When Your Body Betrays You — Letters from a Stoic

Seneca has been through serious illness. He nearly didn't survive it. Letter 78 is the honest account of what that was like, and what kept him going. His catarrh was so severe, and his thinness so extreme, that he seriously considered ending his life.

What stopped him was not fear of death but consideration for his father, who could not have borne the loss. Sometimes, he writes, it is an act of bravery even to live. What sustained him through the illness itself was philosophy and friendship. Not medicines, not distractions, the company of people who sat with him, and the discipline of thought that kept him from surrendering to misery.

The letter makes a careful distinction between the illness and the suffering. Much of what patients suffer comes not from the disease but from their response to it, complaining, self-pity, the habit of projecting the worst possibilities forward. The body can endure a great deal when the mind isn't adding to its burdens. His advice for illness: don't encourage it with attention; don't make it worse with anxiety about how long it will last.

Keep your thoughts occupied. A single day among the learned lasts longer than the longest life of the ignorant.