Evening review

Seneca was one of the most powerful men in first-century Rome: a writer, a senator, and for years an adviser to the emperor Nero. In his essay On Anger, he describes a habit he borrowed from an older philosopher, Sextius.

Each night, once the lamp was out and his wife, who knew his habit, had gone quiet, Seneca went back over his whole day:

He asked Sextius's three questions: What bad habit have I cured today? What fault have I resisted? In what way am I better? Then he did something just as important. He named each fault plainly ("you argued too sharply with that man"), told himself not to do it again, and said, in effect: this time, I pardon you. And he slept.

Most people already go over their day at night. The trouble is the way they do it: at random, landing on the worst moment, replaying it again and again, with no verdict and no end. That's rumination, and it keeps you up.

Seneca's review is the opposite. It's deliberate, fair, brief, and it finishes. You look at the whole day, not just the worst part. You name what went wrong, decide one thing to do differently, and then close the file.

Fairness matters too. A related modern exercise, writing down three things that went well each day and why, raised people's happiness and lowered depression for months in a well-known study. Seneca's questions include progress for a reason: "In what way am I better?" makes you look for it.

Maria's Tuesday: she overslept and was short with her partner over breakfast. At work she finally finished the budget report she had been dreading for a week. At lunch she said something sarcastic about a colleague's idea in front of the team, and saw his face fall. In the evening she called her grandmother, which she'd been meaning to do for a month.