Ancient Greek Cures for Anxiety

Douglas C. Bates
6 min readAug 30, 2022

The Old Is New Again

Our age seems to be the age of anxiety and depression, with rates rising particularly for the young. Many people are not only compulsively anxious for themselves, they project anxiety onto others.

That we should have so much anxiety going on right now seems surprising relative to what has traditionally caused anxiety. The average person in the world has never been physically safer than they are now. We have less violence, less disease, and less starvation than ever. Near-term physical reasons for anxiety have never been lower, but somehow more and more people are succumbing to increasingly bad mental health.

Anxiety and depression are not modern diseases. They’ve existed throughout recorded history. The ancient Greeks were well aware of them. To address them, the ancient Greeks employed philosophy. As the philosopher Epicurus put it:

Vain is the word of a philosopher, which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.

The ancient Greeks developed several systematic approaches for expelling the suffering of the mind. Most notable among these are the Stoic approach, the Cynic approach, the Epicurean…

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Douglas C. Bates
Douglas C. Bates

Written by Douglas C. Bates

Ancient Greek philosophies of life. http://www.pyrrhonism.org Author of “Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism.”

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