What are you focusing on? Things you can’t control, or those you can?

The other day I was chatting with someone who was telling me all about a co-worker who, in their opinion, wasn’t pulling their weight at work. They also told me about a conversation they had with someone over the phone and how they didn’t like that other person’s opinion or the tone of how they expressed it. All of these things were so prevalent in their mind that it was stressing them out and keeping them awake at night.

In another conversation, a client told me about how angry he gets when someone cuts him up in the car, or if he thinks they drive too slowly. That anger would lead to shouting and cursing. That emotion and those thoughts could take over his whole day.

And I think we could all reel off dozens of other examples; the way that e-mail was phrased, the look on someone else’s face, that worry about what others think about us, that thing that doesn’t go to plan, that person who is late, that response we get that isn’t what we expected or wanted, that person who didn’t say thank you when we let them pass or we did them a kind deed.

It’s so easy to get caught in the cycle of focusing on things that we can’t do much about and then finding that those thoughts and that focus leads to us experiencing wave after wave of negative emotion.

“Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us” 

If we want to experience more happiness, joy and tranquility then we want to make sure we are focusing on the things that are up to us, those things that we can control.

Things like are thoughts, feelings and behaviours are things that are either up to us now, or they are things that we can learn to be in control over (e.g. through such things as hypnotherapy). The more we learn to be in control over these things, the more all of the above examples become things that do not harm us by creating negative emotions, thoughts and feelings in how we think, feel, act and react.

That’s not to say that those things are necessarily ‘right’ or kind or nice in any way. And it’s not to say that they are acceptable or to be condoned. What it does mean though is that we get better and better at dealing with things, handling things and coping with things in a way that doesn’t make us feel so bad.

We may not get it right every time but we can certainly get better at only focusing on the things that are within our control and we can stop worrying so much about the things outside our control.

Or as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, ‘Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.” Instead of worrying about the things we can’t control, which leaves our happiness in the hands of other people and circumstance, we can instead focus on the things we can control.

That’s what my latest vlog is all about. Click on this image and have a watch here, right now:

As much as I believe that this is a distinction we should all strive towards, we have to remember to be kind when we forget or don’t quite hit the mark. I’ve talked in a previous blog about how I’m waiting for a test to find out if I have a genetic cancer gene and, while I wait, I have to sometimes deliberately remind myself that it’s completely outside my control, that it will be what it will be and no amount or worrying or conjecture will alter anything at all.

When I used to have social anxiety, my brain was jam packed with worries about what other people thoughts about me and my worry that they were judging me negatively in some way. It dominated my thoughts. But of course, no matter what we do, at the end of the day we realise that we can’t control what they think or how they think it. We can seek to influence it but we can’t control it, can we?

When I walk to work it’s almost guaranteed that some parents walking their kids to the nearby school will just ignore me if I politely stand to one side to let them pass (yet I believe that being polite is important so I continue to do it). When I drive to bootcamp it’s a regular feature that someone will cut across me at the roundabout, or pull out when they didn’t really have the time and space to do so, or they’ll go 30 mph when the road is clear and safe for double that.

When we think about it, is it really worth us experiencing anger and frustration over such things? Do we really need to worry about things we can’t control?

To your success

Dan Regan

Hypnotherapy in Ely & Newmarket

Need help to overcome worry and anxiety and improve your focus? You can book your free consultation here: Free Hypnotherapy Consultation

Find out what other people have said about their hypnotherapy sessions here: Hypnotherapy Testimonials; or read more articles about hypnotherapy for anxiety and worry here: Anxiety Articles

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