Stoicism vs. Mindfulness
What's the Difference and How Can They Complement Each Other?

Stoicism vs. Mindfulness

Stoicism and mindfulness are often mentioned together, and they do overlap: both train attention, and both locate a good deal of our distress in how we meet events rather than in the events alone. Where they part is in what you do once you have noticed a thought. Below is where each one comes from, what the research says, how they differ, and how people combine them.

Where each one comes from

Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BC. It takes its name from the Stoa Poikile, the “painted porch”, a colonnade on the north side of the Athenian agora where Zeno and his followers met; unlike the Epicureans, Zeno taught in a public space. No complete works survive from the early Stoics. What most people read today comes from the Roman period: Seneca, a statesman and dramatist; Epictetus, who was born into slavery; and Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor whose Meditations were private notes to himself. Stoicism is a philosophy: an account of how to live and of what is good.

Mindfulness, in the form most people now meet it, comes from Buddhist meditation. The Pali word sati, usually translated as “mindfulness”, literally means “memory” or “retention”; the scholar T. W. Rhys Davids first rendered it in English as “mindfulness” in 1881.

The secular version found in apps and clinics traces largely to Jon Kabat-Zinn. In 1979 he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he adapted Zen, vipassana, hatha yoga and Advaita Vedanta teachings into an eight-week course he later named Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). He removed the salvation-oriented goals of the religious traditions it drew on, and presented it in a scientific context. His widely quoted description of mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and without judging, to experience as it unfolds.

So one is an ancient ethical system with practices attached, and the other an ancient practice with its religious goals set aside. That goes a long way towards explaining the differences below.

What the evidence shows

One large review is Goyal and colleagues, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014. It pooled 47 randomised trials with 3,515 participants, each comparing a meditation programme with an active control, in adults with a range of health conditions. It found:

• Moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation programmes improved anxiety, depression and pain.
• Low evidence that they improved stress or distress and mental-health-related quality of life.
• Low evidence of no effect, or insufficient evidence of any effect, of meditation programmes on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep and weight.
• No evidence that meditation programmes were better than active treatments such as drugs, exercise and other behavioural therapies.

The authors summed it up as “small to moderate reductions of multiple negative dimensions of psychological stress”.

A later review points the same way. Galante and colleagues (PLOS Medicine, 2021) pooled 136 trials with 11,605 participants, looking at mindfulness-based programmes in nonclinical settings. Compared with no intervention, the programmes improved average anxiety, depression, distress and well-being “in most but not all scenarios”. Compared with specific active control conditions, the review found no statistically significant evidence that mindfulness did better, and the authors rated their confidence as moderate to very low. When the trials at highest risk of bias were left out, only the effect on distress, compared with no intervention, remained.

Meditation is not free of side effects for everyone. A 2020 systematic review by Farias and colleagues in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica covered 83 studies and found an overall prevalence of adverse events of 8.3%: 3.7% in experimental studies and 33.2% in observational ones. The most common were anxiety and depression, and the authors note they may occur in people with no previous history of mental health problems.

Stoicism has not been tested in the same way. It is a philosophy rather than a set programme, and we did not find a systematic review of Stoic training comparable to the mindfulness reviews (we searched PubMed in September 2026 for reviews of Stoic interventions, programmes or training). The closest is a 2025 scoping review of Stoic teachings in nursing and allied health, which found 28 studies, two of them interventional, and summarised them by theme rather than pooling results. The studies that do exist are small. In one from 2022, 24 third-year medical students took 12 days of online training based on Stoic philosophy, and their scores were compared before and after the course; resilience and empathy scores rose, though the authors describe the numerical results as mixed.

Stoicism’s clearest link to tested therapy is indirect. Stoic philosophy was the original philosophical inspiration for modern cognitive psychotherapy, particularly through Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behaviour therapy, the major forerunner of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT); and the cognitive therapy manual for depression by Aaron T. Beck and colleagues traces the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy back to the Stoics.

Understanding the Core Principles

Stoicism

• What is in our power, and what is not. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion with it: “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” Within our power, he says, are opinion, aim, desire and aversion; beyond it are body, property, reputation and office (Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s translation, as are the other Epictetus quotations here).
• Judgements, not events, disturb us. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” (Enchiridion 5)
• Virtue as the only good. The Stoics taught that “virtue is the only good” for human beings, and practised four cardinal virtues: prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice.
• Accepting what cannot be changed. “Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.” (Enchiridion 8)
• Attention. The Stoics had their own practice of attention: Epictetus discusses prosochē, attention, an idea also found in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

A note on one label. The Latin phrase amor fati, “love of fate”, is often attached to Stoicism, but it is known above all from Nietzsche, who used it in section 276 of The Gay Science (1882) and again in Ecce Homo. The idea is often linked to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but Marcus did not use those words: he wrote in Greek. The attitude is close to Stoic; the label came later. There is more on this on our Stoicism page.

Mindfulness

• Present-moment awareness: paying attention, on purpose, to what is happening now.
• Observing without judging: noticing sensations, thoughts and emotions as they come, without judging them.
• Practices: watching the breath and the body scan are among the common exercises, and MBSR combines mindfulness meditation, body awareness and yoga.

Key Differences

This is our reading of the sources above.

• What you do with a thought. Mindfulness asks you to notice it and let it be. Epictetus asks you to examine it: “Seek at once, therefore, to be able to say to every unpleasing semblance, ‘You are but a semblance and by no means the real thing.’ And then examine it by those rules which you have; and first and chiefly by this: whether it concerns the things which are within our own power or those which are not; and if it concerns anything beyond our power, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.” (Enchiridion 1)
• Ethics. Stoicism comes with a view of what is good: virtue. Secular mindfulness, as MBSR presents it, is a skill with its religious goals set aside.
• Evidence. Mindfulness programmes have been tested in dozens of trials; Stoicism, mostly, has not.

Complementary Benefits

The two meet at one point. Marcus Aurelius put it this way: “If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.” (Meditations 8.47, George Long’s translation)

Mindfulness is a way of noticing the judgement as it forms. The Stoic question gives you something to do with it next: is this about something within my power or not? In the 2022 Stoic training study, one of the themes the researchers drew from the students’ interviews was that “Stoic mindfulness encourages students to think about how they think and feel.”

Integrating Both Practices

Some ways people combine the two, described here rather than prescribed:

• Noticing, then asking. A few minutes of watching the breath, followed by Epictetus’s question about whatever came up: is this within my power?
• Writing notes to oneself. The Meditations are exactly that: Marcus wrote them as a source for his own guidance.
• Rehearsing difficulty in advance. Epictetus: “Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly; and you will never entertain an abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.” (Enchiridion 21) The training course in the 2022 study promoted a related practice it called negative visualisation.
• Reading the sources themselves. Higginson’s Enchiridion and Long’s Meditations are both free on Project Gutenberg.

Nothing here is medical advice. If anxiety or depression is affecting your life, a doctor or another qualified professional is the right person to talk to. The authors of the 2014 review wrote that clinicians “should be prepared to talk with their patients about the role that a meditation program could have in addressing psychological stress.”

Sources

• Wikipedia, “Stoicism” (Zeno, the Stoa Poikile, the surviving texts, the cardinal virtues, the link to REBT and cognitive therapy).
• Wikipedia, “Epictetus”, “Seneca the Younger” and “Meditations”.
• Wikipedia, “Sati (Buddhism)”, “Mindfulness”, “Jon Kabat-Zinn” and “Mindfulness-based stress reduction”.
• Wikipedia, “Amor fati”.
• Epictetus, The Enchiridion, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Project Gutenberg ebook 45109), sections 1, 5, 8 and 21.
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Long (Project Gutenberg ebook 15877), 8.47.
• Goyal M. et al., “Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis”, JAMA Internal Medicine 174(3), 2014 (PubMed 24395196).
• Galante J. et al., “Mindfulness-based programmes for mental health promotion in adults in nonclinical settings”, PLOS Medicine 18(1), 2021 (PubMed 33428616).
• Farias M. et al., “Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: a systematic review”, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 142(5), 2020 (PubMed 32820538).
• Brown M. E. L. et al., “Can stoic training develop medical student empathy and resilience? A mixed-methods study”, BMC Medical Education 22, 2022 (PubMed 35505329).
• Boostani A. et al., “Application of Stoic Philosophy Teachings in Nursing and Allied Health: A Scoping Review”, SAGE Open Nursing 11, 2025 (PubMed 41458012).

Checked September 2026. The history rests on Wikipedia’s articles on Stoicism, mindfulness, sati and Jon Kabat-Zinn; the quotations on Higginson’s and Long’s translations; and the evidence on the Goyal (2014), Galante (2021), Farias (2020), Brown (2022) and Boostani (2025) papers, read as their PubMed abstracts, with Galante’s risk-of-bias finding from its full text.