There are days when I don’t journal. Something happens, the morning starts too quickly, a client needs something, family life takes over, or I simply tell myself that I will do it later. I usually notice the difference before the day is over. It is not that something dramatic suddenly happens. Everything just becomes heavier.
My head starts filling up with work, people, conversations, decisions, and problems that do not even exist yet. There may be something I have to solve next Thursday, something a client might ask me next week, something that could go wrong with the business, something I should remember for my family. None of those things is necessarily a problem right now, but my mind has already invited all of them into the room.
I have been mentoring people for roughly ten years now. In the beginning, most conversations were about technology, careers, products, and how to become better at something. Over the years, I started noticing something different. More and more conversations eventually arrive at the same underlying problem: people are carrying too much. They are functioning, often at a very high level, but they have lost the ability to distinguish between what actually requires their attention and what is simply demanding it.
This is one of the reasons I journal, and one of the reasons Stoicism became much more than philosophy to me. It became a practical system for protecting my own mind.
We have become very good at saying yes
There is a strange contradiction in modern high-performance culture. We talk constantly about discipline, ambition and doing difficult things, but very rarely about the ability to stop. We admire the person who can carry more, work longer, build another company, take another client, train harder and optimize another part of life. Yet almost nobody defines the point at which enough is actually enough.
What is a high performer?
Is it someone who gets more done than everybody else? Someone who answers every message quickly? Someone who works twelve hours a day? Someone who never disappoints anyone? Someone who can absorb enormous amounts of stress without visibly falling apart?
If we do not define the term ourselves, somebody else will define it for us. Usually the definition becomes very simple: more.
Do more. Produce more. Earn more. Become more visible. Be more disciplined. Wake up earlier. Build something on the side. Create more content. Train more. Improve yourself.
Even self-development can become another external agenda.
I believe strongly in discipline, but I do not believe discipline means becoming exceptionally good at obeying external pressure. Discipline should make you better at governing yourself. If your discipline only increases how much other people can load onto you, something has gone wrong.
The ability to say no therefore becomes much more important than it initially appears. A no is not simply a rejection. It is evidence that you can distinguish between somebody else’s agenda and your own judgment.
Your mind needs a gatekeeper
I increasingly think about my own mind as something that requires a gatekeeper. Not everything that arrives deserves entry.
A request can arrive without becoming an obligation. A criticism can arrive without becoming an internal crisis. A future problem can exist without becoming today’s problem. Someone can be disappointed without requiring me to immediately repair their disappointment. An emotion can appear without automatically becoming an action.
That distinction is very close to the beginning of Epictetus’ Enchiridion:
“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion, Chapter 1, George Long translation.
The sentence is almost absurdly simple. The practice behind it is not.
Epictetus continues by placing our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions among the things that concern our own agency, while reputation, property, status and other external conditions do not belong to us in the same way. The entire practical problem begins when we confuse these categories. We start trying to control somebody else’s opinion while allowing somebody else’s opinion to control our behavior.
This is where saying no becomes a Stoic practice.
Someone asks something of me. The request itself is external. Their disappointment if I refuse is external. Their opinion about me afterward is external. What I say, how I say it, which responsibility I accept and what trade-off I make are mine.
That does not tell me automatically whether the correct answer is yes or no. Stoicism is not a machine that generates simple answers. It gives me the space to actually make the decision.
The first reaction is not necessarily your decision
This is where the metacognitive aspect becomes important to me.
Imagine somebody comes to you and says, “I really need this today. Can you please do it?”
You immediately feel something. Perhaps tension. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps the fear that the person will be disappointed. Perhaps you simply dislike conflict. There can be an almost physical urge to say yes before you have actually considered whether you want to do it.
That reaction is real, but it is not necessarily a decision.
There is a substantial difference between saying:
“I want to say yes.”
and:
“I notice an urge to say yes.”
The second statement creates distance. It turns the internal reaction into something I can observe.
That is what metacognition means for me in practice. I am not only thinking; I can sometimes observe the process of thinking while it happens. I can notice that I am constructing a story. I can notice that an emotion is pushing toward a behavior. I can notice that I am about to answer primarily to remove discomfort rather than because I believe the answer is correct.
That creates the possibility of intervention.
Something happens. I experience an automatic reaction. I recognize the reaction. I examine it. Then I choose what to do.
Without that observation layer, stimulus and response can become almost indistinguishable. The person asks, I feel pressure, and I say yes. Five hours later, I am angry about something I technically agreed to myself.
The interesting part is that the other person may no longer be the real problem. My inability to tolerate the discomfort of saying no was the problem.
Control, influence and no-control
In my own practical framework, I extend the traditional Stoic distinction into three categories: Control, Influence, and No-Control.
The dichotomy remains the foundation. Epictetus is making a philosophical distinction about what is genuinely “up to us.” But in everyday life, especially for people who are not spending their days studying Stoic philosophy, there is a useful middle category.
Some things are not directly controllable but can clearly be influenced.
I cannot simply command my emotional system to stop reacting. I cannot say, “From now on I will never feel anxiety when somebody challenges me,” and expect the instruction to work. I cannot directly decide that criticism will no longer hurt, that I will never become angry, or that I will never again feel the urge to please somebody.
Those reactions are not entirely under conscious command.
But I can influence them.
I can repeatedly practice boundaries. I can expose myself to discomfort. I can prepare for predictable situations. I can change my environment. I can observe recurring patterns. I can change what I repeatedly reinforce through my behavior. I can become more familiar with the sensation of saying no and discovering that the world did not end afterward.
That gives me three operational categories.
Control contains my deliberate actions, preparation, words, boundaries, and decisions.
Influence contains patterns, habits, emotional responses, relationships, and environments that can change over time but do not obey immediately.
No-Control contains other people’s reactions, the past, random events, and outcomes that fundamentally depend on factors outside me.
The point of the model is not philosophical perfection. It is better allocation of attention. If something belongs to No-Control, I need to stop emotionally negotiating with it. If something belongs to Influence, I need patience and repeated action. If something belongs to Control, I need to act. This Control / Influence / No-Control model is the practical core of the Stoic operating system I use in mentoring as well.
Morning: decide before the world starts deciding for you
This is why my day starts with reflection.
I do not write ten pages. I do not create an enormous list of everything I should accomplish. The purpose is not productivity. The purpose is orientation.
I write down who I want to be during the coming day. That could be something as simple as:
Today I will be calm and direct. When pressure arrives, I will not immediately let it shape my decisions. I will not say yes simply because saying no feels uncomfortable.
Then I define a very small number of signals. I deliberately call them signals rather than goals because I am not always trying to produce a binary achievement. Sometimes the signal is behavioral. I want to recognize pressure before responding. I want to have the difficult conversation instead of carrying it around for another day. I want to protect a block of time. I want to finish one thing that has been creating mental noise.
Then comes something equally important: what I will not do.
Most planning systems are built almost entirely around addition. We decide what else we will accomplish. Eventually every day contains fifteen priorities, which means it contains no priorities at all. A boundary makes the cost visible.
The Mirror-Book practice I use is intentionally small for exactly this reason. Morning intention, a few signals and explicit protection are supposed to create a baseline that survives messy days, rather than another perfect routine that collapses as soon as life becomes difficult.
Preparation does not remove stress; it changes recognition
Writing something in the morning does not magically change the world.
Clients still call. People still push. Children still need something. Projects still go wrong. Other people still arrive with their own stress and sometimes attempt to transfer that stress directly to you.
Preparation changes something else: recognition.
If I wrote in the morning that I will not accept urgency without understanding the tradeoff, then I am more likely to recognize urgency when it arrives. Instead of simply absorbing it, there is a small chance that my conscious mind says: There it is.
That moment matters.
Stoic practices such as premeditatio malorum serve a similar function. You mentally anticipate difficulty before it arrives, not because you want to spend the morning catastrophizing, but because surprise reduces your ability to respond deliberately. Something familiar is easier to observe than something that seems to appear from nowhere.
Voluntary discomfort works in a related way for me. I deliberately do things that are uncomfortable because I want to train the association that discomfort does not automatically require escape. This can happen physically through training, but it can also be a difficult conversation, a deliberate boundary, a period without distraction, or simply saying no when saying yes would be easier.
The goal is not suffering. The goal is familiarity with discomfort.
If discomfort becomes familiar, it loses some of its authority.
The day is the practice
The morning is preparation. The actual work happens during the day.
Something triggers me. Someone asks too much. A message irritates me. I notice anxiety. I become defensive. A new idea appears and suddenly everything I planned in the morning seems less interesting. I want to escape into something easier.
This is the practice phase.
I try to run a very small internal sequence. What is actually happening? Which part is Control, Influence or No-Control? What reaction am I experiencing? What is that reaction trying to make me do? Does that response match the person I decided to be this morning?
Then I intervene.
Sometimes the intervention is surprisingly small. I wait thirty seconds before answering. I leave a message unanswered for an hour. I say, “Let me think about that.” I ask what would need to be deprioritized if this new task is truly urgent. I write something down instead of carrying it around mentally. I tell somebody no.
None of this looks particularly heroic from the outside.
That is exactly the point.
The goal is to raise the baseline, not to create dramatic peaks of self-control. My wider Stoic framework follows the same loop: name the situation, classify it, choose the smallest action inside Control or Influence, act, and review what actually changed.
Sometimes the correct answer is yes
I want to emphasize this because “boundaries” can become another shallow piece of self-help advice.
The goal is not to say no to everybody.
Sometimes I should help somebody even if it is inconvenient. Sometimes my responsibility as a father, husband, entrepreneur, mentor or business partner requires me to accept discomfort. Sometimes justice requires more from me than I would voluntarily choose for my own convenience.
The question is whether I am choosing that responsibility consciously.
There is a profound difference between
I chose to help you even though it costs me something, and I said yes because I could not tolerate your possible disappointment.
Externally, the two situations can look identical.
Internally, one is agency and the other is avoidance.
This is why I increasingly think the ability to say no gives value back to yes. If you cannot say no, your yes is not entirely voluntary.
Every yes contains a tradeoff
This principle appears everywhere in my work, including leadership.
Every yes costs something.
If a team accepts another priority, something else receives less attention. If I add another client call, the time comes from somewhere. If I start another project, I do not receive additional hours in the day because the project is important.
Sometimes the tradeoff is another piece of work. Sometimes it is sleep. Sometimes it is training. Sometimes it is family. Sometimes it is simply mental emptiness.
That last one is often underestimated.
You can technically fit another obligation into your calendar while having absolutely no space left in your head.
The dangerous commitments are therefore often not the obviously impossible ones. They are the small agreements whose costs remain invisible. You say yes now and pay for the decision later, usually when everything becomes quiet, and your mind finally has time to present the invoice.
That is why I insist on explicit tradeoffs in leadership as well. Every additional commitment taxes the outcomes that already matter. If the tradeoff remains hidden, the system eventually pays it through stress, lower quality, or broken promises.
Evening: close the loops
In the evening, I examine what actually happened.
This part matters because memory is unreliable when it comes to our own behavior. We remember intentions very well. We are less precise about what we actually did.
I ask myself what went well, where I failed to intervene, where I said yes when I wanted to say no, what still bothers me, and what remains unresolved.
This is not supposed to become self-punishment. I am collecting evidence.
If I did something well, I write it down. If I held a boundary I usually would have abandoned, that matters. If I recognized an emotional reaction before acting on it, that matters. If I made a mistake, I want the fact, not a two-page story about what sort of person that makes me.
Then I classify unresolved issues again. Control. Influence. No-Control. What is the smallest next action? What needs to be carried into tomorrow, and what can be left here?
My Mirror-Book evening practice is built around exactly that principle: evidence, factual friction, control classification and the smallest next action. The objective is closure, not endless introspection.
Sometimes there is simply too much in my head. Then I use a very uncomplicated method: I sit down and write for ten minutes. Everything that is occupying mental space goes onto paper. I don't try to solve all of it. When the time is over, I stop.
Then I sit in silence.
No podcast. No video. No music. No phone. Nothing else enters.
The point is not mystical. My mind has been receiving input all day. At some point I need to stop adding material.
You need somewhere inside yourself to retreat
Marcus Aurelius wrote about almost exactly this problem nearly two thousand years ago:
“For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4, §3, George Long translation. (Lexundria)
The context matters. Marcus begins the passage by talking about people seeking retreats in the countryside, at the seaside and in the mountains. He then reminds himself that he can retreat into himself at any moment. He does not mean escaping reality. In the same passage he tells himself to return to life afterward.
That is how I understand reflection.
It is not withdrawal from life. It is maintenance for returning to life without carrying every external demand directly into my internal state.
Marcus even describes tranquility there as “the good ordering of the mind.” (classics.mit.edu)
That phrasing is much closer to what I mean by peace of mind than the modern idea of constantly trying to feel happy.
Peace of mind is not necessarily an emotional high. It is order.
The things that matter have a place. The things that do not belong to me are not occupying the center. Decisions have been made. Open loops have either been closed or deliberately carried forward. I know what I am doing next.
Peace of mind is something you maintain
I do not think happiness is something waiting somewhere outside that I eventually discover when enough circumstances become favorable.
Neither do I think peace of mind is a permanent state that I can achieve once and then keep forever.
It requires maintenance.
If I stop doing the practices that keep me oriented, I notice the drift. More things enter. More external agendas become internal obligations. More unresolved thoughts stack up. I become more reactive. Eventually I can find myself carrying stress that I never consciously agreed to carry.
This is what I mean by baseline.
Your baseline is not how calm, focused or disciplined you can be on your best day. It is where you return when nobody is trying particularly hard. Systems tend to return to familiar states, and human behavior does the same. The practical task is therefore not to generate occasional extraordinary days. It is to gradually change what you return to.
That is also why one good evening of reflection will not solve months of accumulated pressure.
You work it down.
One decision. One boundary. One conversation. One problem. One thing released because it was never yours to control in the first place.
Then you come back tomorrow.
Do not confuse judgment with reality
There is another line from Marcus Aurelius that belongs here:
“If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8, §47, George Long translation.
This can easily be misunderstood.
It does not mean that external events are irrelevant, that suffering is imaginary, or that everything bad in life disappears if you simply “think positively.” That would be nonsense.
It means there is a distinction between the event and the judgment my mind constructs around it.
Someone declining my proposal is one thing. This proves that nobody values my work is another.
Someone asking me to do more is one thing. I have to agree, or they will think badly of me is another.
A project failing is one thing. I am a failure is another.
The event can require action. The second layer requires examination.
That is one of the most valuable things metacognition gives me: the ability to ask whether I am currently dealing with reality or with a model my mind produced about reality.
Sometimes the model is correct.
Sometimes it is wildly wrong.
But unless I can observe it, I cannot tell the difference.
The external agenda
I use the term external agenda for the accumulation of priorities, expectations, and judgments that originate outside you but gradually become indistinguishable from your own priorities.
There is nothing inherently wrong with external agendas. Civilization would collapse if everybody ignored everybody else. A family is partly a shared agenda. A company is a shared agenda. Leadership requires taking responsibility for things that are not merely personal preferences.
The problem begins when the gate disappears.
Every demand becomes important because somebody said it was important. Every urgency becomes your urgency. Every expectation becomes an obligation. Every criticism becomes something you must repair. Every opportunity must be taken because declining it feels like loss.
Eventually you can live a life that looks extremely productive from the outside while having remarkably little authorship over it.
That is the condition I am trying to prevent.
Not by withdrawing from responsibility, but by choosing responsibility deliberately.
Taking care of yourself is not withdrawal from others
There is a reason I connect the ability to say no with the ability to care for yourself.
If I continuously abandon my own boundaries to prevent discomfort in other people, I eventually become less useful to everyone.
I become resentful. Distracted. Tired. Reactive. I start saying yes and then failing to deliver. I am physically present somewhere while mentally solving five other problems.
That is not generosity.
Taking care of yourself should not mean building a comfortable little fortress around your life where nobody can ask anything difficult of you. That is simply another form of avoidance.
The Stoic standard is harder.
Take responsibility. Help people. Fulfill your roles. Practice justice. Accept discomfort when the right action requires it.
But remain the person making the decision.
That is the boundary I care about.
A simple practice for tomorrow
You do not need to adopt my entire system to start experimenting with this.
Tomorrow morning, before the world has had much opportunity to tell you who you should be, take a piece of paper and write three things.
First, write one sentence describing who you intend to be today. Not what you want to achieve. Who you want to be when pressure arrives.
Second, write one or two signals that would tell you that you lived according to that intention.
Third, write one boundary. Something you will not automatically accept.
Then go into the day.
At some point something will push against that intention. That is not failure. That is the practice.
Notice the reaction before you obey it. Ask what is actually in your control. Decide whether the situation deserves a yes, a no, or simply more time before you answer.
Then return to the page in the evening and examine what happened.
Do not judge the entire person you are based on one day. Look for the pattern.
Then do it again tomorrow.
The question is still the same
At the beginning of the podcast, I asked when you last genuinely took care of your own mind.
For me, the answer is very concrete.
This morning.
This evening.
And during the interventions in between.
I do not do this perfectly. That is precisely why it is a practice. I can see the difference on the days when I neglect it.
The objective is not to become invulnerable to stress. It is not to eliminate emotion. It is not to say no to everyone, become perfectly productive, or create some permanently tranquil philosophical state.
The objective is much simpler.
When something enters your life, you should still be there to decide what happens next.
You should be able to experience pressure without automatically serving it. You should be able to feel an emotion without immediately obeying it. You should be able to care about another person without surrendering your judgment to them.
And you should be able to say yes because you mean yes.
Which requires that you can also say no.
That, to me, is one of the most practical forms of taking care of your own mind.
—Adriann
