It's not events but our judgments about them that disturb us

Robertson centers his account on what he considers the single most important Stoic psychological insight, traceable to the philosopher Epictetus and repeated throughout Marcus Aurelius's private writings: external events themselves are neutral, and the distress people feel comes from the value judgments they layer on top of those events. This idea directly anticipated what modern cognitive therapy calls cognitive distancing, the practice of separating a triggering situation from the automatic interpretation attached to it, creating space to evaluate that interpretation rationally rather than reacting to it immediately. Robertson notes that pioneering cognitive therapists in the twentieth century explicitly cited this exact Stoic principle when developing their own clinical methods, making the historical lineage from Stoicism to CBT unusually direct and well-documented rather than a loose analogy. Takeaway: pause and separate the raw event from your interpretation of it before deciding how disturbed to feel.