What to do When Life Feels Out of Control

Life most often feels out of control when we are focused on external events or what other people have that we don’t. Another culprit is looking too far into the future. These habits lead to feeling overwhelmed, afraid, out of control, and trapped. The first step is to focus on right now today. What can you do today that will make tomorrow better? If this thought creates negative feelings, remind yourself that it can be something small. It can be as small as drinking a glass of water to ensure you are well hydrated. The size of the action does not matter. What is significant is finding a starting point that reminds you of the choices you have. A starting place for regaining control, reducing stress, and improving your life. Focusing on what you can do today also reduces the scope and scale of the impact of your actions. This means we stop focusing on everything that is wrong and out of our control. By asking ourselves what we can do today, it makes our actions time-limited. It also reduces what we are trying to impact by focusing on what we can do today to make tomorrow better. Not the rest of our lives, just tomorrow.

By limiting our focus, we naturally reduce judgment. If we are just focusing on a 24 hour period of time, we no longer have the weight of the rest of our lives and the judgments that come with that time frame. We also simultaneously satisfy and reduce the urgency of now. The urgency of now tells us that, if we do not accomplish all of our goals right now, we are failing. By focusing on a 24 hour period of time, we satisfy the need to take action now, however we remove the belief that we need to fix everything today because the goal is improvement and not completion. We are not trying to fix all of our problems today: we are simply trying to make tomorrow a bit better, even if only by a little bit. By focusing on small things we can do today to make tomorrow better, we create the permission structure necessary to chip away at larger goals. Most large goals need to be broken down into smaller steps to be achievable. There are very few things in life that can be accomplished all at once. This is also true of being in control. What we can control and influence are a series of small things that add up.

By reducing the scale of our vision from everything and nothing to small or bite-sized pieces, we quickly shift away from what others have control of to what we control. Using the water example, if we decide to drink more water, we are in total control of when and how that happens. There are thousands of small decisions we make every day that reflect what we are in control of. If we start looking at small changes, they add up over time and bring into focus all of our choice points and decisions we must make. They begin to paint a picture of how we got to where we are now and how we can change the things that feel overwhelming. We can make different choices. Our lives are a series of small choices that combine to have large consequences. Taking back control is about actively choosing what you do and do not do. Sometimes the thing we need to change to make tomorrow better is what we say yes and no to. By making small changes today, we can make big improvements for our tomorrow.