@Ryan Holiday on why anxiety is his most expensive habit.

I do a pretty good job managing my finances. I make pretty good money, but I have one really expensive habit that I'm trying to quit. And it's an expensive habit that's cost me so much. That's caused me a lot of misery, a lot of frustration. It's caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. I don't have some secret gambling addiction. I don't have some terrible vice. Actually I do, it is a vice. What I'm talking about is anxiety. And I would say nothing in my life has cost me more than anxiety. And I've gotten so little pleasure out of it. That's the terrible thing. It's no fun. There's no reward except a tiny bit of relief you get when the bad thing you were so worried about doesn't happen. And we don't tend to think of anxiety as an expensive habit, but it is. How many moments were you taken out of? How many experiences did you lose? How much strain was placed on relationships or connections because you were worried, you were stressed, you were scared, you were spiraling, you were thinking about not this moment that you're in, but this hypothetical moment of something that lay ahead. That's really what anxiety is. Senecas says we suffer more in imagination than in reality. The emphasis there has to be on the suffering that anxiety causes us. I have this little reminder that I carry with me. So philosophy is this quote from Epictetus about whether something is in our control or not in our control. That's what I try to ask myself when I'm getting worked up about something. Is this up to me? Is what I'm feeling about this thing, this, is it going to happen? Are we going to make the connection? Am I going to get to the airport in time? Is it going to be delivered? Is it going to go my way here? What I'm feeling, the stress that I'm feeling in that moment isn't changing the outcome in any way, right? That's why Epictetus was saying, we have to ask ourselves, is this up to me or is it not up to me? Seneca says that he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. That's the reminder on the back. On the front, it's the Ouroboros is this image of the snake swallowing its own tail. And that's what we are doing. We are punishing ourselves. We are feasting on our own thoughts, our own worries, and it comes at an immense cost. And so it's something I'm trying to do better at. I'm not perfect at, but I hope to get better at it every day. And I hope you do too. By the way, you can check this out at dailystoic.com slash anxiety.