how an ancient philosophy helped me manage my parental anxiety
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.
- Epictetus
The world is a challenging place. Every day it feels like we’re hearing more bad news. More things to fear, more tragedies, more things to be angry about. Until I became a parent, the happenings of the world didn’t really bother me. If anything they were a footnote in my daily life. All that changed when my son was born.
After my son was born and the initial shock of becoming a dad wore off, I was struck by anxiety like I had never experienced before. I was worried about everything. Suddenly the trouble of the world came crashing into focus. Everything felt overwhelming, it felt like it was all a danger and that there was nothing that I could do to stop it. I felt powerless. As those feelings washed over me, one thing occurred to me: I wasn’t better or worse off than anyone else when it came to the powerlessness in the face of world events.
It was around this same time that I stumbled across the writings of Ryan Holiday and the teachings of the great stoic philosophers. At the core of these teachings was the principle that we should only focus our time, energy, and effort into things that we can actually impact, instead of worrying about the things that are beyond our control.
Everyone, and I mean everyone has the same power to influence the direction of the universe, of their fate, of world events as I do. So who was I to use my time and energy to worry about things that I had absolutely no control over? What did that gain me? Wouldn’t my energy be better spent on focusing intensely on the things that I could control? The answer was quite simply, yes.
What I found in the writings of the stoic philosophers was a mindset that would force me to challenge myself. To look inward, and to learn to have a more realistic relationship with the world, the universe, and my own emotions. This is a journey that started years ago, but now has become more important than ever for my personal growth, for my growth as a father, and my growth as a husband.
Does this mean that I’ve given up worrying about world events? No, I don’t think that any human can look at the state of the world and rightly say that there’s nothing that they worry about. But the idea is to not become attached to those emotions, to become addicted to the anxiety that it brings. What it has challenged me to do is to focus on how I manage my emotions, how I express and experience gratitude for small moments, and how I work to appreciate but not attach to things that are impermanent. In all things and in all ways happiness, or at the very least personal peace, comes from the acceptance of things as they are when there is no way for us to change them. But that also frees us up to focus on and appreciate what truly matters.
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