Epictetus isn't simply saying "don't worry so much"—he's diagnosing anxiety as a failure of mathematics, a miscalculation of weight and scale. We suffer not because our problems are large, but because we've allowed a setback (a missed promotion, a critical email, a social embarrassment) to occupy a space in our minds wildly disproportionate to its actual significance in our lives. A person who spends three sleepless nights agonizing over a minor mistake at work has lost the ability to see that one mistake among ten thousand competent daily actions—and it's that blindness to proportion, not the mistake itself, that generates the torment. The antidote, then, isn't positive thinking or distraction; it's the disciplined act of placing each worry on a scale and asking honestly what it weighs.