Derren Brown: "one of the big secrets of happiness is from the Stoics"

Derren Brown on the BBC Radio 2 Steve Wright show, 3rd November 2015

"In real life, we're fed so much the idea nowadays that you should control things: in order to be happy you should sort of set your goals, believe in yourself enough and you can make stuff happen to conform to what you want. And I think, actually, in real life, one of the big secrets of happiness is from the Stoics. And Stoicism was a popular philosophy for 500 years before Christianity took over, and one of their main axioms is that you don't try and control things that are out of your control. You're only in control of your thoughts and your actions; everything else in life, if it's not under your control - what other people do and what they think and what they think of you - if you just let that go and decide that it's fine and stop trying to control it, you naturally remove a whole load of anxiety and frustration from your life."