotions. Much more.