Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2025
The False Illusion of Control
By Stan Prachniak, MBA/>
There are many things in life that give us the illusion of control over a variety of situations. But there is one that stands out more than others and can wreak havoc on your mental health if you choose to let it take over your thoughts. The illusion of control that I am talking about is worry. You may believe that if you focus on all of the possible outcomes or scenarios of a situation that you are somehow controlling that situation—you are not. Worry is not control. Worrying might feel like you are taking action, but worry is more like inaction.
Everyone has worried about something at one time or another in their life. It could have been something as small as what people might think about an outfit, or as big a potentially life-threatening situation. There is one thing that you should remember about any situation that you find yourself in. Worrying about a situation will not affect the outcome. You may feel like you are controlling what is happening because you are actively worrying about something, but in the concept of fight, flight, or freeze; you are frozen or stuck. In order to become unstuck, you have to learn how to control what you can control and let the rest go. It isn’t always going to be easy to do this because some situations you will encounter will have serious consequences. So, how can you transition from the inaction of worry to taking action and controlling what you can? The first step is to do a simple assessment of the situation that you are actively worrying about. As an example, let’s think back to when we were in school and had to take tests. If you were anything like me, then you probably worried more about a test the closer it came to being time to take it. And even after I had turned my test in, I worried. The worry didn’t go away until I got my grade back. That test lived rent free in my head for days. But what did my worry actually accomplish? Nothing positive, I can tell you that for certain. Worrying about a test only distracted me from other things in life and even caused some sleep deprivation. Worry can have a number of negative effects on your mental health.
As an example, let’s do a simple assessment of potential worries involved with the siuation of taking a test. The first step would be something like asking yourself, “what am I worried about?” in this instance, the major worry would be making a poor grade. After identifying the root cause of your worry, you would ask yourself something like, “what action can I take to alleviate this worry?” The first thing that comes to mind for me is preparation—study for the test. Studying (an actionable event) is taking control of what you can do in this situation. Spending mental energy on worrying, rather than studying, is a waste of your resources. The more prepared you are for the test, the less likely you are to worry about the outcome. Once you have finished taking the test, you have to let it go. At that point, there is nothing you can do to change how you did on that test.
Utilizing the two simple questions from the example above will allow you to distance yourself from a false illusion of control in many situations. They will also encourage to be proactive in many aspects of your life. Remember, worrying might make you feel like you are doing something but it is more likely keeping you stuck in “freeze” mode.
Freedom To Change offers a way for you to break free from the illusion of control that worry give you by employing what we call the ABCD method. This method encourages you to assess your beliefs about a situation, choose what you can do, and then do it. For more information on the Freedom To Change materials, visit www.freedom2change.org.
