A.K.A. A brief primer on recognising and quieting your Worries.
–The series- Introduction Net positive. Your attitude is your choice. Expect nothing. Do your best. Control the Controllables. – You are here.
Strap in. This is a good (long) one. We talk a little about the brain, our history, behaviours and more, on a topic I’m quite enthusiastic about. Plus I had fun drawing more pictures.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. – Mark Twain.
Short Story
I once read the line, “Control the controllables” somewhere, some day, but it stuck around. It’s self explanatory (I like things simple) In later life I got into reading some books on Stoicism and then made the connection. In short, most events and thoughts in life can be categorised into two (and a half) groups:
Group A – Things I have control over:
Group B – Things I have no control over:
Group C(ish) – Things I have some control, or nudgeability, or something around, and only influence a bit:
If I close my eyes, the problem goes away.
Realising that, with a rational approach, you can slot what happens in life into any of these groups goes a long way to alleviate you of your worries. It even works for stuff that hasn’t happened yet (or may never happen except in our minds.)
We’re going to focus on Group A & B.
Long Story
We worry.
As a species, that is one of our in-built traits that for the most part comes as part of the package deal. “Here’s some feet, those are your arms, the intestines do their own thing, and you’re going to worry. See ya later, have a good life”
Standard issue kit.
Back when we were living with Mr. T-rex and Ms Stegosaurus, the ability to worry kept us on our toes and able to be alert to the situation. This high stress state served a function, like most of our parts do or have done. It looked after us before we starved, it let us hear the breathing and growling of a predator, and it warned us of the coming change of a season (“Better find that cave with the good insulation this year!”)
Now that we have out-evolved, out-farmed and out-lived most of our worries, we should be plain sailing right?
That would be nice. However, as a species we have progressed technologically way, way, way faster (and then some) than our bodies and our primal systems have been able to keep up. Our bodies are still making sure that food scarcity won’t kill us, whereas our brains are fast at work trying to collectively get us to Mars/make viral 15 second videos on social media (it isn’t sure which one is more important yet).
So we worry about things still.
More often than not they aren’t the same life or death things that we used to worry about The same intensity is there because that Worry part of our brain needs to focus on something. Now that there’s no lion behind that tree and we can get warm with the press of a button, our Worry instead focuses on the modern day things which have happened, the things which are happening, and the things which may or may not happen in the near to far future.
That is a HEAP of things to be worrying about! “A heap? Oh man, I wasn’t really that aware of it before but now I’m anxious and stressed and it’s all because I’m reading this stupid passage with these simple pictures. What do I do now?” Let’s take a short break from Worry.
Lets Control the Controllables.
What are the Controllables?
Aside from being a Super Secret Boy Band, they can be defined as the things in our lives and existence that we absolutely have total influence over happening or not. No question about it. You are the builder, the creator, the driver, and the leader of them. These controllable things are unquestionably within your ability to do something about. The shortest way to understand a Controllable is to think of
Your thoughts.
Your actions (or reactions).
That’s about it.
Is anybody or anything else in direct control of those two things? Unlikely. You (your consciousness inside your head) are the ‘middle-man’ as it were between outside events and inside reactions.
(Unecessary Side note: Just while we’re poking the subject with a stick, re-read that little bracket just above there. “Your consciousness inside your head”. The real ‘you’ is not really that meat sack we call your body or the things it’s flailing around doing. The ‘you’ is an interpretation of ‘stuff’ that is pieced together in the rooms around your brain, and ‘you’ only exist in there. Even the world in front of you is just what your brain is interpreting at this current point in time, thanks to your senses bombarding it with all kinds of inputs. ‘You’ exists in total darkness, silence, and solitude, and you’re always there, just being conscious inside that skull sitting atop the body you inhabit. Interesting way to think of things. Anyway, thanks for reading this bit, have fun carrying on.)
So any commands, actions, impulses, behaviours, internal or external have to go through You before they’re made reality.
If I may encourage you to take a moment, and do just one thing today, it would be to take a breath, slow down, and read that sentence two more times. Really let it sink in word for word. (Of course ‘You’, you little middle-man, are in control so you can do whatever you darn well please).
What that means is you are the doer of your do’s and the thinker of your thoughts. (Thanks Andy Cope) And while some of those actions and thoughts rightly and usefully take up a strong role in our lives and heads, if we don’t feel that they are productive then we have the power to tell them, “No. Thank you for being here, but you can move along.”
Whether they’re a one-off in-the-moment flash of emotion, or a long-standing character taking up too much space inside, there is always an ability inside us to remain in control. Road rage is a choice. Shouting at inanimate objects is a choice. Any kind of hissy fit is a choice. Because all of your thoughts and reactions have to be approved by You. Some might take a longer time and more encouragement to leave (and also may need generous dollops of professional theraputic help), but most can be asked to wait right there, and then say goodbye in the moment.
The beautiful thing after that, is we can enjoy the peace created from the void of that thought, or it can be replaced with something positive we’ve chosen to focus on! As much as we are in control of those less helpful thoughts, we are even more capable of tidying up the brain-neighbourhood, giving a good lick of paint to the drab and tired neuron walls and planting some fresh bulbs of Good Thinking Habits. At any time. At any place. At any stage in our lives. Saying thank you is a choice. Finding a solution is a choice. Being patient is a choice.
It requires effort. It is a constant practice. And like any habit we choose to form, the more we practice it, the easier and more subconscious it becomes (One might say ‘habitual’!)
Now then, what is on the other side of the coin? Anything which isn’t a Controllable is, by definition, an unControllable.
Woah woah woah hold on! Before you lock the door and throw away the key, give the family of unControllables a break. It’s not their fault you can’t control them! They’re just doing what they do, being what they are. We shouldn’t suddenly hate rain, or trees, or time simply because we can’t control it.
Something unControllable is quite simply anything which is outside of your zone of influence. That would encompass anything external, or outside, to You. Your thoughts are inside You, but the thoughts of others are inside them, and there’s no controlling those! We can do our very best to lead by example, and to ensure that our actions were our very best, but we sure can’t control the thoughts or actions of others.
Nor have we got any control over the ferocity of the rain, the mood of the drivers on the road, the temperature outdoors, how fast your postman is or any number of things nature and other people might have going on.
But we also cannot tell the Earth to stop spinning or the Sun to stop shining. Those things are beautifully reliable and ensure that there will always be a new day and with it, new beginnings.
Just because there is a whole realm in our lives which we cannot control does not mean that the idea is bad. Instead, it can give a feeling of freedom and relaxation. We can’t control those things, so why spend our time and energy trying to? It is counter productive, when our energy can be spent on ourselves instead and reap twice the benefit if not more.
Why is this relevant?
Back to Worry.
When we have a good think about all the things we have no control over (outside of us things), and then focus our efforts on all the things we do have control over (inside of us things), we can begin to release the Worry from ourselves and alongside it, craft a better way of thinking and some delightful actions to go with them.
The magic of this mental acrobatics is the soothing effect it has on nearly all worries. When you start to practice this way of thinking, it unlocks more mental energy which was otherwise bound up in Worry. It improves your decision making efforts. It relaxes you and in turn increases peoples appreciation of time spent with you. It improves your outlook on life. And likely many more benefits which will be personal to you.
If you want a very simplified way of deciding, you can boil your method down to this:
“Can I control this thing? Yes? Then why worry about it when I can control it?” “Can I control this thing? No?! Then why worry about it? The worry will not make it any more controllable”
This is not to say that anything initially unControllable shouldn’t be approached with some amount of problem solving. That is where your Controllable side comes in; being faced with a difficult situation, you apply your thinking and reactions in a way that moves towards a solution.
These ways of thinking, these understandings of the brain, these methods of taming the animal within aren’t new. I’m not a psychologist, mental health professional, or die-hard Stoic (though they all have some characteristics which appeal to me) and nor am I here trying to write or tell anyone that which hasn’t been said a thousand times before, written a thousand times more than that, or studied and shared by folks deeper in this field than I currently am. There are some astonishing books out there, and quite honestly I wouldn’t have been inspired to put brain to paper here if I had not read those books first! But little ol’ regular me has pieced some of this stuff together and found it pretty useful, so I’m hoping you’ll get a bit of satisfaction from it too.
It’s all an ongoing practice.
Keep the piece(s of your brain as together as you can)
-Frank
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