Praemeditatio malorum (Greek προενδημεῖν τοῖς πράγμασιν, προμελετᾶν) is the exercise of representing in advance the troubles that may occur. The aim is to deprive future events of "novelty" (καινόν, Med. 7.1; 8.14), whose suddenness is what usually generates a passion. The one who has imagined exile, illness, loss, and an encounter with bad people in advance meets them without shock, as already familiar. This is not pessimism but a hygiene of impressions (φαντασίαι): an exercise in readiness.

In the morning or in the evening, represent concretely and in detail the course of the day to come and the difficulties one will have to face: incomprehension, ingratitude, failure, illness, the death of someone close. Not abstractly ("anything can happen"), but vividly and concretely. As an additional step, work out in advance one's rational stance toward each such possibility: what the qualification of the event will be as a good or an evil, how the distinction between what depends on us and what does not will operate. When the event arrives, it meets not an empty consciousness, but an already-prepared judgment.