Stoic Practices: Morning Reflection
The mornings came first as exercise. Two years ago, I started walking for my health, beginning with just a few blocks at a time. I carried extra weight then, 187 pounds of it, to be exact. The plan was simple: move more, eat better, and feel less tired. What I didn’t expect was that those early walks would become something much deeper.
They began with music, everything from marches to soft piano covers. I built playlists to suit my mood. Later, I switched to audiobooks to make the walks more “productive.” But as my life began to shift in other ways, the loss of my mother, the uneasy open space of transition, I started walking in silence. Or nearly so. Sometimes I let quiet piano music play, more a texture than a sound.
In that quiet, something changed. My thoughts began to stretch out and organize themselves. I would think through the day ahead, what needed to be done, who I might see, and the challenges waiting. Sometimes old memories would surface, friends, good days, regrets, and I would find myself smiling or misting up, depending on the day. There were mornings when inspiration struck out of nowhere, the solution to a stubborn problem or the seed of a new essay appearing in mid-walk.
It became, quite by accident, a kind of morning meditation. As Bob Ross might have said, a happy accident. And like most good accidents, it only later revealed its purpose. I realized that, without meaning to, I was practicing a Stoic exercise, the morning reflection.
Marcus Aurelius described it in Meditations 2.1: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I am rising to do the work of a human being.” He wasn’t talking about work in the modern sense: emails, errands, projects, but about our true work, to live with reason, courage, and kindness. Seneca put it even more plainly: “The mind should be summoned each morning to attend to its duties.”
Morning reflection was the counterbalance to the Stoic’s evening review. The night was for reflection: what did I do well, what could I improve, and what should I avoid tomorrow? The morning was for looking forward, wondering how I would meet the world today. Epictetus urged his students to imagine the day’s trials before they came, so they could meet them without surprise or complaint. It was a spiritual, intellectual, and emotional warm-up.
The structure of a Stoic morning was simple: anticipate, discern, and choose.
Anticipate what might happen: delays, frustrations, and difficult people. Discern what is within your control and what isn’t. Then choose the virtue you most want to carry with you that day: wisdom, courage, justice, or temperance.
My walks fit that rhythm perfectly. I would think about the obstacles waiting, an uncomfortable conversation, a decision I’d been avoiding, the quiet ache of loss that still shows up without warning. I would remind myself of what I could influence, my words, my tone, my patience, and what I couldn’t. By the end of some walks, I’d found clarity. Other mornings, I just found acceptance.
Modern science, in its own way, has caught up with the Stoics. The Journal of Positive Psychology published work by Barbara Fredrickson showing that morning reflection and gratitude broaden attention and increase creativity throughout the day. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that short morning journaling sessions improved mood and focus, effects that lasted for hours. Cognitive psychologists call this “implementation intention.” Pre-deciding how you will act makes you far more likely to follow through. Even neuroscience has joined the conversation. Andrew Huberman at Stanford explains how early sunlight exposure and mindful awareness synchronize our circadian rhythms and stabilize mood.
Two thousand years later, we rediscovered what Marcus and Seneca already knew, that a few deliberate minutes in the morning can redirect an entire day.
Other thinkers have echoed the same truth. Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” Morning reflection opens that space before the first stimulus arrives. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of waking as an act of mindfulness, a small bow to the new day. The Dalai Lama has said that his first thought each morning is to serve others, a modern echo of Marcus’s call to “the work of a human being.”
Over time, I brought more structure to what had started by accident. I still walk most mornings, two and a half to three miles, often before sunrise. The air feels new then, almost generous. I think about what matters and what doesn’t as I look ahead to the day. My health routine became a soul routine, and I learned that both kinds of health depend on regular motion.
For others, the practice doesn’t need to be a walk. It can be a few quiet minutes with coffee, a short entry in a notebook, a pause before the first glance at the phone. The point is to gently turn the mind toward the day instead of letting the day crash into the mind. It isn’t about optimism or planning. It’s about how you stand inwardly before the hours begin.
The Stoics called this prosoché — attention. They believed a good life was one lived attentively, awake to each moment, steady amid its shifting weather. Morning reflection is simply the first act of attention, a daily decision to begin with awareness rather than distraction.
Some mornings end in joy, a vivid sunrise, a rush of energy, a sudden insight. Others end with melancholy, the familiar ache of remembering what’s gone. But either way, there’s peace in showing up. To borrow again from Seneca, “He who has learned how to live will know how to die.” Learning how to live, the Stoics would remind us, happens one morning at a time.
When I finish my walk, the city is waking. Light moves across the Bay, the air shifts warm, and I feel both grounded and expectant. These moments remind me that every dawn is a small rehearsal for life itself, uncertain, finite, and entirely in our hands only for a little while. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive, to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
The alarm may start the day, but reflection decides how we meet it.
And how we meet the morning, more often than not, is how we meet the world.
