Why am I so hard on myself?

You send an email to your boss. The second it’s gone, you see it: you’ve signed off “Best regrads.” Not “regards.” Regrads. You will think about this until approximately the end of time.

You say the word “epitome” out loud in a meeting, for the first time in your life, and you pronounce it “epi-tome.” Nobody says anything. You’re sure everybody noticed.

Someone tells you their name. Four seconds later, it’s gone. You now have to get through an entire dinner without ever saying it.

You send a message to the group chat. Nobody replies for twenty minutes. By minute fifteen, you’ve decided they all find you annoying and have probably started a second group chat without you.

You wake up at 9:30 on a Saturday. Your first thought isn’t “lovely, a lie-in.” It’s “great, the day’s wasted.”

Your basil plant dies. “I can’t even keep a basil alive. How am I supposed to run my life?”

You wear your gym clothes all day, as a kind of promise. You do not go to the gym. You feel guilty in Lycra until bedtime.

And all the while, in the background, there’s the list: I should drink more water. I should reply to that message from three weeks ago. I should call my grandmother. I should have my life sorted by thirty. I should stop saying “I should.”

And when you mess up, out comes the classic, the one you’d never say to a friend: “Why are you like this?” Yes, the question from Level 1, chapter 1. Except now it’s not curious. Now it’s a telling-off.

So where does that voice come from? Why are we so much harder on ourselves than we’d ever be on anyone else?

A German psychoanalyst called it a tyranny. An American psychologist gave it the rudest name in this whole course. And a philosopher who was born enslaved, two thousand years ago, had already written the instructions for how to get it to calm down.

Crime number one. In everyday English, being “stoic” means not showing your feelings. Keeping a straight face. Not crying at funerals. The British “stiff upper lip.” Lately, it’s also the brand of a certain kind of online video: a marble statue of a Roman emperor, dramatic music, and a voice telling you to stop feeling things, wake up at 4am, take an ice bath and “grind.”

The ancient Stoics would be very confused.

They weren’t against feelings. They were against a specific kind of feeling: the destructive ones that come from wrong judgements. Panic because you’ve convinced yourself something is a catastrophe. Rage because you think the world owes you something it doesn’t. Misery because you’re demanding that things be different from how they are. Those, they said, are worth working on. But they also talked about good feelings: joy, care, goodwill towards others. The goal wasn’t to be a statue. It was to be free.

There’s even a lovely ancient story about it. A Roman writer was on a ship during a terrible storm, along with a famous Stoic philosopher. When the waves got huge, he noticed the philosopher had gone completely pale, just like everyone else. After the storm, he asked him, a bit cheekily: aren’t you Stoics supposed to be fearless? And the philosopher explained, quoting our guest in this chapter: of course you’ll go pale when the ship nearly sinks. That’s your body reacting. The Stoic part is what you do with that first shock afterwards.

So, no ice baths required.

Crime number two. You’ve probably seen this, on mugs, on fridge magnets, on Instagram: the prayer asking for the serenity to accept the things you can’t change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s very often credited to Marcus Aurelius, or to Epictetus, or sometimes to St Francis. It sounds exactly like ancient Stoic wisdom.

It was written in the twentieth century by an American theologian called Reinhold Niebuhr. It became famous after support groups for people recovering from addiction started using it in the 1940s. A wise and helpful prayer. Just not two thousand years old.

But here’s why everyone thinks it’s Stoic: because the idea at its heart really is. It’s almost exactly the first lesson of the man we’re about to meet. He’d just have said it without God, and with a lot more jokes about being thrown into prison.

But first, back to the voice in your head saying “Best regrads, you absolute idiot.” Where does that voice come from?

You met Karen Horney in the last chapter, telling Freud he’d got women wrong. Towards the end of her life, she wrote a book about something else entirely: the voice in your head that never lets you rest.

Horney said that many of us, especially if we grew up feeling we had to earn love, build an idealised self: a glorious, impossible version of who we’re supposed to be. This idealised you is always calm, always generous, never tired, never jealous, brilliant at work, a perfect friend, a perfect partner, never makes mistakes, never needs help, and probably has very hydrated skin.

And then there’s the real self: the actual you. Tired on Mondays. Occasionally jealous. Signs emails “Best regrads.”

The problem isn’t that you have an ideal. The problem is that you start to treat it as the person you’re supposed to be already, and you punish the real you for not being it. And that punishment comes in the form of a constant list of demands. Horney called it, brilliantly, “the tyranny of the should.” I should be more patient. I should never feel hurt. I should be able to handle anything. I should have it all figured out.

The gap between who you are and who you think you should be, she said, turns into something very painful: self-contempt. That’s the voice saying “idiot” when you trip on the pavement.

Now meet her blunt American friend, who would have said the same thing with a lot more swearing.

Albert Ellis was born in 1913 and grew up in New York. As a young man, he was painfully shy, especially with women. So, at nineteen, he gave himself a challenge. Every day for a month, he went to a park in the Bronx, sat down on a bench next to a woman, and made himself start a conversation. He talked to around a hundred women. Most of them got up and left. One agreed to go on a date with him. She didn’t show up.

And he considered it a total success. Not because he got a date, but because he discovered that being rejected a hundred times didn’t actually kill him. It was unpleasant. It wasn’t a catastrophe. That lesson became the foundation of his whole career.

Ellis trained as a psychoanalyst, but he got impatient. He felt that sitting for years exploring childhood was too slow, when people were suffering now. So in the 1950s he created a new kind of therapy, which became known as Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, and he became one of the founders of the whole family of cognitive therapies that are everywhere today.

His big idea is easy to remember. It’s called ABC.

A is the Activating event: something happens. You sign the email “Best regrads.”

C is the Consequence: how you feel and what you do. Shame, panic, three hours of replaying it.

Most people think A causes C. The typo made me feel terrible. But Ellis said no, there’s something in the middle.

B is your Belief about what happened. And it’s B that does the damage. Not “I made a typo,” but “I must never make mistakes, and if I do, I’m an idiot and everyone will think I’m incompetent.”

Ellis noticed that our most destructive beliefs almost always have the word must in them. I must do well. People must like me. Life must be easy and fair. And he gave this habit a name that he loved saying in public, in lecture halls full of serious psychologists: musturbation.

He had other gems too. “Awfulising”: turning an inconvenience into a disaster. And “I-can’t-stand-it-itis”: the belief that something mildly uncomfortable is completely unbearable. You can stand it. You’ve stood worse. You survived a hundred women leaving a park bench.

His solution? Argue with your musts. Not “I must never make mistakes,” but “I’d prefer not to make mistakes, I sometimes will, and that’s annoying, not awful.” It sounds tiny. It changes everything.

And where did a twentieth-century New York therapist get this idea from? He told everyone, openly: from an ancient philosopher who was born enslaved.

Meet Epictetus. Born around the year 50, in what is now Turkey. Born enslaved. His name literally means “acquired,” like a purchase. He ended up in Rome, owned by a powerful man who worked as a secretary to the Emperor Nero. Not the dream job, as employers go.

He walked with a limp all his life. There’s an ancient story, possibly legend, about how it happened. His master was twisting his leg, and Epictetus said calmly, “If you keep doing that, you’ll break it.” The master kept going. The leg broke. And Epictetus said, just as calmly: “Didn’t I tell you it would break?”

That’s either the most impressive or the most annoying thing anyone has ever said. Possibly both.

While he was still enslaved, he was allowed to study with a famous Stoic teacher. Later, he was freed, and became a philosopher himself. Then an emperor who didn’t like philosophers threw all of them out of Rome, so Epictetus moved to a town in Greece and opened his own school, which became one of the most famous in the ancient world.

He owned almost nothing. One of his best stories is about a lamp. Someone stole his iron lamp, and instead of getting angry, he decided the thief had simply paid a price: for a lamp, the thief had given up his honesty. And Epictetus bought a cheap clay lamp to replace it. The joke is on the universe, though: after he died, a fan reportedly bought that clay lamp for a fortune.

And like Socrates in Level 1, he never wrote anything down. His student Arrian took notes in class and turned them into two books: the long Discourses, which read like lively, sarcastic lectures, and a short summary, the Handbook. People have been carrying the Handbook around ever since, from Roman emperors to modern soldiers.

And the Handbook opens with the idea that the Serenity Prayer borrowed: some things are up to us, and some things are not.

Up to you: your judgements, your choices, your effort, how you respond. Not up to you: your body, your reputation, other people’s opinions, what happens in the world, whether the group chat replies in twenty minutes.

His advice is simple and incredibly hard: put all your energy into the first list, and stop torturing yourself about the second.

Then comes the line that Albert Ellis built a whole therapy on. In an old public domain translation: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.”

In other words: it’s not the typo. It’s what you tell yourself the typo means.

And here’s a passage that could have been written for this chapter. Epictetus said there are three stages of growing up as a person. When something goes wrong, an uneducated person blames others. Someone who’s started learning blames themselves. And someone who’s really learned blames neither.

Think about that. Blaming yourself isn’t the final, mature stage. It’s the middle. It’s progress from blaming everyone else, sure. But the next step isn’t a harsher inner critic. It’s to stop the blame game altogether, look at what happened, ask “what’s up to me here?”, and do that.

He also had a brilliantly practical trick for not falling apart over small losses. If you love a cup, he said, remind yourself: I love a cup. So when it breaks, you won’t be devastated. It was a cup. Cups break.

Your basil plant? It’s a plant. Plants die. It doesn’t mean you can’t run your life.

Your typo? It’s a typo. Typos happen. “Best regrads” will not be read out at your funeral.

What’s up to you is the next email.

Tonight: a German psychoanalyst who walked out of New York singing, an American psychologist who once got stood up by the only woman out of a hundred who said yes, and a Greek philosopher with a broken leg and a clay lamp.

So who wins?

No winner, because they’re all fighting the same tyrant, just with different weapons.

So next time you trip on the pavement and hear “idiot,” try three questions, one from each of them.

Epictetus’s question: was this actually up to me?

Ellis’s question: where’s the “must” hiding in what I just told myself? Swap it for “I’d prefer.”

Horney’s question: whose standard am I failing to meet? Mine, or an imaginary perfect version of me?

And then, the simplest test of all, straight from the beginning of this chapter: talk to yourself the way you’d talk to your friend who made the same mistake. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing, honestly, nobody noticed.”

You’d say it to her in a heartbeat. You’re allowed to say it to you.

The misunderstandings: In everyday English, “stoic” means suppressing or not showing emotion. Ancient Stoicism did not aim to eliminate feelings; it aimed at freedom from destructive passions arising from mistaken judgements, while valuing “good feelings” (eupatheiai) such as joy and goodwill, and accepting involuntary first reactions such as turning pale in danger. The Serenity Prayer, often attributed to Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus or St Francis, was written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the twentieth century and popularised by Alcoholics Anonymous from the 1940s, though its central idea resembles Epictetus’s distinction between what is and is not within our control.

Karen Horney on the self (1885–1952): In Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), Horney described how people, often in response to early insecurity, construct an idealised self, a glorified image of who they should be, which they then treat as a standard the real self must meet. The resulting inner demands form a “tyranny of the should,” and the gap between real and idealised self produces self-contempt. Growth involves relinquishing the idealised image and accepting and developing the real self.

Albert Ellis (1913–2007): American psychologist, originally trained as a psychoanalyst, who developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) from the mid-1950s, one of the first cognitive-behavioural therapies. His ABC model holds that an Activating event does not directly cause emotional Consequences; the link is the person’s Beliefs about the event. He identified rigid, absolutist demands (“I must,” “they must,” “the world must”) as the root of much distress, calling this “musturbation,” along with “awfulising” and “I-can’t-stand-it-itis.” Therapy involves disputing these beliefs and replacing demands with preferences, often combined with behavioural practice such as shame-attacking exercises. Ellis explicitly credited Epictetus as a major influence.

Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE): Stoic philosopher, born enslaved in Hierapolis (modern Turkey), later freed. He taught in Rome and then in Nicopolis, Greece. He wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian recorded his teaching in the Discourses and the Enchiridion (Handbook). Key ideas:

• The dichotomy of control: some things are “up to us” (our judgements, intentions, desires and actions) and some are not (body, property, reputation, external events). Peace comes from focusing on the first and accepting the second (Enchiridion 1).
• Judgements, not events, disturb us: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things” (Enchiridion 5).
• On blame: the uneducated blame others; those beginning to learn blame themselves; the educated blame neither (Enchiridion 5).
• Practice: regular self-examination, such as an evening review, to train judgement over time.

Where they meet: All three see much human suffering as coming not from events themselves but from the demands and judgements we place on ourselves and the world, and all three see change as possible through examining those judgements.

Where they differ: Horney, as a psychoanalyst, traces harsh inner demands to early experience and emphasises gradual self-understanding. Ellis focuses on present beliefs and teaches people to dispute them actively and quickly. Epictetus offers a whole philosophy of life, centred on the distinction between what is and isn’t within our control, and on lifelong practice.

A note: Constant, harsh self-criticism can sometimes be part of depression or anxiety. If your inner voice feels relentless or is affecting your daily life, it’s worth talking to a doctor or mental health professional. Cognitive therapies descended from Ellis’s work are widely available and well researched.

Further reading:

• Epictetus’s Handbook (Enchiridion). Very short; you can read it in an afternoon. Older translations are public domain.
• Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, an emperor’s private notebook of reminders to himself.
• Albert Ellis’s A Guide to Rational Living (with Robert Harper), a classic, practical introduction to his approach.
• Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), especially the chapter “The Tyranny of the Should.”