In the city of Cyprus in 300 BC, there lived a very wealthy trader called Zeno. While on a voyage from Phoenicia to Piraeus, his boat sank, along with all of his cargo. Because of that single event, an event that was entirely out of Zeno’s or anyone's control, this very wealthy man suddenly became poor in an instant.

Imagine you were Zeno. How would you react to your entire life’s work getting flushed down the drain by the sheer force of nature? What is the proper reaction? Would you be angry? Sad? Would you feel life has cheated you? For most of us, these would all be normal reactions, but not for Zeno, the father of Stoicism.

One small change lasts an eternity, and one small reframing of your mindset can cascade into larger and more impactful changes later down the line. The core of Stoicism is the very definition of acceptance and indifference.

After reading the works of Socrates and other great philosophers, Zeno created and taught Stoicism. According to Zeno, although we don’t have much control over what happens to us, we do have control of how it affects us, and we must use this control to great effect. Rather than crying over spilled milk, or in this case, drowned goods, Zeno focused on maintaining his composure over the situation, remaining calm and neutral, despite his predicament.

Today, people inadvertently view Stoics as people who cannot be broken, people who don’t often linger to the emotional extremes, going through things like fits of rage or bouts of anxiety. But the original idea behind Stoicism was much more than that. Rather than just a way to describe people who are unemotional, Stoicism was a way to view, describe, and understand the world. It was a way of life, and that way of life has lasted for centuries. Stoic philosophy can be applied to situations today the same way it was applied thousands of years ago, and it’s benefits are just as impactful.

Stoicism allows us to process these negative emotions from negative experiences, and turn them into the thoughts that give us a unique perspective of the world. Perspective is everything, and everyone in the world has different experiences and thus different perspectives on things.

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.[1][2][3] Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly.

Dualism finds its entry into Western philosophy thanks to René Descartes in the 17th century.[4] Substance dualists like Descartes argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas property dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.

Monism is the position that mind and body are ontologically indiscernible entities, not dependent substances. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BCE and was later espoused by the 17th-century rationalist Baruch Spinoza.[6] Physicalists argue that only entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that mental processes will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. Physicalists maintain various positions on the prospects of reducing mental properties to physical properties (many of whom adopt compatible forms of property dualism),and the ontological status of such mental properties remains unclear.[11][13][14] Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists such as Ernst Mach and William James argue that events in the world can be thought of as either mental (psychological) or physical depending on the network of relationships into which they enter, and dual-aspect monists such as Spinoza adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.