Why You React Before You Think—And What to Do About It
Dying Every Day (Day 145)
Dear Fellow Traveler,
Many of us know the concept that a space exists between stimulus and response—where our freedom resides. Yet, fewer of us have truly discovered it when it counts. Today, we seek it with two guides who found it in unexpected places: Epictetus, once a slave, and Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor.
As always, I hope you find this meditation helpful for daily life!
Be wise and be well.
J.W.
💀 Dying Every Day
Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) learn how to live.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Why You React Before You Think—And What to Do About It
Welcome to Dying Every Day. This is Day 145.
“The third thing concerns freedom from deception and rashness in judgment, and generally it concerns the assents.”
— Epictetus, Discourses
Don’t move past this passage yet.
That word—assents. It sounds technical, almost bureaucratic. It is, in fact, the hinge on which everything turns.
Epictetus identified three key disciplines: desire, action, and assent, with assent being the most crucial. He described assent as the mind’s act of accepting an impression—saying yes to it, recognizing it as real and meaningful, and responding accordingly.
Every moment, impressions arrive.
Not the dramatic ones—those are easy to see coming.
The ones that test the discipline are smaller and faster.
For instance, a tone in someone’s voice that causes a tightening in your chest before you understand why. Or, a self-related thought that emerges at 3 am with the conviction of truth. Or it could be a moment of being overlooked that shouldn’t matter, but does.
These impressions arise constantly, without permission or pause—and with each one, the mind faces the same recurring choice, a choice most of us make so swiftly we are unaware we are making it: To assent. Or not.
This is what Epictetus means by freedom from deception and rashness in judgment. The deception is the assumption that the impression is the truth—that what just happened means what it feels like it means. The rashness is based on that assumption before it is examined.
Most of our suffering, Epictetus says, is the product of this rashness.
Not of what happens to us—but of what we do with the impression before we have looked at it clearly. We assent without examining. We agree without questioning. We let the impression become the verdict before we have asked whether the verdict is true.
According to Epictetus,
Impressions are not under our will or control, but thrust themselves on the recognition of men by a certain force of their own. But the assents by which these impressions are recognized are voluntary and depend on man’s control.
Consider re-reading that carefully.
The impression arrives without your permission. You cannot stop the thought from forming, the feeling from rising. That is not within your power.
What is within your power—always, without exception—is the assent.
But here Epictetus admits something important, something the simplified version of this teaching tends to leave out. Even the wise man, he says, flinches at a sudden loud noise. The body startles. The heart rate spikes. The first movement happens before the mind can intervene—because it is not a mental movement at all. It is physical, prior to thought, faster than choice.
The discipline of assent is not about preventing that first movement.
It is about what happens after it.
After the flinch, there is a gap. After the impression lands—after the tightening in the chest, after the thought arrives with its false certainty, after the feeling rises without asking permission—there is a moment, small and easily missed, where the mind can still choose what to do with what has arrived.
That gap is where philosophy lives. Not in books, arguments, or the classroom—in the almost invisible interval between what happens and what you do about it.
Epictetus called cultivating that pause the most important discipline. The one without which the others cannot hold.
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, was developing a theory of meaning-centered therapy when he and his family were deported to Nazi concentration camps in 1942. He spent three years in four camps, including Auschwitz, during which his wife, parents, and brother all perished.
When he finally returned home, he found that nearly everyone he loved had been taken from him.
His account of what he discovered in that experience is one of the most significant works of the twentieth century—Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite conditions meant to destroy every aspect of human dignity and inner life, he found this:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Imagine that. His wife. His parents. His brother. His name replaced with a number. His body owned by the state. His future entirely uncertain, day after day, for three years.
And in that place, he found something that could not be reached.
Not freedom from what was happening.
Not freedom from grief or fear or the daily degradation of the camps.
But the freedom of the assent.
The freedom to examine the impression before handing it full authority. To choose deliberately, in full awareness of what could not be changed, the quality of the soul’s response to it.
There is a widely attributed quote by Frankl that you may have encountered about the space between stimulus and response. It is true in spirit, but the Viktor Frankl Institute acknowledges it almost certainly wasn’t written by him.
It appears to have been found in an unidentified library book and mistakenly attributed to him over time. What Frankl actually wrote is what you just heard—simpler, harder, written from inside Auschwitz rather than borrowed from somewhere else. The last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude.
This is the discipline of assent, lived from the inside of the most extreme human circumstances of the twentieth century.
Epictetus found it as a slave—in a body that was owned, in conditions he did not choose, with a freedom that could not be taken because it could not be seen. Frankl found it in Auschwitz, watching his fellow prisoners, noticing that the difference between those who maintained their inner hold and those who lost it was not always physical strength or fortune. It was something interior. A quality of presence. A refusal—sometimes barely conscious—to let what was happening outside become the final word about what was possible inside.
Both men are pointing at the same thing.
“The third thing concerns freedom from deception and rashness in judgment, and generally it concerns the assents.”
What Epictetus is describing is not a philosophical proposition.
It is a practice—daily, unglamorous, made in moments so small they leave no visible mark. The pause before the words leave your mouth. The breath before the message is sent. The half-second between the tightening in your chest and the decision about what it means.
Most of us live our entire lives without knowing that half-second exists.
Epictetus and Frankl do not expect us to replicate their hardships. Instead, they urge us to genuinely engage with what they discovered—during captivity, under extreme conditions, and in situations where all non-essential things had been removed—and to apply these lessons now, in settings with lower stakes, more distractions, and where the difference is less obvious because we are not necessarily compelled to seek it.
That is the invitation.
That is what the discipline of assent has always been.
Daily Practice
Today, when an impression arrives that tightens something in you—a tone, a thought, a moment of being overlooked, a piece of news that immediately generates a verdict—try to find the gap before you assent.
You may not always catch it. When you don’t, try this instead: after the response, look back. Ask Epictetus’ question:
“Was that impression true?”
“Did it mean what I thought it meant?”
“Was the response it generated the right one?”
That retrospective examination is not a consolation prize.
It is the practice.
Each time you test or examine an impression you accepted too hastily, the gap becomes marginally more apparent the next time—more accessible, more inhabitable—before your response rather than after.
Epictetus called this the discipline that secures all the others.
One gap. One pause. One examination.
That is the whole practice.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
—
Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. Catch up on recent (and past) meditations in the archive!