Seneca opens one of his letters to Lucilius by admitting he’s been reading Epicurus again — a rival school, technically an enemy camp. “I still allow myself to cross over,” he writes, “not as a deserter, but as a scout.” He wasn’t defecting. He was checking what the other side had figured out that his side hadn’t. A 2026 study in the journal Mindfulness just ran the numbers on whether that instinct was right — not about Epicureanism, but about something Seneca never got to compare his tradition against directly: Buddhism.

The paper is called “Seneca Meets the Buddha: The Relationship Between Buddhist and Stoic Mindfulness,” by Johannes Karl, Ronald Fischer, and Tim LeBon. It’s the first study to take a validated measure of Stoic attitudes and map it directly against validated measures of Buddhist-derived mindfulness, using network analysis instead of a simple correlation. The headline finding: these don’t look like two separate psychological categories that happen to overlap a little. They look like one continuum, with philosophical belief at one end and direct experiential awareness at the other.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What the research found
Do Stoic attitudes and Buddhist mindfulness measure separate things?	No — they arrange along one continuum, not two categories
How was this tested?	Network analysis and multidimensional scaling, across two independent studies
Who was studied?	1,781 New Zealand undergraduates (Study 1), then 287 Australian adults (Study 2)
Which instruments were compared?	The SABS against the FFMQ in Study 1, the SABS against CHIME in Study 2
Does “stiff-upper-lip” stoicism show the same benefits?	No — emotional suppression doesn’t track with the resilience and life-satisfaction gains real Stoic attitudes do

The Quick Version

Karl, Fischer, and LeBon’s 2026 study mapped Stoic attitudes (measured by the Stoic Attitudes and Behaviors Scale) against Buddhist-derived mindfulness (measured by the FFMQ, then replicated with CHIME) using network analysis and multidimensional scaling. The result: rather than forming two separate psychological clusters, Stoic attitudes and mindfulness facets sit along a single continuum running from abstract belief to direct present-moment awareness. Seneca assumed something like this when he read Epicurus for material worth keeping. This is the first time anyone measured it.

What the Study Actually Did

Study 1 gave 1,781 undergraduates in New Zealand two instruments: the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), the standard tool for measuring Buddhist-derived mindfulness across five facets — observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging, and non-reactivity — and the Stoic Attitudes and Behaviors Scale (SABS), a newer instrument built specifically to measure philosophical Stoicism rather than the colloquial “stiff upper lip” version of the word.

Instead of just correlating total scores, the researchers ran network analysis — mapping how every subscale of both instruments relates to every other subscale, as a web rather than a single number. Then they used multidimensional scaling to see whether the resulting map clustered into two distinct regions (one Stoic, one Buddhist) or something else.

It came out as something else. The subscales didn’t sort themselves by tradition. They sorted themselves by a different axis entirely — one end anchored in abstract philosophical commitment (beliefs about virtue, about what’s in your control), the other anchored in direct experiential practice (noticing sensation, watching thoughts arise without grabbing them). Stoic and Buddhist measures showed up at both ends and in between, threaded through each other rather than sitting in separate piles.

Study 2 replicated the pattern with 287 Australian adults, swapping the FFMQ for the Comprehensive Inventory of Mindfulness Experiences (CHIME) — a broader, more recently developed mindfulness instrument. Same structure emerged. That’s the detail that makes this more than a fluke of one questionnaire pairing: two countries, two different mindfulness instruments, one shape.

What “One Continuum” Actually Means

It’s worth being precise here, because “Stoicism and Buddhism are the same” is a stronger and less interesting claim than what the data shows.

The study isn’t saying a Stoic virtue ethic and the Noble Eightfold Path are identical doctrines with different names. It’s saying that at the level of psychological attitude — the traits and dispositions these questionnaires actually measure — the variation between people doesn’t split cleanly along tradition lines. Someone high in Stoic “beliefs about control” tends to also score higher on mindful non-reactivity, whether or not they’ve ever opened a book on either tradition. The traditions differ. The underlying capacity they’re both cultivating apparently doesn’t split the same way.

Think of it like measuring physical fitness with two different questionnaires — one built by marathon coaches, one by rock climbers. You’d expect some traits to show up on both (endurance, recovery, pain tolerance) even though the sports look nothing alike and the coaches would bristle at being told they’re teaching “the same thing.” That’s closer to what this data supports than a claim of doctrinal equivalence.

What Are the Seven Dimensions of the Stoic Attitudes and Behaviors Scale?

The SABS, developed and validated by Tim LeBon and colleagues, breaks Stoic attitude into seven measurable factors:

1. Beliefs About Control — distinguishing what you can influence from what you can’t
2. Stoic Mindfulness — attentiveness to your own thoughts and reflective self-monitoring
3. Virtue — practicing wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control as ongoing habits
4. Benevolence and Compassion — recognizing shared humanity, not just personal discipline
5. Ethical Development — treating life as continuous moral growth rather than a fixed state
6. Stoic Worldview — situating yourself within something larger than your immediate circumstances
7. Beliefs About Happiness — locating wellbeing in character rather than external outcomes

Notice factor two. “Stoic Mindfulness” isn’t a metaphor the SABS authors reached for because it sounded nice — it’s a dedicated dimension, sitting inside a scale built to measure a 2,300-year-old Western philosophy, using the exact vocabulary contemporary psychology borrowed from Buddhism. That’s not a coincidence the new study discovered. It’s a design choice the earlier scale-validation work already made, and this study is the first to test what it implies when you put it next to an actual Buddhist mindfulness instrument.

Seneca Already Made This Move

Seneca didn’t have access to the Pali Canon. He wasn’t triangulating Stoicism against Buddhism the way Karl, Fischer, and LeBon’s participants unknowingly did by filling out two questionnaires. But the instinct behind the crossing-into-enemy-camp letter is the same instinct the data vindicates: that a school of thought doesn’t own a monopoly on the psychological ground it’s standing on.

He did this constantly, not just with Epicurus. His letters return again and again to prosoche — attention held steady on the present judgment rather than let loose to react — as the discipline underneath every other Stoic practice. We’ve written before about what prosoche actually is and drawn a fairly sharp line between it and Buddhist mindfulness: prosoche evaluates (“is this in my control?”), mindfulness observes (“what am I experiencing?”). That distinction is still real at the level of instruction — a Stoic teacher and a meditation teacher are telling you to do different things in the moment. But this study is evidence that the trait those different instructions are cultivating, over time, in a person’s actual disposition, doesn’t stay as separate as the instructions themselves.

That’s a genuine complication, not a contradiction. Different doors into the same room is still a defensible way to describe it. The rooms just turn out to share more wall than the doors suggested.

Why “Stiff-Upper-Lip” Stoicism Doesn’t Count

Here’s the part of the study that matters most if you’ve only encountered Stoicism as a productivity-bro slogan: high SABS scores correlate with greater resilience and higher life satisfaction, and with lower anger. That’s consistent with what we’ve covered before about the gap between classical Stoicism and the pop version — the “don’t feel anything, grind through it” caricature that gets marketed as Stoicism on social media.

Emotional suppression — gritting your teeth, not talking about it, performing unaffectedness — doesn’t show these benefits. It’s a different construct from what the SABS measures, and it’s the one popular culture keeps mistaking for the real thing. The study’s finding only holds for Stoic attitude in LeBon’s validated sense: examined beliefs about control, active virtue practice, a worked-out relationship to what happiness actually is. Not silence dressed up as discipline.

This lines up, incidentally, with the earlier validation work behind the SABS itself, and with research we’ve covered connecting mindfulness and Stoic attitude at the neural level — an earlier study had already found a strong correlation (r = 0.65) between the two constructs using simpler methods. What this new study adds isn’t the existence of a relationship. It’s the shape of it: not two correlated things, but one continuum, replicated twice, with two different mindfulness instruments, in two different countries.

A Practice That Borrows From Both, Honestly

You don’t need to pick a side to use this. A practice worth trying, built from where the two traditions actually converge rather than where they’re supposed to differ:

1. Notice the reaction first, without evaluating it. Before you ask “is this in my control,” just register that something happened in your body — a flash of heat, tightened shoulders, a held breath. That’s the mindfulness end of the continuum: observe before you judge.
2. Then ask the Stoic question. Once you’ve noticed rather than reacted, ask what’s actually yours to influence here and what isn’t. That’s the belief-and-evaluation end.
3. Let both be part of the same motion, not two separate steps you’re forcing together. The study’s whole point is that these aren’t sequential techniques bolted onto each other. For people who score high on both scales, they function as one capacity, not two habits run in series.

This isn’t a new meditation technique. It’s closer to permission — to stop treating “am I doing mindfulness or am I doing Stoicism right now” as a question that needs an answer every time you’re paying attention to your own mind.

Where This Doesn’t Help

A network analysis of questionnaire responses tells you about the structure of self-reported attitudes. It doesn’t tell you that the doctrines are interchangeable, that a Zen teacher and a Stoic tutor would agree on how to run a session, or that you can skip learning either tradition properly because the underlying trait is shared. Buddhist accounts of suffering rest on metaphysical claims — impermanence, non-self — that classical Stoicism doesn’t share and doesn’t need to. Papering over that with “it’s all basically the same” would be exactly the kind of flattening this site tries not to do.

And this is self-report data from university students and general-population adults, not a clinical sample. It says something real about how these attitudes structure themselves in ordinary people’s minds. It doesn’t say anything about trauma, clinical anxiety, or conditions where either practice might need to be modified or supplemented by an actual clinician — that’s a conversation for a professional, not a questionnaire study.

The Scout, Not the Deserter

What the study actually vindicates isn’t a merger. It’s Seneca’s method: cross into the other camp, take what holds up, come back a Stoic rather than a convert. He did that by reading Epicurus and admitting the borrowed material was good. Karl, Fischer, and LeBon did it with a validated scale, a network model, and two replications on two continents.

The traditions aren’t rivals because they were never actually staking out separate territory in the first place — not down at the level of what a trained, attentive mind is capable of doing with a difficult moment. Seneca crossed over as a scout because he suspected as much. It just took until 2026 for someone to bring back a map.

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This post discusses psychological research on Stoic and mindfulness measures. It isn’t a substitute for professional mental health guidance. If you’re navigating anxiety, trauma, or persistent distress, a therapist can help in ways a philosophy essay can’t.