Stoicism can help you reduce stress during nofap

In stoicism, you are often taught not to be attached to anything, to cultivate a sort of indifference. This is definitely similar to Buddhism in some ways.

A big part of stoicism is letting go of the things that you can't control and controlling the things you can. Guess what? Almost everything in our lives is impossible to fully control especially career, relationships, and even health (to some degree).

I have found that A LOT of my stress comes from worrying about things. A big part of this is having these GRANDIOSE expectations of how life is going to work out (a large problem with most self-improvement literature is that it instills an overly-optimistic/naive attitude in people which causes them to have very high expectations i.e "you can do anything" "law of attraction" etc).

Nowadays, I have a new practice that I picked up from stoic literature. I call it "writing things off". I use my journal and I write down a few things that I must detach from. For example:

#1 I need to let go of chasing people's validation
#2 I need to stop telling people grandiose ideas of what I will one day accomplish as this creates these expectations that I then feel ashamed of not meeting
#3 I need to let go of the expectation of being rich one day. Riches are never guaranteed and it's better to strive for survival first and if riches come they come.

The more I let go of all these desires and allow myself to relax a bit, the less stressed I feel. Much of my stress comes from this desire to optimize my life and be this successful guy. Again, I am not saying that these things are bad but in my experience, if you want them too much, it can be a huge source of internal pressure.

If you put too much pressure on yourself to succeed, you'll probably burn out and self-sabotage. "You have to put pressure on yourself to succeed!" someone might say. True in theory but how is that working for you? If every time you put stupid amounts of pressure on yourself, you end up just crashing/doing PMO then your method does not work.

To me what works is putting a fair amount of pressure on yourself but being very careful to not overdo it. You must not be too invested in some "vision board" or "definition/mission statement". You must allow life to unfold and be comfortable with survival/bare minimums if that's all you can muster for the time being. If you relax a bit, success might come later on once you've regained strength and patience.

Hope this helps, peace.

 

I think many old traditions talk about this idea of "dropping desire" or being content with the small things. If you don't allow yourself to be content, your mind can get into a frenzy which can be very destructive. It's a difficult balance.

 

I'm also talking about objectives. Im saying that if you have too many big objectives, it can bite you in the ass later. I've made this mistake of creating these big goals only to burn out and hate myself for not achieving them.