Chrysippus — the third head of the Stoic school and arguably the philosopher who built Stoicism into a rigorous system — argued that emotions are not feelings that happen to us but judgments we make. Fear isn't a sensation; it's a verdict: 'This is dangerous and I cannot handle it.' Anger is a verdict: 'This wrong deserves my energy right now.' The modern psychologist Albert Ellis reached the same conclusion from a completely different direction in the 1950s, constructing what he called 'Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy' on the premise that distress lives not in events but in the evaluative beliefs we attach to them. What these two thinkers share — separated by twenty-two centuries — is a surprisingly specific claim: the most exhausting thing about a difficult day isn't the workload or the interruptions. It's the continuous stream of small verdicts. 'This shouldn't be taking so long.' 'I should be further along.' 'This task is beneath what I'm capable of.' Each verdict costs something. Ellis called these 'musturbatory' beliefs — the rigid insistence that things must be a certain way — and Chrysippus would have recognized them immediately as assent to false impressions. The practical move isn't to stop evaluating, which is impossible. It's to notice when you've issued a verdict and ask whether the case actually supports it.

What verdict have you issued about a current project or task that, if you examined it honestly, you couldn't fully defend?

Drawing from Stoic Philosophy combined with Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy — Chrysippus (Stoic fragments, c. 280–207 BCE) and Albert Ellis (Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, 1962)