For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been going back and forth between listening to a motivational speaker and reading a book about how our human desire to control everything leads to a great deal of anxiety.
Think positive.
If we want to do anything in life, we must believe that we have a certain amount of control over some things. In andition, there are also many things we can’t control but can influence. We can’t control other people, for example, but we can often influence them.
If we believe we have no control over anything or that we are doomed to failure from the outset, we won’t even try. If I write a book and publish it, it might succeed or it might not. But if I’m so discouraged and convinced of failure that I never write the book, I definitely won’t succeed. Hope and vision are necessary for motivation to try anything in the first place.
But don’t be obsessed with control.
On the other hand, if we try to control everything, the result will be a great deal of anxiety, because we can’t control everything. We can’t control other people. We can’t control the weather. We all deal with unexpected events. If we can’t trust God on some level, we will be very anxious people.
Learned Helplessness
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, some studies were done which focused on learned helplessness. Both human amd animal studies were done, and the results were the same: When faced with a problem over which the people or animals had no control, then placed in a similar situation where they did have control, both the people and the animals did not even try to solve the second problem. They had been taught to be helpless. They learned that they had no control last time, so they made no effort the second time around.
Two lessons can be learned here:
1. You can’t control everything. If you become obsessed with the need to control everything, you will only end up frustrated, discouraged, and anxious.
2. Your brain will make too big of a deal out of past situations that were uncontrollable, if you let it. If you start believing that you have no control at all, you will be defeated even when you could have been victorious. You will miss out on the many opportunities you could have taken.
This reminds me of the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wiadom to know the difference.