Here’s a mental exercise. Spend a few minutes, before going to sleep tonight, imagining — in concrete specific detail — one of the significant difficulties you might face in the coming year. Your parents fall ill. You don’t get into the university you want. A close friend drifts away. A job interview goes badly. Something you’ve been counting on doesn’t happen. Pick whichever one sits most uncomfortably in your mind, and spend a few minutes letting yourself fully imagine it: what it would feel like, what you would do, who you would tell, how you’d start to absorb it.
This sounds like exactly the kind of exercise a therapist or wellness expert would tell you not to do. Don’t dwell on the negative. Don’t imagine worst-case scenarios. Focus on the positive. The advice is ubiquitous, and it’s often well-meant.
And it happens to be, in many cases, the opposite of what the research supports. The deliberate contemplation of future difficulties — done in a specific way, with a specific orientation — turns out to be one of the more useful mental practices that has ever been developed. It was developed, in its clearest form, about two thousand years ago. And it has since been rediscovered by modern cognitive-behavioural therapy as something that empirically works.
The Stoics, briefly
The practice comes from Stoicism, a school of Greek and Roman philosophy that flourished from roughly the third century BCE through the second century CE. Its most-read surviving practitioners are Seneca (a Roman statesman and playwright), Epictetus (a former slave who taught in Rome after his freedom), and Marcus Aurelius (a Roman emperor whose private notebook, the Meditations, survived to become one of the most-read philosophy books ever written).
Stoicism was, among other things, intensely practical. It wasn’t a body of abstract doctrines to be contemplated; it was a set of practices for living. The Stoics believed that most human suffering came not from external events but from our responses to them — and that those responses could be trained, over years, into something more stable and less driven by fear, anger, desire and grief.
One of their central practices was called premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of evils. The practice is essentially what was described in the opening of this article. Spend deliberate time imagining the difficulties that could come. Picture them concretely. Rehearse, in your mind, how you’d respond. Don’t catastrophise; don’t dwell passively; but also don’t pretend the bad things can’t happen.
The rationale was psychological. If you encounter a difficulty you’ve imagined, you’ve already done some of the emotional work of absorbing it. The shock is smaller. The panic response is reduced. You’ve already, in some sense, been here before. If you encounter difficulties you haven’t imagined — inevitable, given the variety of life — you’re no worse off than you would have been. The premeditated ones are easier; the unpremeditated ones are the same as they would have been either way.
The practice is not pessimism. It’s rehearsal. And it rests on a specific psychological claim — that the mind can be partly prepared for difficulty by deliberate imaginative engagement with it — that has turned out to be more correct than the Stoics themselves had evidence for.
The CBT connection
Modern cognitive behavioural therapy, developed from the 1950s onward, owes more to Stoicism than most people realise. Albert Ellis, one of CBT’s two founders (alongside Aaron Beck), explicitly credited the Stoics as a central influence. Ellis’s foundational insight was drawn almost directly from Epictetus: it is not events that disturb us, but our judgements about events. Much of CBT is, in effect, a technique for identifying and modifying those judgements.
The connection goes deeper than inspiration. Several core CBT techniques are recognisably Stoic exercises, updated and operationalised for therapeutic use.
Cognitive restructuring — the practice of identifying automatic negative thoughts, examining them for accuracy, and replacing them with more proportionate interpretations — is a version of what Epictetus called correcting one’s assents.
Exposure therapy — the deliberate encounter with feared situations, in graduated doses, until the fear decreases — is a version of premeditatio malorum’s active side. You don’t just imagine the feared thing; you face it, deliberately, in controlled circumstances, until your nervous system updates its prediction about how dangerous it actually is.
Decatastrophising — the technique of asking what’s the worst that could realistically happen, and how would I actually cope? — is almost word-for-word what the Stoics recommended. The exercise reduces catastrophic anxiety not by dismissing the feared outcome, but by imagining it concretely and discovering that, even in the worst case, you have resources.
CBT is, by most measures, the best-supported psychological therapy for anxiety disorders and depression, with a substantial body of evidence accumulated over sixty years. That much of its core architecture traces back to Stoic practice is not a coincidence. The Stoics, through careful introspection and long practical experience, arrived at genuine insights about how the mind works. Modern science has confirmed much of what they figured out.
The “defensive pessimism” research
A third strand worth knowing about comes from the American psychologist Julie Norem, who has spent decades studying a specific personality pattern she calls defensive pessimism.
Norem’s research started from a puzzle. Standard advice in educational and performance psychology says you should cultivate positive expectations — visualise success, believe in yourself, expect the best. The advice has a good rationale: positive expectations are associated with better performance in many studies.
But Norem noticed that some people — successful people, even — seemed to operate in precisely the opposite way. Before important performances, they imagined everything that could go wrong. They rehearsed worst cases. They planned for disasters. When she studied these people, she found something striking. Trying to force them into a positive-expectations mindset actively hurt their performance. They did better with the pessimistic preparation than with forced optimism.
Norem’s interpretation: for some people — particularly those with high baseline anxiety — the deliberate rehearsal of bad outcomes is how they convert anxiety into useful preparation. Telling them to “think positive” leaves the anxiety in place but removes the mechanism by which it was being productively channelled. The exercise doesn’t create the anxiety; it processes it.
This matches what the Stoics described. Not everyone needs premeditatio malorum. Some people are naturally calm and don’t benefit from imagined difficulty. But for people inclined to worry, the practice converts the worry from a helpless state into something active — a rehearsal that produces actual readiness rather than just unpleasant feelings.
Norem’s research suggests that the “universal” advice to cultivate positive expectations is actually universal advice for some people, and specifically wrong for others. The practice that fits depends on the temperament.
The counter-thread worth hearing
Before endorsing premeditatio malorum wholesale, an important caveat from a different psychological tradition.
The American psychologist Steven Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in the 1980s, has argued that for some anxiety-prone people, the contemplation of worst-case scenarios doesn’t defuse fear — it amplifies it. The person imagines the bad outcome, their nervous system responds as if it’s happening, and the rehearsal reinforces the anxiety rather than reducing it.
Hayes’s approach, drawn partly from Buddhist contemplative traditions and partly from behavioural research, emphasises acceptance of present-moment anxiety rather than strategies to manage it. The practice isn’t to imagine the feared thing concretely; it’s to notice the fear as a sensation, accept it without trying to change it, and continue doing what matters regardless. The mechanism is different from Stoicism, and in some populations it has produced strong clinical results.
ACT and CBT are, in some sense, competing schools within the broader cognitive-behavioural tradition. Both have evidence. They probably work for somewhat different profiles of people, and for somewhat different conditions. What the Hayes critique suggests is that premeditatio malorum isn’t a universal tool. It works for some people, in some situations, for some kinds of difficulty. It can backfire for others.
A rough heuristic: if imagining a feared situation makes you more able to move toward it afterward, the practice is probably helping. If the imagining leaves you more paralysed, more avoidant, more consumed by the fear, it probably isn’t. Pay attention to the effect on your actual behaviour, not just to whether the exercise feels productive in the moment.
When this practice actually helps
Drawing together what the research suggests, premeditatio malorum is probably useful in these specific conditions:
Before a significant challenge you’re preparing for. The job interview, the presentation, the difficult conversation, the exam. Imagining how it could go wrong, concretely, lets you prepare for the likely problems and reduces the shock if they occur. This is the practice’s clearest modern application.
For decisions you’re about to make that might not work out. The move to a new city. The career change. The significant financial decision. Imagining concretely how the decision might go wrong, and what you’d do if it did, is usually more useful than refusing to think about the possibility. This is also what a pre-mortem does, in a more formal way.
For background anxieties that are running in the background without being addressed. The vague worry you’ve been carrying for weeks — about a relationship, about money, about a health question — often gets worse precisely because it hasn’t been faced. A deliberate session of imagining the actual feared outcome, in concrete detail, often reduces the anxiety considerably. The specific is less frightening than the vague.
For the inevitable losses we all eventually face. Seneca, in one of his letters, wrote about the value of contemplating the eventual death of a loved one — not to produce premature grief, but so that the final bereavement is absorbed into a life already oriented toward impermanence. This is harder for modern readers to accept, but it’s arguably one of the deepest applications of the practice. Most grief is worse for its suddenness; some emotional work, done in advance, reduces the shock without reducing the love.
What not to do with it
For completeness, when the practice fails or is misused:
If you’re already anxiety-prone and imagining worst cases spirals into rumination rather than rehearsal, stop. The Hayes tradition is probably better for you than the Stoic one.
If you’re using the practice to avoid action rather than to prepare for it — if you’re imagining failure as a reason not to try — the practice has been inverted. Stoicism’s point was preparation for action, not justification for inaction.
If the practice is producing despair rather than readiness, it’s not working. Real Stoic practice ends with a return to the present, with renewed ability to do what’s possible today. If you’re stuck in the contemplation of disaster, you’ve lost the thread.
The question that remains
Two thousand years after it was first articulated, the Stoic practice of imagining future difficulties has turned out to be, for many people, a genuinely useful psychological tool. It isn’t a cure. It isn’t for everyone. But for those it fits, it converts anxiety into preparation, reduces the shock of inevitable losses, and produces a kind of stability that mere positive thinking never quite delivers.
The Stoics built this through observation and long practice. Modern science has, in effect, verified much of what they found. The continuity is rare enough to be worth noting: an ancient philosophy has survived empirical scrutiny in a way most ancient philosophies haven’t, partly because it was always, at its core, empirical. The Stoics noticed what actually happens when humans prepare for difficulty versus when they don’t. They were right often enough that the practice is still worth doing.
The question worth carrying:
Of the difficulties you’re quietly worried about in the coming year, which one might become easier — not less likely, but easier to face — if you spent fifteen minutes today actually imagining it?
Key research referenced: Stoic writings, particularly Seneca’s Letters, Epictetus’s Discourses, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations; Albert Ellis’s cognitive-behavioural therapy and its explicit Stoic origins; Aaron Beck’s parallel development of CBT; Julie Norem’s research on defensive pessimism (The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, 2001); Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.