“You may not be able to control every situation and its outcome, but you can control how you handle it.” ~Unknown
Life is often crazy and rushed. Sometimes it’s hard to feel in control. It can be completely confusing and leave us feeling lost.
This is exactly where I was two years ago. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I feel hopeless, disoriented, and completely lost every day.
I felt like I had no control over anything in my life, including my thoughts, emotions, and actions.
I had just returned from my local doctor’s appointment, holding a prescription for antidepressants and the first pills making their way down my throat, when something dawned on me.
I realize this is not the answer. I realized that the idea that medication could solve all my problems was not only a false fantasy, but also deeply ironic. Because by taking them, I am actively choosing to make the root of the problem worse.
By taking this drug, I would be sacrificing more freedom and control. Essentially, I put my future in the hands of a daily pill.
I’m not saying antidepressants are bad or suggesting that anyone should stop taking them, as they are beneficial to many people’s mental health. They were just things I realized I could avoid accepting by solving my problems in alternative ways.
I believe it was at this moment that everything changed for me. That’s when I realized I was the cause of the problem and only I could fix it, so the journey began.
Since then, I have been happier than I have ever been, with a new sense of control and an unshakable sense of confidence.
Here are four ways I manage to gain that sense of control. I hope these steps help you do the same.
1. Take responsibility
Taking responsibility is one of the most important things a person can do, but it may not be what you think. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about taking on responsibility? Is this an admission of your negative behavior? Is this admitting when you do something wrong?
I want to focus on things that are not your fault.
This may be confusing at first. You may wonder why someone would be held responsible for something they did not cause.
Just because something isn’t your direct fault doesn’t mean you can’t take responsibility for it. In my case, I blame my childhood and upbringing for how I feel. I thought that because certain things had happened to me and they were not my fault, I was somehow entitled to suppress my feelings and react negatively to them.
But who benefits from this mentality? This certainly doesn’t do me any good. In order to get better, I have to take responsibility for my own ways. Only then will any meaningful change occur.
I’m not saying you have yourself to blame. This actually eliminates blame entirely because it doesn’t matter who is at fault. If you are the one who suffers the consequences, you are also the one who needs to take responsibility.
The moment something negative happens, it’s over; it cannot be changed. Therefore, the only thing you have to do is deal with the consequences as best you can. Refuse to stay bitter and resentful, and instead, learn and grow.
The next time something negative happens in your life, ask yourself: “Am I handling this in the best way possible?”
2. Do difficult things
When I started doing hard things, my life started to change for the better.
Life is hard, as far as I know, it always has been. Have you ever seen or heard of someone going through an extremely difficult time in their life? These people are always mentally strong and rarely affected by difficult times.
The bad news is that we can’t fake these tough moments, nor can we recreate them. But we can raise the difficulty bar in other ways. I mean, people actually built a building and put a bunch of heavy metal stuff in it and had other people pay for it and move it.
I’m not saying you have to go to the gym; I’m just saying you have to go to the gym. I’m just saying that in order to reduce the impact of life’s inevitable assaults, we can actively increase our tolerance for discomfort so that when they do come, we’re far less affected.
This gives us control because we cannot stop life from hurting us, but we can actively choose to reduce the pain it causes.
Some of the difficult things I started doing included running, taking cold and ice baths, and following a healthier diet.
Start incorporating everyday difficult things into your daily life and you’ll notice the difference.
3. All victories are equal
When pursuing a goal, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking about achieving it, but this will only lead to an overwhelming feeling of distance between you and your goal. You’d better make the focus smaller. Instead of comparing your current self to your ideal self, focus on the next thing that will bring you closer to the person you want to be.
Not only does this eliminate the feeling of distance, but it also constantly makes you feel like a winner. Trust me, all wins are the same, so you might as well celebrate it.
What does it mean that all wins are equal?
There is a concept that I am very interested in recently, which is the hedonic treadmill.
According to Wikipedia, “The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the tendency in humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite significant positive or negative events or life changes.”
This means we get used to it quickly. Let’s say your goal is to lose fifty pounds. Losing the first pound is equivalent to losing fifty pounds.
The same goes if your goal is to reach 1 million subscribers or earn your first £1 million (or US dollars).
To lose fifty pounds, you must have lost forty-nine pounds. To reach 1 million subscribers or your first £1 million you must hit the number 999,999 at some point.
I’m not underestimating these achievements – not at all. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have high goals either.
But I would say that their value only comes from the context in which they are applied. People fail to understand that the value attached to the goal was assigned by a past version of themselves and a completely different version experienced them, so essentially, the value is gone.
You who set goals and you who achieve them are used to two completely different standards. By achieving your goal, you then eliminate all value from it.
The difference between 999,999 and 1 million is 0.0001%, but no one actually celebrates reaching the former.
This is why people feel so empty when they finally achieve their goals.
To avoid this and constantly feel like a winner, you should focus on the next step and celebrate every victory.
4. Discipline=Freedom
You may have heard about discipline and all its benefits many times before because it is crucial to adopt discipline if you want to succeed in anything in life. However, what I am going to talk about is the positive aspects of discipline that no one knows or talks about.
That’s the sense of freedom that comes with it.
There’s an obvious way self-discipline can bring freedom: by avoiding procrastination and completing tasks immediately, we end up having more time.
But discipline brings us a deeper sense of freedom.
As I’ve already mentioned, we all inevitably experience uncomfortable feelings in our lives, usually due to things that are completely beyond our control.
Now, let’s say you let these feelings stop you from doing what you know you should do. You let external circumstances determine how and where your life goes.
Having the discipline to continue doing what needs to be done, regardless of the external circumstances or feelings that may follow, will give you the deepest sense of freedom.
Without discipline in these situations, you essentially lose all sense of control.
One of the most important things I felt when I started building discipline was a wave of freedom that I had never felt before, although I didn’t know it at the time.
From the outside, everything in my life is exactly the same—no outward appearance has changed. Yet everything is there inside. I feel free. Taking control of your life means that suddenly nothing is permanent and you no longer feel helpless.
As mentioned above, doing hard things is a great way to build discipline because they are most likely the last things you want to do. But discipline can also be built through smaller, more mundane things, like waking up early or refusing to nap, starting a daily meditation practice, or learning a language instead of endless scrolling.
These are some of the little things I do to build more discipline. Yours may look completely different. The trick is to find something productive, challenging, and something to stick with—and then a sense of control and freedom will follow.
About James Davis
James Davies is the author of GrowthHub, a weekly blog that offers amazing and fun self-improvement insights and ideas. After overcoming a lifelong anxiety disorder in a doable way, he embarked on a journey of self-development that sparked his interest in how to change a person for the better. James explores these ideas through practice and action, and shares them through writing articles to help others do the same.
