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that it is certain people, situations, or events that make us sad, anxious, or angry. When you’re irritated by a colleague at the next desk who won’t stop talking, you naturally assume that the colleague is the source of the irritation; when you hear that a beloved relative is ill and feel pained for them, it makes sense to think of the illness as the source of the pain. Look closely at your experience, though, say the Stoics, and you will eventually be forced to conclude that neither of these external events is ‘negative’ in itself. Indeed, nothing outside your own mind can properly be described as negative or positive at all. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things. The colleague is not irritating per se, but because of your belief that getting your work finished without interruption is an important goal. Even a relative’s illness is only bad in view of your belief that it’s a good thing for your relatives not to be ill. (Millions of people, after all, get ill every day; we have no beliefs whatsoever about most of them, and consequently don’t feel distressed.) ‘Things do not touch the soul,’ is how Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher–emperor, expresses the notion, adding: ‘Our perturbations come only from the opinionwhich is within.’ We think of distress as a one-step procedure: something in the outside world causes distress in your interior world. In fact, it’s a two-step procedure: between the outside event and the inside emotion is a belief. If you didn’t judge a relative’s illness to be bad, would you be distressed by it? Obviously not. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ Shakespeare has Hamlet say, very Stoically indeed.
    The suggestion here is not that negative emotions don’t really exist, or that they don’t matter, or that they can easily be brushed aside through sheer force of will. The Stoics aren’t making any such claims; they are merely specifying the mechanism through which all distress arises. And they do mean all. Even losing your home or your job or a loved one, from this perspective, is not a negative event in itself; in itself, it’s merely an event. To which you might respond: but what if it really is bad? Lacking a home and an income, you might perish from starvation, or exposure. Surely that would be bad? But the same relentless logic applies. What makes the prospect of starvation or exposure distressing in the first place? The beliefs that you hold about the disadvantages of death. This view of how emotions work, as the leading Stoic scholar A.A. Long points out, is the underlying insight behind contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, too. ‘It’s all there [in the work of the Stoics],’ he told me. ‘Particularly this idea that judgments are in our power, that our emotions are determined by our judgments, and that we can always step back and ask: “Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”.’ It was a method of thinking he regularly employed himself, Long explained, to deal with everyday distresses, such as road rage. Were other drivers really behaving ‘badly’? Or was it more accurate to say that the cause of his anger was his belief that they ought to behave differently?
    The distinction is crucial. The idea that it is ultimately our beliefs that cause our distress, as we’ve seen, is a perspective shared by Stoics and positive thinkers alike. Beyond this, though, the two traditions diverge utterly – and the divergence becomes most baldly apparent when it comes to beliefs about the future. The evangelists of optimism argue that you should cultivate as many positive expectations about the future as you can. But this is not the good idea that it may at first appear to be. For a start, as Gabriele Oettingen’s experiments demonstrate, focusing on