Mindfulness Techniques for Letting Go of Control
If there’s anything that’s certain in life, it’s that things will happen that are outside of our control. Sure, we can change our environments to reduce the chances of certain things happening and do our best to prepare for worst-case scenarios, but we can’t predict if (or when) they will happen.
As a result, mindfulness experts and psychologists often tout the benefit of letting go of control and accepting uncertainty. An excessive need to control can lead to unproductive stress, because it often puts people in an extended “fight or flight” mode. Here are 5 mindfulness techniques for letting go of control.
1. IDENTIFY YOUR TRIGGERS
The first step of letting go of control is to identify what triggers your need to control things. Do you find yourself anticipating the reaction of your coworkers who have said hurtful things to you in the past? Does your friend’s success lead you to question your own life and make you stressed out about whether or not you’ll experience something similar in the future? Once you realize what they are, you can start to experiment with methods that prevent you from going down into a worry spiral. One simple method is to take a breath and remind yourself that the need to control doesn’t arise from a true “fight or flight” situation.
2. DO A “MENTAL DUMP” OF YOUR FEELINGS
Sometimes, the need to control is a reaction to unpleasant feelings. Emotions are difficult to regulate, and you might be craving a sense of certainty because you don’t want bad feelings to take over.
But unprocessed and suppressed emotions don’t help you feel a sense of contentment. In fact, they do the opposite by making you more prone to stress, anxiety, and irrational outbursts. One way to process your feelings is to write it all down and do a “mental dump” of what you’re thinking. This can help “get the negativity out of your system”.
3. EMPLOY SOME DISTANCE
Sometimes, your need for control is related to other people’s thoughts and actions. You need to let go of the anger that makes you want to control other people’s actions in the first place. Often, when you’re angry with somebody, you tend to think repeatedly about the thing they did to you, which keeps you emotionally engaged with the way you were wronged. Psychologists call this repetitious thought pattern ‘rumination,’ after the term for how cows chew their cud.”
The best way to deal with rumination is to create some psychological distance. By pushing yourself to see it from the outside, you’ll be coaxing your mind to think of the situation more abstractly. As a result, the specific details of what that person did will be less available to you, and so they’ll have less influence on your emotional state.
4. CHOOSE TO DEAL WITH IT IN THE FUTURE
If your need to control what you know to be irrational worrying, perhaps one of the best ways to deal with it is to dedicate a time in the future to worry about it.
Choosing to dedicate time to “worrying” actually makes you less likely to worry. In turn, it become easier for you to be more at peace with uncertainty and unpredictability.
5. LEARN TO SEE UNCERTAINTY AS A PART OF LIFE
We tend to ask questions and generate “what-ifs” as an attempt to introduce some certainty when we’re uncomfortable with the unknown. But a more mindful way to approach this is to build tolerance for uncertainty. Then, you can slowly identify which of your worries are “useful” and which are making you “unnecessarily miserable.” You can choose to let go of the latter and prepare “strategic solutions” for the former.