What Does It Actually Mean to Be ‘In Control’?
The Illusion of Mastery
We spend a lot of our lives chasing control.
Control over our food choices.
Control over our routines.
Control over our emotions, our time, our reactions, even our weight.
It sounds noble, even admirable. Most people who tell me they just want to “get back in control” aren’t talking about power or domination. They’re talking about feeling grounded again. They want relief from the constant chaos of the world and the chaos inside their own heads. But if you dig a little deeper, that desire for control often comes with something heavier hiding underneath it: fear.
We think control will save us from failure, judgement, or regret. That if we can just hold all the strings tightly enough, we’ll finally stop making mistakes. We’ll stop disappointing ourselves. But that’s not how life, or the human brain, works. The harder we try to hold on, the more brittle we become.
In the gym and in life, I’ve seen it over and over. People gripping routines, macros, or expectations like lifelines. They think control means perfection, so the moment something slips, the skipped workout, the untracked meal, the missed target, they spiral. They don’t just lose trust in their plan, they lose trust in themselves.
But here’s the truth I’ve had to learn the hard way: what most of us are craving when we say we want control isn’t mastery or rigidity. It’s trust.
Self-trust.
The kind that lets you bend without breaking when things don’t go to plan.
Real control isn’t about micromanaging every detail. It’s about knowing you’ll be okay when things don’t go exactly how you expected. It’s the steadiness that comes from awareness, not from force.
And that difference changes everything.
What We’re Really Protecting Ourselves From
When clients come to me desperate to “get control back,” I can almost hear the exhaustion behind it. They’ve been white-knuckling life for a while. Usually, what they’re actually fighting isn’t a lack of willpower, it’s the voice in their own head.
The inner critic. The one that narrates every perceived failure in high definition.
That voice convinces us that if we can just build enough structure and discipline, maybe we can silence it. If we follow the plan perfectly, maybe it won’t have anything to attack. But control that comes from fear isn’t control at all. It’s a cage we build to keep the critic quiet.
The problem is, those rules and rigid boundaries rarely last. Life intrudes. Someone gets sick. Work explodes. We miss a session or grab something off-plan because it’s what’s available, and suddenly the critic’s right there again, reminding us we’ve failed.
Oprah Winfrey once said, “What we dwell on is who we become.” That’s not about toxic positivity or pretending things are fine when they’re not. It’s about noticing where our attention lives. If all we notice are the missteps, we start to see ourselves through the lens of our mistakes.
Most of us aren’t trying to control our food, our schedule, or our emotions. We’re trying to control the shame that shows up when we don’t live up to our own impossible standards.
That’s why I try to steer my clients toward balance instead of punishment. Because if your definition of control depends on never missing, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of failure.
You can’t out-discipline the human condition.
The Serenity Paradox: What Can and Can’t Be Controlled
There’s a line I come back to often, from the serenity prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
That wisdom part? It’s the hardest one.
We live in a world that trains us to believe everything is our responsibility. Productivity culture tells us that if we just wake up earlier, hustle harder, meal prep better, and manage our mindset, we can avoid pain and disappointment. It’s a comforting illusion, because if it’s all on us, then maybe we can fix it all too.
But that illusion is fragile. Life is unpredictable. People will say things that hurt you. Your body will change. Plans will fall apart. And if your sense of control depends on eliminating uncertainty, you’ll spend your life fighting battles you can’t win.
The Stoics understood this centuries ago with an idea expressed best (in my opinion) much later by William Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” We can’t control what happens, but we can control how we respond.
That might sound like emotional distance, but it’s not about numbing out. The danger with trying to control your reactions too tightly is that you start to mute everything. The lows, yes, but also the highs. I’ve seen people work so hard to protect themselves from pain that they stop allowing joy to reach them too.
It’s like being on antidepressants that flatten every emotional edge (and I say this as someone who has been there). You stop breaking down, but you stop soaring too.
For some people, the middle ground, calm, consistent, neutral, feels like safety, and that’s okay. For some, the trade-off of losing the highest highs is necessary to endure the lowest lows. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing a different path of experience. For many, survival depends on that even keel, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The goal here isn’t to prescribe how anyone should experience life, but to recognise that control looks different for everyone.
For those who can, though, the challenge is to stay open. To experience the joyful highs fully, while remembering they’re fleeting. And to ride out the lows with the same awareness that they will pass too.
Control isn’t about avoiding emotional weather. It’s about learning to hold your footing in the storm without convincing yourself the rain will never stop.
Self-Talk: The First Sign of Real Change
When clients start softening their grip on control, the first thing that shifts isn’t their habits. It’s how they talk to themselves.
It changes from “I suck” to “that sucked, but I got through it.”
It’s subtle but profound.
That small change in language signals something powerful: non-identification. It’s the final step in the RAIN process (Recognise, Acknowledge, Investigate, Non-identify), and it’s where real transformation begins.
Instead of defining themselves by the setback, they start to see it as an experience, not an identity. The bad day doesn’t mean they’re bad. The missed workout doesn’t erase their progress. The stress binge doesn’t make them hopeless.
I’ve been through this myself more times than I care to count. The voice that says, “You should have known better,” still shows up. But now I can answer it with, “Yeah, maybe. But I’m learning.”
When we stop identifying with our slip-ups, we free ourselves to move forward. And as that language shifts, consistency usually follows. Because it’s not guilt driving the behaviour anymore, it’s self-respect.
That’s when identity starts to change.
The tricky part is that we rarely celebrate this phase. We don’t pause to acknowledge, “Hey, I’ve changed,” when we reach that consistency. We don’t fully integrate that new self-concept, and then we are both ill-prepared for the inevitable times when we get knocked off track AND not empowered to take the next step on the journey.
Acknowledging your progress isn’t arrogance. It’s reinforcement. It teaches your brain that the new pattern is safe to keep.
So yes, celebrate the fact that you handled a stressful week better than last time. Recognise that your inner dialogue is kinder. Notice that you’ve learned to pause before reacting.
That’s not losing control. That’s gaining it, just not the kind you expected.
Redefining Control: Acceptance, Not Perfection
The old definition of control doesn’t work.
Rigid perfection is a mirage that will leave you dying in the desert. You can chase it all you want, but every time you think you’ve reached it, it disappears on the horizon.
Real control isn’t about flawless execution. It’s about direction. About awareness. About choice.
It’s the ability to make better decisions most of the time, and to make peace with the fact that sometimes “most” is all you get.
It’s what you do after the moment of failure that defines it.
Do you spiral into self-criticism and start over on Monday, or do you take a breath, recalibrate, and move forward?
I’ve seen this play out in nutrition all the time. Someone goes off-plan at lunch and figures the day is ruined, so they may as well write off dinner too. That’s not losing control, it’s SURRENDERING it.
REAL control is saying, “That wasn’t ideal, but I can make my next choice better.”
It’s what happens in the space between stimulus and response.
The same applies to emotional control. You can’t stop frustration, grief, or fear from showing up. They’re human. But you can choose whether you let them drive the bus. You can choose not to hand them the keys.
And that kind of control doesn’t come from force. It comes from practice.
Every time you respond with awareness instead of reaction, you build resilience. Every time you pause, breathe, and decide, you reinforce trust in yourself.
When that trust grows, the need for rigid rules starts to fade. You stop needing perfect circumstances to feel steady. You become capable of making good decisions even when things aren’t perfect, and that’s the definition of real control.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not something you can post about. But it’s the difference between feeling perpetually at war with yourself and feeling at peace in your own skin.
That’s the kind of control worth chasing.
The Strength to Bend
Maybe “being in control” isn’t the goal after all.
Maybe it’s knowing when to loosen your grip.
Because control, as we usually define it, is exhausting. It’s a constant state of vigilance. Every variable becomes a threat. Every deviation feels like failure.
But life doesn’t care about our spreadsheets and systems. It has its own rhythm, and it will keep changing no matter how hard we try to manage it.
What if, instead of chasing control, we aimed for resilience?
Resilience doesn’t demand perfection. It allows for movement. It says, “You can bend without breaking.”
When we talk about bending, people often hear weakness. They think letting go means giving up. But bending is not surrender, it’s adaptability. It’s the capacity to move with life rather than brace against it.
A tree that refuses to bend in the wind will eventually snap. The one that sways, even under pressure, survives the storm and keeps growing. That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.
It’s the same in our lives. When we allow ourselves to bend, to adapt, to pivot, to recover, we preserve the strength to keep going. We conserve energy instead of burning it all trying to hold everything still.
Maybe the goal was never control at all, but resilience, the grace to bend when life shifts. Because life doesn’t reward control, it rewards awareness, adaptability, and the courage to keep showing up.
Reflection Prompts
This week, I’d encourage you to notice where you might be mistaking rigidity for stability.
Where are you gripping too tightly?
Where could you breathe a little more space into your routines, your expectations, or your self-talk?
If you want to take this a little deeper, here are a few questions to sit with this week:
When I say I want to be “in control,” what am I really trying to protect myself from?
Where in my life am I gripping too tightly out of fear of losing progress or approval?
How would it feel to trust myself a little more, even when things don’t go to plan?
What would “bending without breaking” look like for me in practice?
Write it down. Reflect on it. Sit with it.
Control may not be what you think it is, but self-trust just might be what you’ve been looking for all along.