Journal Like a Stoic: A 90-Day Stoicism Program to Live with Greater Acceptance, Less Judgment, and Deeper Intentionality (Includes Teachings of Marcus Aurelius)

I’ve been reading and meditating with this book over the last couple months and it’s the perfect introduction to Stoicism! The quotes from the Stoics and questions are insightful and have helped a lot in my day-to-day life!

"Journal Like a Stoic" by Brittany Polat is a concise and practical guide to incorporating the principles of Stoicism into one's daily life through journaling. The book provides a clear and accessible introduction to the philosophy of Stoicism, as well as step-by-step instructions for creating a Stoic journaling practice.Polat's writing is engaging and easy to follow, making it a great resource for both beginners and those already familiar with Stoicism. The book includes numerous prompts and exercises designed to help readers reflect on their thoughts and actions in a Stoic manner, as well as tips for overcoming common obstacles that can arise in a journaling practice.One of the strengths of "Journal Like a Stoic" is its emphasis on the practical application of Stoic principles. Polat encourages readers to use their journaling practice to cultivate virtues such as wisdom, courage, and self-control, and to develop a more resilient and grounded perspective on life's challenges. She also provides guidance on how to use Stoic practices such as negative visualization and self-reflection to navigate difficult emotions and situations.Overall, "Journal Like a Stoic" is an excellent resource for anyone interested in incorporating Stoic philosophy into their daily life. Polat's clear and concise writing, practical exercises, and emphasis on practical application make it a valuable guide for beginners and intermediate practitioners alike (and even advanced practitioners may glean some ideas of wisdom from it). Highly recommended!

Journal Like a Stoic is a wonderful resource for not just learning about Stoicism as "crafting a life with purpose and intention," but actually doing it. Dr. Polat begins with a charming anecdote in which her grandmother warns her not to buy "magic beans" from people claiming to sell them. She argues that ancient Stoicism is not a "self-help fairy tale," but a system that takes work and practice to benefit from. The remainder of the book contains a short summary of the Stoic philosophical system and history, followed by a program of 90 journaling prompts (each consisting of a quote from the classical Stoic literature and some short commentary).I like Polat's style of journal prompts, because she both makes the prompts personally accessible ("Think about the last time you were stung by someone's disapproval... Why did you want their approval?"), while at the same time staying close to the source material and giving the reader/journaler a chance to deepen their knowledge about key Stoic devices, metaphors, and meditation practices (ex. the inner citadel, the four virtues, virtue as the highest potential for human nature, etc.). This respect for the Stoic system—as something a practiioner has to learn and grow into to cultivate their ability to practice it, even if the terms are a bit unfamiliar at first—is what sets Polak's work apart from comparable books.In particular, I find Journal Like a Stoic to be much more satisfying in its approach to Stoic training than Holiday and Hanselman's Daily Stoic Journal (2017)—which, while also a useful resource, follow's Holiday's preferred style of emphasizing the generic, immediately-accessible ideas from Stoic literature, rather than building up the distinctive Stoic world view of virtue ethics brick-by-brick (which takes some time to learn and appreciate as its components layer on top of one another).Polat, by contrast, combines both of these components very well into an enjoyable and educational guide for philosophical-spiritual practice—relevant enough to be usable by anyone as a first journaling resource, but also scholarly enough to satisfy a purist like me who believe that virtue actually really is the "highest good" (as the Stoics claim!).

Overall: the author created a very good set of 3 courses to introduce Stoicism. Each are 30 days long. She starts with "Examining the Inner Critic," follows that with: "The Road to Acceptance," and finishes with "Living with Virtue." Each day she offers a quote from a famous stoic accompanied by her modern day interpretation of that quote. She then poses two questions as prompts for to ponder and the journal in the book.Most days I wrote about both questions. Once in a while I was stumpted to write anything. When that happened, I'd dog-ear a corner to come back to it later. I noticed I became more thoughtful by journaling based on the stoic prompts. I'm more reflective and I want to learn more from the Stoics and about myself.

I’m 20ish days in and it’s a pretty good journal but I’m not a fan of the self-help feeling I’m getting. It certainly references good stoic literature, but a lot of the reflection prompts are almost corny feeling, things like “say 10 good things about yourself in the mirror.” Nothing wrong with these things, just we’ve been there done that. I was just hoping more for purely stoicism-backed prompts. It is like a self-love book combined with stoicism where I was hoping it would be just journaling about prompts reflecting on our virtues and vices. Now don’t get me wrong, self-love is certainly stoic, I just feel as if so far it’s been talked about far too much. Perhaps my opinion will change when I finish and I’ll alter my review. I picked this out from hearing an interview on Practical Stoicism podcast of the author. She sounded very wise and the host gave a raving review of the journal. Perhaps it got my hopes up too high, because it’s good so far but not great.