It’s a frustrating irony. You try harder and tighten your grip. You double down on doing everything “right.” And yet somehow, it leaves you feeling further away from the results you want.
You might assume the issue is control, but it’s actually the illusion of control. The illusion of control is putting your energy and emphasis on things that you can’t change while neglecting what you can. It’s exactly what we talk about in this podcast episode.
Many people spend excessive time pouring energy into things we were never meant to control in the first place. They muddy themselves in the God-space of the world. And when you do that, you end up exhausted, discouraged, and stuck. It’s the place where you work really hard but have nothing to show for it. And it’s not because you don’t have the power and ability to change, but because you’re doing it from the wrong space – controlling what you don’t have control over while ignoring what you do.
But when you shift your focus and place your energy on what is actually within your control, things begin to move and change. That’s where progress happens and where freedom exists.
And honestly, this is more than just health. It will shift your life.
Learning what you can control and letting go of what you can’t creates a kind of freedom most of us don’t even realize we’re missing.
The Illusion of Control
The illusion of control leads us to believe that our internal world is dictated by our external world. It tells us, “If I can just fix what’s around me, then I’ll finally feel the way I want to feel.”
This is why most people spend most of their energy and focus trying to control everything outside themselves, such as their circumstances, environment, and even other people. But that’s the opposite of where real control lives.
I can say from experience that I’ve spent a lot of my life believing that if my husband would just act a certain way, I could feel the way I wanted to feel. If things around me would just fall into place, then everything inside of me would too.
I put my control in what was outside of me, a.k.a., controlling my husband and my environment. And you already know where that led. To a lot of frustration, missed joy, and fighting battles I was never going to win. Because the truth is, trying to control what’s outside of you will always lead to loss. It may look like control, but it costs you your peace every time. Not to mention, it never actually gets you what you want.
Even something as simple as the weather can reveal this in us. We may not believe we can control it, but we still let it control how we feel. A gray day becomes a heavy mood. A change outside becomes a shift inside.
That’s the illusion.
When health becomes control.
The illusion of health shows up in health more than we realize.
For a long time, I believed that if I just did everything “right,” if I ate the right foods, worked out enough (or more than enough), and followed all the rules, I could control my health. To clarify, controlling my health really meant guaranteeing results.
I thought if I managed it closely enough, I couldn’t lose it. But I learned the hard way that control doesn’t work like that. Because, despite doing everything right, I still lost my health.
And that reality is devastating when you’ve built your life around the belief that every outcome is something you can control.
It’s easy to confuse micromanaging your diet and exercise with actually creating health. It feels productive. It feels responsible. But underneath it is this quiet belief: “If I do this perfectly, I can guarantee the result.”
But the truth is, we can’t.
We don’t have control over how our body responds.
We don’t have control over every outcome.
But we do have something else. Arguably, something better. We have influence.
What You Actually Control
Influence is where your real power lives. You are always influencing and being influenced. Take the food you eat. It might not be “changing” your body, but it is influencing it to change (for better or worse). When you start to see the power of influence, you can then make choices, which is your ultimate form of control.
At the end of the day, the only thing you truly have control over is your choices. You get to choose:
- How you show up.
- How you respond.
- What you focus on.
- What you think about.
- What actions you take.
That’s it.
And while that might feel limiting at first, it’s actually incredibly freeing. You’ll quickly learn just how powerful those choices are.
They’re what shape your life.
They’re what influence your health.
They’re what shift your perspective, even when circumstances don’t change.
Looking back, I can see how much time I spent trying to control my body. Attempting to force it into an outcome I wanted all without realizing that those very attempts were part of what was hurting me.
The truth is, we don’t have as much control as we think we do. But we also have far more power than we realize.
A different way to live.
What if health didn’t require you to try harder? Maybe what you need most is to let go just a little bit. Not to lose control, but to stop holding so tightly to the outcome and chasing control in places where it doesn’t exist, and put that emphasis on making the small daily choices that in the end change it all?
On this week’s “After The Show,” my husband and I break down what it looks like to stop controlling each other and start making choices that end up changing the entire picture.
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Resources from the show:
- How To Heal: A New Perspective on Change
- Why We Obsess Over The Scale (And What We Miss)
- A New Era of Self-Care Is Here
- The Best Wellness Plan (That Actually Works)
- The Positive Side To Dysregulation
