The Fear of Losing Control
By: Mya Grace Gurrin
Tags: Control, Fear Of Failure, Social Commentary, Psychology, Sociology

A lack of control over our life and future instils us with fear. For if we don’t know what will happen, how do we know how to act? The concept of free-will, that we have agency over our actions and decisions is a central tenant in western culture. Except, we have a strange way of showing it. The majority of us spend one third of our lives in jobs we hate and spend money on things we don’t really want or need (that’s on you advertising). Worryingly, while half of the world’s children complain about being forced into education, the other half would, and do, walk to the ends of the Earth to go to school.

Rewind a year and half. We all attended the world premiere of the shitstorm that was 2020, where uncertainty ran rampant, and control was handed over to COVID-19 and the arguably incompetent hands of the government. “Stay indoors”, “Protect the NHS” were plastered across TVs, radio stations and even traffic signs. This accentuated level of restriction sparked an initial minority to complain about their human rights, or lack thereof in this instance, claiming that: “we do not live in a dictatorship and cannot be forced to stay at home.”

Newsflash, we certainly can.

In fact, the frustration some felt against their governments mimicked the seemingly eternal frustration people living in a dictatorship actually feel for their entire lives. Women unable to leave the house without their husband’s permission, girls prohibited from going to school and homosexuals still stoned to death, or hung is the harsh reality for those in certain countries. The people don’t agree with it, nor do they want to choose to obey, but they have to. Or else, it’ll be their execution made public.

In a liberal society, we control our lives. And some control it to the very last detail. You must get all A*. You must go to Cambridge University. You must get a job as a lawyer by age 26, a swanky house by age 28 and married with a supermodel partner by 30. This is only achieved by studying 8 hours a day, going to the gym at 6 o clock in the morning, only eating raw foods (except on Christmas, because even control freaks deserve a break) and ultimately living a fairly miserable and monotonous life to achieve a goal which may or may not be accomplished not due to your own incapability’s but external factors. You also don’t even know if being a lawyer, having a fancy house and marrying a supermodel will even make you happy. Given the statistics, you probably won’t.

We are the authoritarian government in our own lives. We set rules, regulations, often unfair ones which limit rather than enable. We get frustrated at ourselves for them and get even more frustrated when we almost inevitably fail at some point because people aren’t perfect. And that is the crux of certainty. Nothing can ever be perfect; there will always be someone or something that appears to be better. While striving for happiness and contentment is not a crime, burning yourself out in the pointless quest for perfection is a crime to yourself. And unlike the people living under dictators who can’t escape their situation, we can. We must learn how to escape the dictator within our minds to allow us to give up a certain amount of control, make mistakes and learn. In this article I will cover how to accept that we can’t control every aspect of our lives to try and give an insight into what life could be like without Kim Jong Un in your mind.

How much are we really in control?

Every decision you make is within your control, from what time you get out of bed to the house you live in. But if we control our decisions, how come we are often so dissatisfied with them? This is because as we make decisions, we are contemplating the pros and cons, the right and wrong, legal, or illegal. You can’t simply decide to do whatever you want simply because you want to. You may want to have a lie-in but if you don’t get up at 7, you’ll be late for work, so you decide to get up at 7 anyway. You may want to live in a beach house in Bali but because you can’t afford to you chose to live in a 2-bed townhouse. You may want to kill your co-worker for chewing loudly but you can’t, because the law says so. These are all 100% your decisions. You could be late for work, you could rob a bank to live in Bali and you could strangle your co-worker so they can never chew again. But you don’t. Because thankfully we are more rational than we are instinctive.

However, some people are more inclined to simply ‘follow the crowd’ and go along with the decisions of others. Clinical psychologist Julian Rotter coined the theory of Locus of control in the 1950s. He suggested that people have either an internal locus of control, in which you believe you are responsible for your actions and their consequences, or an external, which is when you believe that your actions and their consequences are largely out of your control. Everyone falls somewhere on this scale, residing perhaps at highly internal or somewhere fairly in the middle. Those with an external locus of control blame fate or external factors for their actions and behaviours, making them more susceptible to social influence and peer pressure. In other words, they don’t believe they are in control of their life so are fine with letting others control it. After all, if you’re not in control of your actions then it’s not your fault if someone insists you rob a bank with them to buy a house in Bali. Therefore, we still need to believe we have control over our lives to some degree, or else a real-life purge would be the movie of 2022. Perhaps that’s what control is: an illusion constructed to make (or at least try to make) humans behave.

We have all, at some point in our lives, thanked an invisible being for something. Whether it be making you slightly late leaving the house which meant you narrowly escaped a car crash, to more important matters of thanking God, no matter your religious status, that a sick loved one gets better. The entity to whom you are grateful may be a type of God, fate, simple coincidence or ‘someone watching over you’, but they are still someone we blame for consequences that we don’t feel we have control over. This could be a lack of self-esteem, self-awareness, or numerous other factors. The truth is within a modern society, while we have control over the majority of our decisions, many are still left up to chance. We simply cannot control everything which can make life pretty scary. We can’t just do whatever we instinctively want because we have financial, social, and legal restraints. Some people are in the right place at the right time, and it’s still proven that in the world of work rich white men are significantly more successful. Not because of aptitude but luck of their race and gender. We can’t control that. But it might be to the detriment (or help, you lucky bastards) us and our prospects. We are all puppets to the media, clicking and clicking because we just can’t help ourselves because bloody advertisers and influencers are just too good at their jobs. The government controls a large part of our lives and the people around us do too. In fact, only a marginal amount of our lives is wholly controlled by us, which we tend to overdo and micromanage to make up for the lack of control in other areas. And we have to learn to live in an imperfect society and know that not everything will plan out to how we expect it.

And that’s okay.

Why too much control can be bad for you

Atychiphobia, the severe fear of losing control, is when controlling behaviour goes too far and really impacts on one’s life. It is often part of another mood disorder such as an anxiety or eating disorder, or if you’re a perfectionist. The phobia is normally obtained through trauma or vicariously, for example seeing your parent lose their shit over not being able to control the election of the orange man from across the pond….

While not everyone’s fears grow to fully fledged phobias, controlling behaviour over oneself or others still greatly impacts one’s quality of life. They can experience anxiety, sever self-criticism and troubled relationships due to their tendency to micromanage everything. They have cognitive distortions of ‘having to’ do something. Normally, the outcome of tasks have negative elements, frustrating the controller and keeping them in a vicious cycle of control and obsess as they feel consistently driven to get everything ‘just right’.

No matter where we resign on the spectrum of Locus of Control, we are all controlling about something. For most of us, this involves the future. What job you will get and when, or even what you’re going to have for dinner. What if the supermarket runs out of broccoli? Well, your entire diets fucked, of course! Or maybe, you should learn to enjoy green beans when life doesn’t go your way. Maybe that’s the important thing.

This may not sound like you yet, but if some part of you mirrors one or more of these tendencies you must quit while your ahead. The less control you inflict upon yourself the easier it is to surrender to control, or lack thereof.

How to deal with a lack of control

Influencers and society declare that if we all ‘meditate, sleep well and eat healthy’ then we’ll all be happy, mentally stable and singing kumbaya in the middle of a field holding hands. This, of course, is all crap spouted to get more money and doesn’t actually make you content if you’re not already mentally stable. Another suggestion from these omniscient influencers is to, get this, form a contingency plan for if things go wrong. Plan ahead *insert face palm*. Do not, I repeat, do not, do this if you are already controlling. It will simply manifest your need for more control and make you feel even more of a failure when things go awry. As George and Lenny found out: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” Which in English means, the more you plan the more you fuck up. Which makes sense really as you’ve got more to go wrong. People think it’s good to deal with an obsession with control by making people more controlling is beyond me, and really highlights the dyer state of our society. It’s like saying to an alcoholic, “You want to drink less then here, make a chart of the drinks you can have in different situations! Bloody Mary at breakfast and scotch in the evening, but if you’ve run out of scotch, whisky will have to suffice.” No, you idiots! The best cure of obsession and addiction is to go cold turkey. Completely surrender to it and never look back.

We live in a heightened state of fear with an unrealistic demand for certainty in an uncertain world where plans and strategies are paramount, and God help those who don’t have plans at all! Therefore, the logical way to oppose certainty is to face inherent and unavoidable uncertainty. The formidable task of moving forward without having a clue what the future holds. “But that’s crazy! I Can’t simply not look ahead and not plan, how do I know how to save money?” you exclaim to me through the paper. Sure, maybe it does seem a little crazy but that’s only because I’m asking you to face one of your biggest fears. I’m metaphorically asking you to jump of a cliff without a parachute. But I’m not. Epictetus is.

Stoic thinker ‘Epictetus’ said mental attitudes and desires are in your control. External matters however, such as approval from others, is not. It is the external control that we attempt to micromanage and fail marvellously at is what we need to stop. Existentialists call this ‘confronting your angst’, accepting that we are responsible for our choices about the future but not the future itself. Therefore, we can say that “I would like to be a lawyer”, but we cannot and should not say “I will be a lawyer because xyz will happen”. Because the likelihood is that there will be many different unexpected curve balls thrown at you, like a global pandemic, which you can’t plan for. All you can do is work hard in the present, make rational choices that you genuinely agree with and are happy about. Those choices don’t always have to benefit future you, because you’re not there yet, but as long as you’re not burning out your present self and taking away the life you live now then you will get there and learn what actually makes you happy instead of forcing yourself to do things that make you miserable.

It’s important to remember that we all have choices. There are often two types of people when it comes to choices which I will explain with your standard road metaphor. Blind fearlessness will just cross a road without looking both ways and the consequence is that they will likely get runover. They align more so with the Donald Trump’s and Peirce Morgan’s who don’t think before they spout a load of offensive, ignorant bullshit. Cowardice, however, will look both ways for an agonisingly long time so by the time they decide to cross the road they’ve missed what they were crossing the road for and wasted precious time on the side-lines. Both are unsustainable ways of living, but finding a middle ground, cultivating a rational courage that knows to look both ways before crossing the proverbial streets of life, knowing that they’ve done what they can but if a car is going 100mph and hits them it was the car’s fault not theirs: that is life’s Shangri-La. Courage requires finding this delicate balance between still being tentative and contemplative but not so much that you allow life to pass you by. To cultivate courage and overcome the fear of losing control a starting point is to:

1) Act on evidence, without demanding certainty. Evidence as we all know can still be disastrously wrong but it’s a good starting point for choice making and far better than often incorrect assumptions that are normally fed to us by the media, which we all know is just as reliable a source as Dominic Cummings.

2) Live by probabilities as nothing is a guarantee. Again, nothing is a given, and in a constantly changing society anything and everything could be thrown at you. You must simply take the challenges and use them as a means to grow and learn, not as personal failures. “I might be a lawyer” allows for flexibility and personal growth and change in decisions if you find that actually being a journalist is more for you.

3) Accept that you are imperfect and as a race we are inherently subject to mistakes. As a dancer, I know full well that nothing is ever perfect, but that doesn’t make me a bad dancer it simply makes me a dancer; someone who is lucky to always having something to work towards and improve. Otherwise, life would be pretty boring. Failing not the villain it is often depicted as, but a gift to help us learn and grow.

4) Strop ruminating now. Don’t put off surrendering to pointless controlling behaviour, because the longer it goes one for, the deeper you get and the harder it is swim to shore. Plus, it will give you weeks, months or years more time living a freer life that won’t be dictated by unnecessary goalposts in a world that’s often determined to set you off-course.

Try to make these things a habit, but accept that sometimes you need a bit of a routine to get you up in the morning. As long as you know that life is not the rose-tinted picture that the media portrays it to be and its more than normal to fail and go off course, then you’re already doing better than millions of others. Be grateful for what you have and don’t compare to the success of others. We all have different metric systems for success, so it’s another maladaptive way of making you feel unnecessarily bad. Life’s curveballs are to be expected and embraced as they are what we learn from the most, provide us with the best experiences and morph us into (hopefully) good people. Those spontaneous events where we’ve randomly ditched our plans and said ‘yes’ to something a little different are the times that stick out the most, and shouldn’t be neglected because of strict routines (unless it’s illegal, I don’t want to be sued). The world will not stop being tricky to navigate and life will never be simpler, which is why it’s so important to master courage and embrace failure now, before your siting in a nursing home at 85 saying: “if only”.