Starting a Stoic Practice in 2026

I’m doubling down on Stoicism. A few months ago, I started reading Epictetus and began to feel the scales of depression peeling off my skin. Like the cleansing potential of a productive cough, little by little, I was breathing easier. Not only was I becoming more productive, I was also feeling good about it.

But just reading from the Stoics isn’t enough. What really drove it home for me was my journaling habit. For over seven hundred days, I’ve been journaling every single day. I noticed a huge shift in my writing when I started journaling about what I was reading from the Stoics. I felt as if Epictetus himself was sitting right beside me, responding to what I had to say.

I want to continue down this path and develop a stronger Stoic practice in 2026.

There is something appealing about starting my mornings with a daily dose of Stoic wisdom. So, I picked up The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. The book aims to be “a tool in the pursuit of self-mastery, perseverance, and wisdom: something one uses to live a great life, rather than some esoteric field of academic inquiry.” To me, that is what philosophy is all about. It’s meant to help us live our lives—to help us deal with the slings and arrows of our own minds.

I don’t have many rules about this new Stoic practice. The main thing is to read from The Daily Stoic and journal about what I’ve read every day. My intention is to keep this separate from normal journaling, which is a bit more personal. I’m flirting with the idea of writing a weekly recap of takeaways and posting them here on my blog—or maybe I’ll save those for my newsletter.

But beyond The Daily Stoic, I plan to read more from Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. There are others, of course, but I figure those three are a good place to start.

There is no way for me to know how this will go. But that’s not the point. I’m most interested in using this philosophy as a tool for mastering my mind. I want to stop wasting so much time and energy on things I can’t control, and instead, direct my effort to the choices that are my own. Because every minute I spend worrying about things I can’t change is time I’m not working on things I can.