A Stoic Life: Improve Mental Health With the Concept of Amor Fati
In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily life, often neglecting our mental health. However, it should not be overlooked, as it is a vital aspect of our overall well-being. Mental health is just as important as physical health. In fact, poor mental health has been shown to have a substantial impact on future physical health. The reverse is also true, and because of this relationship, a continuing negative effect pattern can begin. As a nurse, I have seen poor mental health contribute to poor physical health, which in turn leads to decreased mental health, which then…
Hopefully, you see where this is going.
This is important! And the first step towards taking care of your mental health is to recognize the importance of it. It’s not uncommon for people to dismiss their mental health, often labeling it as a weakness. This is especially true for men in today’s society. It’s weakness to ask for help, especially for emotional help. It’s weakness to not be able to do it all on your own. Failing to bottle up your emotions and dare to show them? Weakness. To paraphrase Brene Brown, it’s as though your friends, family, and society would rather have you die atop that white horse than see you fall off of it. However, it takes immense strength to prioritize your mental health, and it’s crucial to acknowledge this.
So, How Does Good Mental Health Work (Without Drugs)?
If you look up how to improve mental health naturally and without pharmaceutical intervention, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results. You’ll get thousands of websites proclaiming to have the answer to this. And while they’re not all wrong, or even mostly wrong, the answers will vary. A lot of these will seem obvious. Social relationships, relaxation, stress reduction, self care…the list goes on. More on most of these later, but I want to talk about what is often seen as the biggest factor in negative mental health – and almost certainly the most common today.
The Stress Monster
Stress is ever-present in today’s society. It’s listed and acknowledged as killing us – it’s a major contributor to heart attacks and strokes, two of the leading causes of death in people over 40. And it is a huge factor in poor and declining mental health. From what I’ve learned over the years, the amount of stress in our lives is largely determined by how we respond to things that have the potential to rattle, upset, or otherwise invoke anger/fear in us. And it is here that we come to Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism.
Amor Fati and The Stoic’s View
Marcus Aurelius is seen by many as the founder of stoicism. Stoicism, for those unfamiliar, is an approach to life that embraces practicality, acceptance, and living with justice and integrity. ‘Amor Fati’ is a concept frequently discussed in Stoic writing. Translated, it loosely means “Accept Fate” or “Accept Life”. The Stoic approach to this idea is that all things, good and bad, that occur in our lives should be not only accepted, but celebrated and welcomed. In Meditations, Marcus wrote:
“Nothing which occurs at the right time comes too soon or too late for me. All that your seasons produce, O nature, is fruit for me.”
These are the words of a man who has not only accepted every event in his life previously and to come, but loves these events with equal appreciation. He welcomes not only the prosperous events for their benefits, but embraces his adversities as well for the benefits he is able to find in them. He relishes in the negative, for he always finds a way to gain from it.
Amor Fati in Daily Life
What does this mean for us? How are the words of a long-dead emperor beneficial to modern life? How does this affect mental health? Remember what I said above about how we respond to things? Go read that again. Now, in daily life, Amor Fati could be seen as:
I’m caught in a traffic jam – this gives me an opportunity to grow in patience. I’ve suddenly lost my job – this will test and improve my ability to be adaptable to the unpredictable. My partner and I are fighting – I have an opportunity here to practice communication and understanding. Even in an extreme situation: my loved one has died – I am reminded by this the importance of not taking my life for granted.
In essence, it is a way of finding peace and relaxation through acceptance of circumstances, re-framing and/or trying to find lessons in even the most negative of situations, and remaining positive regardless. Like anything, this is something that requires practice, and a lot of it. Our thought patterns are deeply ingrained personality traits, and our brains are resistant to changing behaviors that have survived in us for any significant amount of time. However, cultivating this habit will allow us to reduce the effect of stressors, and examine the root causes of our unhappiness. And happiness goes hand in hand with good mental health.
