Control What You Can Control

Okay, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that you pretty much control nothing that goes on in your life. You can’t control what other people say or do or believe. You can’t control your genetics, the circumstances you were born into, or whether your mom was depressed and your dad was an alcoholic when you were growing up.

You can’t control the weather, the year you were born, the cultural values you inherit or the people you grow up around. You can’t control almost anything that happens to you — freak car accidents, lightning strikes, flash floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, solar flares or meteor strikes.

You cannot fully control whether or not you contract cancer, diabetes, lupus, Alzheimer’s or Hashimoto’s. You can’t control whether your kid dies. Your sister dies. Your friend dies. Your friend’s friend dies or that guy you slept with in college dies in a freak ice fishing accident.

You can’t control how people feel about you, what they hear about you, how they think about you, the way they see you, hear you, smell you, or even touch you.

You cannot fully control basically anything that goes on in this crazy ass world around you.

But here’s the good news. The one thing you do control is far more important than all the others.

You control your thoughts. You can always control your thoughts.

The Buddha once said that when you get struck by an arrow, you are injured twice. The first injury is the physical injury, the arrow piercing your skin causing you to bleed. But the second arrow is our beliefs and thoughts around the injury. We decide that we didn’t deserve to get struck by the arrow. We think about how much we wish we didn’t get struck by the arrow. We wish the arrow had never happened. And for those thoughts, we suffer.

This second injury is purely mental. And it is optional.

Psychologists often talk about something called “pain catastrophizing.”8 Pain catastrophizing is when someone takes something small — like someone disagreeing with their point of view — and blows it up in their mind to the point where they believe their whole life is over. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, because in the age of social media people do it all the fucking time. 

There are a few reasons people can be motivated to catastrophize. The first reason is simply that they’ve become so coddled and lazy and have nothing meaningful happening that the slightest inconvenience strikes them as a legitimate crisis.

But there are other reasons we catastrophize. One reason is that we can be socially rewarded for it via sympathy, attention, and a sense of importance. Many argue that social media has created a “victimhood culture” where people are emotionally rewarded for their grievances; therefore, people unconsciously try to be as aggrieved as possible.9

Catastrophizing can even be adopted as our identity — look at us, we’re that person who always has sOmeThInG cRaZyyyy going on! That’s how our family knows us. That’s how our co-workers know us. That’s how we know ourselves. And, like any identity, we become attached to it and protect it. It provides us a sense of security and knowing.

The problem is that catastrophizing fucks us all up. It’s making Buddha’s second arrow far larger and more painful than the first. When the Buddha’s point was that there is no second arrow — that it’s invented in our minds — we’re like, “No thanks, check out how many likes I can get on Facebook if I turn this into the biggest fucking brouhaha the world has ever seen!”

One thing I try to remind myself is that there is nothing in this life that I have suffered that millions (billions?) of other people have not also suffered and survived before me. Pain catastrophizing, much like obsessive rumination, conceals a narcissistic core. It operates on the assumption that your experiences are singular and special, that no one could possibly understand the pain and hardship you’ve endured, that somehow the world has conspired against you and only you.

You cannot control your pain. But you can control how you think about your pain. You can control whether you believe your pain is insurmountable or whether it’s a trifle. You can control whether you think you will never recover and be the same again, or whether you think you will bounce back fine.

Because pain is inevitable, but suffering is only in the mind.