Hi! Six months ago, my family and I were on the edge of death, hospitalized with severe consequences of covid. I'd like to share what helped me to overcome the depression, physical and emotional pain, and to deal with the anxiety of losing the beloved ones and my own life.

Everything started 4 years ago when two of my friends and I were tired of playing online games like World of Warcraft. At some point, we started reading books on philosophy and psychology, just for fun and natural curiosity. We discussed Plato, Seneca, Kant, and occasionally some modern thinkers like Taleb or Peterson. As our interest grew, we invited a few more friends and started a philosophy club, where we are still meeting every week for the discussions.

From that time, we had more than 260 meetings, and every time we would write a short summary with the most practical mental exercises and frameworks found in the books.

I personally thought that it's so abstract, and I actually rarely used those exercises in my everyday life.

But then suddenly I was diagnosed with covid. And all the theoretical hardships described in Stoic preachings became real.

After a week the things went so bad that my father, mother, and grandmother were all hospitalized with severe consequences. I remember the moment when my father came from FMRI. We were told that 90% of his lungs to be damaged. He had a forced smile on his face trying to hide despair and terror from my mother and me. He was so depressed with the situation, and so was I.

Doctors had to put him in intensive care to connect him to an artificial lungs ventilation machine. After he was released from intensive care, he was constantly out of breath, experiencing severe coughing pain.

He was too weak to move. I felt hopeless and desperate; I searched for guidance to alleviate his suffering. Then I suddenly recalled that I have saved exercises. So I started to introduce him to specific practices and thought experiments on coping with pain that we gathered in our philosophy club.

When my father first started his rehabilitation, he couldn't bear to finish the daily walk prescribed by the doctors. He experienced severe pain from the intensified breathing and was out of breath all the time.

The prescriptions of doctors were so harsh and painful, that he lost faith that he could recover. He got what is called learned helplessness - when a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly.  And he came to believe that he was unable to control or change the situation, so he thought he should not even try at all.

But then, we practiced Stoic exercises for 10-15 minutes together every morning before breakfast.

After just a few weeks of following this practice, my father started regaining faith in himself. He managed to finish more and more walks, as he learned to cope with his pain and discomfort better.

After this (quite dramatic) first-hand experience of the impact of practical philosophy, I decided to share the actual exercise I used with the community on Reddit.

I understand that most of you might not have time for 1000+ pages of philosophical tractates, as they are both enormous in size and hard to read.

So below is a version of the exercise I used in the time of my hardships. I put it in a straightforward and concise form of guidance as if you were talking with the stoic thinker Seneca.

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&gt;!Exercise!&lt;

&gt;*Hi, my name is Seneca. I am a statesman and Stoic. I lived during the reign of Emperor Nero, a pretty tough time, to be honest.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*And as you know, tough times bring a lot of pain, both physical and emotional. Given that we all experience tough times and pain throughout our lifetime, we must learn how to deal with them in the right way.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*So our goal for this lesson is to explore how to cope with physical pain in a stoic way.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*When you feel physical pain, the mind's role in forming your reaction is harder to see. Pain seems like an immovable fact that owes nothing and has no relation to our thinking.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*Yes, pain is pain: a sensation that exists no matter what we think about it.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*But even then, we, Stoics, insist that our judgments about those feelings produce our experience of them.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*So how much our pain bothers us, how much attention we pay to it, and what it means to us is determined by our judgments.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*Because of the natural connection between the mind and the body, those judgments infiltrate the self-talk we engage while being in pain.*  
&gt;  
&gt;***What kind of pain bothers you now or bothered you recently?***  
&gt;  
&gt;***How do you talk to yourself while in pain? In what words you describe your pain to yourself and other people with whom you share it?***  
&gt;  
&gt;*When we feel such kind of pain, we usually say to ourselves: "My day is ruined. Why always me? Why do I have this headache again."*  
&gt;  
&gt;*When you describe pain in such emotionally triggering and negative language, you make a big deal out of it - amplifying your distress.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*Instead, you should try to remember that pain is neither unendurable nor everlasting. You can keep its limits in mind and not escalate the pain through your own imagination and self-talk.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*There is a technique that Stoics call 'Phantasia kataleptike' or viewing bodily sensations objectively.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*That means that we try to describe external events and bodily sensations as natural processes.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*Instead of saying, "My head is going to explode. My day is ruined." it's better to say, "There's a feeling of pressure around my forehead."*  
&gt;  
&gt;*It's as if we were describing another person's problems: with greater objectivity and detachment, like a doctor documenting illness symptoms in a patient.*  
&gt;  
&gt;***Now, describe your pain as if it is perceived by another person. What is this person (you) experiencing? By doing this you transform negative self-talk into the objective description.***  
&gt;  
&gt;*By depersonalizing yourself talking about pain, it is possible to change your emotional reaction towards the pain and reduce the intensity of the pain itself.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*This prevents us from focusing too much on the worst-case scenario, catastrophizing our pain to the point where we feel overwhelmed and entirely consumed by it.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*In addition to this form of cognitive distancing, it is also helpful to think of pain as confined to a particular body part rather than allowing it to spread.*  
&gt;  
&gt;*For example, if you have aching teeth, try to imagine a line around your mind, marking its boundaries, with all bodily sensations, including your teeth pain, on the other side.*  
&gt;  
&gt;***Next time you experience pain, try to draw a line around the mind, marking its boundaries, with bodily sensations on the other side, as if viewed from a distance.***  
&gt;  
&gt;*Don't make your ills worse for yourself and burden yourself with complaints. Pain is slight if opinion adds nothing to it. If, on the contrary, you start to encourage yourself and say, "It's nothing, or certainly very little; let's hold out, it will soon leave off" – then in thinking it slight, you will make it so.*

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Glad you read till this point:) Hope you still have the energy for some closing remarks.

I encourage you to share this exercise with the people you care about and who experience any kind of pain right now. All of us have friends or family members who need that.

If it helps them to endure the pain and make it even 10% lighter, that's already a huge help.

P.S. If you liked this exercise, I am planning to write more exercises like that. Let me know in the comments or DM so I can share with you the link to my newsletter.