7 SIMPLE Seneca Habits To Stop Feeling EXHAUSTED

Seneca was not a strong man.

From a young age, he had trouble breathing.

He tells us himself in his letters that he suffered asthma attacks so severe, the doctors called them a rehearsal for death.

Any other illness, he said, is simply being ill.

This is like breathing out your soul.

And yet, he also tells us that, in the midst of one of those fits of breathlessness, he never stopped leaning on cheerful and courageous thoughts.

He was born in Cordoba, in Roman Hispania, around the beginning of our era, into a well-off provincial family.

His father, also called Seneca, was passionate about oratory and had a prodigious memory.

And while still a babe in arms, the little boy was carried to Rome by an aunt, his mother's sister.

He would remember it with gratitude many years later.

It was she who brought him to the city, and she who nursed him with a mother's tenderness through a long illness.

His youth was worse still.

In a letter to his friend Lucilius, he tells how, as a young man, he suffered such persistent catarrhs that he wasted away to skin and bone.

Think what that means for a lad eager to take on the world.

A cough that won't go, a body that won't keep up, strength that runs out long before the day does.

Anyone might have resigned himself to living as an invalid for good, at half speed, waiting for life to pass him by.

And he tells him what pulled him out of that pit.

It wasn't just the doctors, it was two things.

The first was study.

I owe it to philosophy, he says, that I got back on my feet and recovered.

The second was his friends, whose encouragement, visits and conversation eased him more than any remedy.

Hold on to those two medicines, a mind busy with what matters and good company, because they'll appear again in today's habits.

His great teacher in youth was a stoic philosopher called Attalus.

Seneca recalls that he laid siege to his school, first to arrive and last to leave, and that he would listen to him speak against excess with such enthusiasm that he left determined to change his life.

Many of those resolutions faded over the years, he admits with good humor, but some stayed with him forever.