Marcus Aurelius for Sensitive Stoics

Making the best of sensory processing sensitivity

Priscilla du Preez via Unsplash

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The term “sensitive” gets bandied about quite often to refer to people whose feelings are hurt easily, who feel things too strongly, or who lack the social toughness to get along well in our competitive society. While there is a grain of truth in all these meanings, this very negative assessment is not the only way of looking at sensitivity. In the past few decades, psychological research has shown that high sensitivity is actually a biological condition in which the nervous system processes input at a deeper level than is the norm. Not only is it present in about 25-30% of humans, but it also occurs in many animals; sensitivity has “been observed in over 100 nonhuman species, including fish, birds, rodents, and primates” (Sensory Processing Sensitivity, Acevedo et al., 2021, p. 186).

Psychologist Elaine Aron is credited with first recognizing and studying sensory processing sensitivity in the ‘90s, and since then much research has confirmed the neurological basis for what we label “sensitivity.” While SPS is displayed in different ways—ranging from deep aesthetic appreciation to overstimulation by bright lights and loud noises—the underlying characteristic is always depth of processing stimuli. Because highly sensitive people process information more deeply, they are more impacted by their environment and need more downtime to recover from it.

However, sensitivity is not all negative. On her blog The Highly Sensitive Person, Aron suggests that sensitive people “are not weak—they are susceptible. Open.”

If it were only the negative that affected highly sensitive people (HSPs), we would say they are vulnerable.  But the proper word choice is “susceptible,” open to influence. In sharp contrast, those who are “resilient,” in the sense of not being affected by bad situations, are also less affected by good ones. They are less open to influence, to change.

Elaine Aron, Sensitivity is about Depth of Processing

Jenn Granneman, co-author of the book Sensitive: The Hidden Power of the Highly Sensitive Person in a Loud, Fast, Too-Much World, suggests that a better word is “responsive”:

It means they pay attention to what’s going on around them. It suggests a more active and engaged approach to the world. Rather than simply reacting to external stimuli, a responsive individual is attuned to their surroundings and adjusts their behavior accordingly. This can include understanding how other people are feeling and taking care of their own emotions.

Jenn Granneman, There May Be a Better Term for Highly Sensitive People

According to Granneman, strengths associated with sensitivity are the ability to learn and change easily based on environmental input; greater attunement to the needs of other people; deeper appreciation of beauty, art, and nature; and strong creativity and imagination. Sensitive people are more easily impacted by negative environments and stressors, but they are also more impacted by positive environments and beneficial influences.

This means that highly sensitive children raised in supportive homes, where they feel safe and valued, often have extremely positive life outcomes, but unfortunately children raised in unsupportive homes, particularly those that are overly permissive or overly authoritarian, often have lifelong emotional struggles. (For detailed information on these differential outcomes, see Jagiellowicz and Acevedo’s chapter Health and Social Outcomes in Highly Sensitive Persons.) Kids without sensory processing sensitivity are not as impacted by their upbringing and so vary less in their outcomes. Sensitive kids are very susceptible to poor parenting, bad school environments, and other negative influences.

If you’re a highly sensitive person, you know exactly how it feels to be so responsive to the people and things around you: it can be an emotional rollercoaster, as your emotions follow the train of events and affective register of people around you. Or, particularly for those with less-than-ideal backgrounds, the tendency is to sink into the doldrums, allowing strong negative experiences to overpower the positive ones as you ruminate and dwell on the ways in which life doesn’t measure up to your expectations. This emotional pattern is obviously not conducive to a flourishing and happy life.

The good news is that psychological interventions seem to be particularly powerful for those with sensory processing sensitivity. Remember, responsiveness goes both ways; while you may have responded strongly to negative input in the past, you can also respond strongly to positive input in the present and future. So even if you’ve had bad experiences before and are prone to the negative effects associated with sensitivity (such as anxiety and depression), there’s a good chance you can overcome them with effective psychological tools.

Clearly, I think Stoicism is one of those tools. In a way I hesitate to describe Stoicism as a tool, because it’s so much more than that: it’s an entire system for living, one that informs every facet of life. But on the other hand, I think even a philosophical system can be considered a kind of tool—a “cognitive gadget” that we use to live a more effective, more meaningful life.

So let’s think for a moment about how Stoicism can be a good system of living for sensitive people. We’ll now turn to the man who is simultaneously the most famous and the most sensitive of ancient Stoics: Marcus Aurelius.

Was Marcus Aurelius highly sensitive?

I don’t think it requires a lot of argument to say that Marcus Aurelius was highly sensitive; his Meditations pretty much speak for themselves. In contrast to almost everything else he did as Caesar and Emperor—writing letters, giving speeches, leading armies—which was primarily public-facing, the Meditations are his private thoughts to himself. In these writings he could focus on those things that were actually important to him, as opposed to the demands of the state and his courtiers. Even though Marcus is following exercises and rehearsing topics he learned years earlier from his philosophical tutors, we still get a glimpse of his personal emotional patterns and preferences.

Marcus’ sensitivity to the beauty of the world and to other people’s inner lives is clear from verses such as:

If a person is endowed with sensibility and has a deep enough insight into the workings of the universe, he will find scarcely anything which fails to please him in some way by its presence, even among those that arise as secondary effects. Such a person will view the gaping jaws of wild beasts in their physical reality with no less pleasure than the portrayals of them displayed by painters and sculptors, and he will be able to see in an old woman or old man a special kind of mature beauty, and to look on the youthful charms of his slave boys with chaste eyes. And one could cite many similar examples, which will not seem persuasive to everyone, but will only strike home with those who are genuinely familiar with nature and all her works. (3.2)

I travel along nature's way until the day arrives for me to fall down and take my rest, yielding my last breath to the air from which I daily draw it in, and falling to that earth from which my father drew his seed and my mother her blood, and my nurse her milk, and from which day by day these many years I have gained my food and drink; the earth that bears me as I tread over it and make use of it for so many purposes. (5.4)

Acquire the habit of attending carefully to what is being said by another, and of entering, so far as possible, into the mind of the speaker. (6.53)

We are all working together to a single end, some of us knowingly and with understanding, and others without knowing what they do, in just the same way as those who are asleep, for even they, as Heraclitus, I think, remarks, are workers and fellow workers in what comes to pass in the universe. Some help in one way, others in another, and even, moreover, he who finds fault with what is coming to pass, and tries to resist or suppress it; for the universe has need even of people like that. It remains for you, then, to decide on which side you will be placing yourself…(6.32)

However, it’s not just his verses that attest to his sensitivity, but also his correspondence with other people and his actions as Roman emperor. In his excellent biography Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor, Donald Robertson notes that “Marcus Aurelius…could be a sensitive man” (p. 14):

Marcus Aurelius did not have a heart of stone. When the news was brought to him that one of his most beloved tutors had died, the young Caesar was distraught, and tears poured down his cheeks—he may perhaps have started to beat his chest and tear his clothes in grief…

Such displays of emotion were not out of character for Marcus. We hear of him in his fifties, as emperor, being moved to tears when an advocate giving a speech uttered the words, “Blessed are those who died in the plague!” Toward the end of his life, the emperor likewise found himself weeping over a letter informing him that a catastrophic earthquake had leveled the city of Smyrna (modern-day Izmir, Turkey). His tears soaked the parchment as he read, “She is a desert through which the west winds blow.” He was a man capable of knowing intense grief. Perhaps especially for that reason, he committed himself to a lifelong training in philosophy: Marcus came to realize that although a great leader may experience sorrow or anger, he cannot allow intense emotion to cloud his judgment. (p. 10)

So I think we are well-justified in believing that Marcus Aurelius was highly sensitive. At the same time, I also think it can be dangerous to retrospectively attribute 21^st century constructs to ancient figures, and I’m certainly not qualified to make any formal claims about Marcus. I can’t say with any certainty that he would meet the qualifications of what we now consider high sensitivity. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether Marcus was *officially* a highly sensitive person—his writings can still offer beautiful advice for sensitive people today, regardless of whether or not he would meet criteria for what we now call sensory processing sensitivity.

Meditations for the Highly Sensitive

So what advice can sensitive people draw from Marcus Aurelius? Donald Robertson sums it up succinctly: “He gradually trained himself to manage his emotions by examining them rationally rather than merely suppressing them. Stoicism taught him to view external events —events beyond his direct control—as of secondary importance” (loc. 120).

When you are highly attuned to the people and events around you, you become overly susceptible to the vagaries of fortune: the suffering of other people, the potential for beauty that isn’t fulfilled, the coarseness of life as it devastates people of good and bad character in equal measure. It is quite possible that a sensitive person would want to hide under the blankets in bed and never come out.

And yet, Marcus Aurelius presents the example of a sensitive person—emotional, attentive to the underlying patterns of the world, and able to see the inner nature of things—who faced the daily onslaught of war, plague, politics, pomp and circumstance, traitors, criminals, and rogues that the job of Roman Emperor brought into his life. How did he do it? Surely there were many factors, but Stoicism must have been a crucial support.

Throughout his meditations, we see Marcus relying on the mental tools that he had learned from his tutors and from the discourses of Epictetus (and which he had seen modeled by his mother, grandfather, and especially by his adoptive father Antoninus Pius). Today we can still apply many of these same techniques to the challenges of being highly sensitive in a highly insensitive world.

Challenge 1: Overstimulation

One of the hallmarks of sensory processing sensitivity is feeling overwhelmed by strong sensory input such as bright lights, sustained loud noises, strong smells, large crowds, etc. (For me personally the greatest difficulty is noise, which is one of my biggest challenges living with three energetic kids.) This also relates to getting easily stressed out by constant and overlapping demands from other people.

Marcus certainly had to face this sort of overstimulation, but he dealt with it by reminding himself that his inner citadel is always available as a refuge from unpleasant external sensations:

People seek retreats for themselves in the countryside, by the seashore, in the hills; and you too have made it your habit to long for that above all else. But this is altogether unphilosophical, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself whenever you please; for nowhere can one retreat into greater peace or freedom from care than within one's own soul, especially when a person has such things within him that he has merely to look at them to recover from that moment perfect ease of mind (and by ease of mind I mean nothing other than having one's mind in good order). So constantly grant yourself this retreat and so renew yourself; but keep within you concise and basic precepts that will be enough, at first encounter, to cleanse you from all distress and to send you back without discontent to the life to which you will return. (4.3)

Retire into yourself. The rational governing centre is of such a nature that it finds its contentment in its own just conduct and the serenity it gains from it. (7.28)

Remember that your ruling center becomes invincible when it withdraws into itself and rests content with itself, doing nothing other than what it wishes, even where its refusal to act is not reasonably based; and how much more contented it will be, then, when it founds its decision on reason and careful reflection. By virtue of this, an intelligence free from passions is a mighty citadel, for man has no stronghold more secure to which he can retreat to remain unassailable from that time onward. (8.48)

He refers to this idea of retiring into yourself and creating an inner citadel multiple times throughout the Meditations. Marcus was not the first Stoic to think in terms of an inner refuge, but he perhaps had to make more use of it than anyone else. When faced with the onslaught of demands from people all around him, and the constant nuisance of drains on his time and energy, his ability to find peace and strength within himself was surely a great comfort.

Challenge 2: Emotional reactivity

Another huge challenge for sensitive people is dealing with “high emotionality,” or “a tendency to react to things more emotionally than others do in similar situations” (Tom Falkenstein, What Being Highly Sensitive Really Means). Particularly when you have a stressful job or many competing responsibilities, or when you face uncertainty, pain, or hardship, emotional reactivity can become a liability. Here is how Marcus advised himself to deal with the crushing stress of being Roman emperor:

Be like the headland, with wave after wave breaking against it, which yet stands firm and sees the boiling waters round it fall to rest. “Unfortunate am I that this has befallen me.” No, quite the contrary: “Fortunate am I, that when such a thing has befallen me, I remain undisturbed, neither crushed by the present nor afraid of what is to come.” For such a thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have remained undisturbed in the face of such a blow. (4.41)

If you suffer distress because of some external cause, it is not the thing itself that troubles you but your judgment about it, and it is within your power to cancel that judgment at any moment. But if what distresses you is something that lies in your own disposition, who is to prevent you from correcting your way of thinking? And likewise, if you are distressed because you are failing to accomplish some particular action which strikes you as sound, why do you not persist in the action rather than yield to the distress? “But something too strong for me is blocking my way.” Then you should not be distressed, because the responsibility for your failure to act does not rest with you. (8.47)

Marcus reminded himself to reframe his responses from negative (I’m so unfortunate) to positive (I’m fortunate that I can deal with this). This is a game-changer for those who are overexcitable or easily fall prey to self-pity and resentment. Learning to see various types of hardship as training exercises rather than roadblocks allows us to stay focused on what we can do to solve the problem, not what we can’t do.

Following Epictetus’ emphasis on properly managing impressions, Marcus echoes his instructions to distinguish between what is and what is not up to each person. Other people’s actions, and things that happen in the world at large, are not up to us, and therefore we have no cause to be upset, angry, frustrated, or afraid of them. Our happiness depends only on creating a good character for ourselves through our own thoughts and actions. Therefore there is no need to react in an overly emotional way, since it’s not worth getting upset about indifferent things.

Challenge 3: Susceptibility to other people’s thoughts and emotions

While everyone struggles to get over criticism and deal with difficult people, those with sensory processing sensitivity find this especially challenging. When we’re around other people who are sad or stressed, we pick up on their emotions and internalize them. We often want everyone around us to be happy, which means it’s hard to let someone down, directly contradict them, or even fight stringently against them when required.

Obviously, as emperor Marcus had to make very hard decisions, and there was no way he could please everyone. He had to use his own good judgment to square off against rebellious tribes, a would-be usurper, backstabbers at court, and people who just didn’t like him. He had to find ways of becoming invulnerable to the emotions of unwise people around him. Here’s how he did it:

When another blames or hates you or people give voice to such feelings, look to their souls, enter into them, and see what sort of people they are. You will then see that there is no need for you to tear yourself apart so that they will come to form this or that opinion of you. Nevertheless, you should be friendly towards them; for by nature you and they are friends. (9.27)

The moment you awaken from your sleep, ask yourself this question: will it make any difference to me if someone else criticizes me for actions which were just and right? It will make no difference at all. Or have you forgotten what these people who assume grand airs when praising or blaming others are like in their beds or at table, and what actions they commit, and what sort of things they flee from or pursue, and how they thieve and plunder not with their hands and feet, but with the most precious part of themselves, the part in which there emerges, if only a person wishes it, faith and modesty, truth and law, and a good guardian spirit within? (10.13)

Marcus constantly reminded himself that the people around him held unwise judgments and that it was not his responsibility to make them all happy. He had psychological tricks for remembering how fallible and weak they were, such as thinking of them asleep or using the toilet. At the same time, he placed this understanding within the context of compassion—not in order to judge them, but in order to understand their motivations. It’s important to see what kind of person you are dealing with, whether you should give credence to their claims, whether you should trust their advice. For these reasons it was crucial for him as Roman emperor to “enter into the souls” of the people around him, but for the purpose of understanding, not criticizing.

Advantages

Let’s not forget that although high sensitivity comes with its challenges, it also has advantages. I think Marcus Aurelius can also offer us insight into making the most of our deep processing abilities.

Appreciation of nature and beauty

Part of being sensitive to your environment means appreciating the beautiful. When tuned incorrectly, this ability can leave sensitive people dissatisfied as they focus on the uglier side of the world. But when tuned correctly, the ability to notice and savor the beauty of the world can lead to long-lasting contentment:

Truths as this should be carefully noted, that even the by-products of natural processes have a certain charm and attractiveness. Bread, for instance, in the course of its baking, tends to crack open here and there, and yet these very cracks, which are, in a sense, offences against the baker's art, somehow appeal to us and, in a curious way, promote our appetite for the food. And again figs, when fully ripe, tend to split open; and in olives which are ready to drop, the very fact of their impending decay lends a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And ears of corn bending toward the earth, and the wrinkled brows of a lion, and the foam dripping from the jaws of a wild boar, and many other things are far from beautiful if one views them in isolation, but nevertheless, the fact that they follow from natural processes gives them an added beauty and makes them attractive to us. (3.2)

As Marcus reminds us, the important thing is to use this ability to find and focus on the beauty—not the ugliness—in whatever happens to be around us.

Seeing other people’s gifts

Because we are so attuned to other people, we are able to recognize depths that more casual observers might not see. Sensitive Stoics look beyond those shiny external things that tend to dazzle the crowds. We prefer to focus on deeper characteristics of those around us, seeing their innermost nature. Marcus Aurelius invites us to use this special ability to develop a loving disposition toward the people in our lives:

When you want to gladden your heart, think of the good qualities of those around you; the energy of one, for instance, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third, and some other quality in another. For there is nothing more heartening than the images of the virtues shining forth in the characters of those around us, and assembled together, so far as possible, in close array. So be sure to keep them ever at hand. (6.48)

Conscientiousness and focus

Sensitive people are often extremely conscientious—after all, we don’t want to disappoint anyone or let anyone down. Conscientiousness can be a disadvantage when it results in perfectionism or anxiety, but it can be an advantage when used wisely. For example, conscientious people are able to stay focused on their goals, persevering despite difficulties. We just have to make sure our goals are aligned with our values.

So here’s one way staying focused on our goals can help us to be at peace with the people and world around us:

What ease of mind a person gains if he casts no eye on what his neighbor has said, done, or thought, but looks only to what he himself is doing, to ensure that his own action may be just, and holy, and good in every regard. Do not look back to examine the black character of another, but run straight towards the finishing line, never glancing to the right or left. (4.18)

Stay focused on your values and goals, and your sensitivity can be a true strength.

Concluding Thoughts

There is so much more we could say about Stoicism for sensitive people, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I hope this has given you a lot to think about, whether you yourself are sensitive or whether you are close to someone who is. Just remember that sensitivity, like other biologically-determined traits that we did not choose for ourselves, is an indifferent and not a determinant of happiness. We can use it for good or for ill. But with a little training, sensitivity can be a great gift that enables us to make ourselves, and the world around us, a little more beautiful.

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