Manage the Stress of COVID-19 with Stoicism

Psychological tools from the ancient Stoics can help you endure the pandemic

You’re about to sit down to your sixth virtual meeting of the day when your toddler strolls into your makeshift home office. As you call to your partner for help, your son spills his juice all over your laptop. You hastily clean up the mess, sighing at the screen’s image of your wildly disordered hair. Soldering on, you force a smile and begin the meeting, only to find that your connection suddenly dropped. As you frantically try to reconnect, your phone sends an ominous alert: the last time you went to the store in a vain attempt to buy toilet paper, you were exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

It is nearly impossible to find someone who hasn’t been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of this writing, more than 1.9 million people around the world have succumbed to the infection so far, and many more have been hospitalized. This magnitude of suffering and death from an infectious agent hasn’t been seen since 1918 when the H1N1 influenza virus ravaged the world.

In order to preserve life, we’ve had to upend our way of life. An effective strategy to curtail transmission of the virus is social distancing, but this tactic has disrupted work, school, and gatherings with family and friends. The threat of serious illness, the loss of job security, and the challenging adjustments to our normal routine have generated extraordinarily high levels of stress. To rub salt in the wound, COVID-19…