Take Control: Become the Cause of your own Thoughts and Actions
Routinely experience the feeling that you can tackle any task you care to take on; that you’ll get it finished and feel satisfaction with the result.
Personal Agency
The technical term for that state of mind — where you feel so in control — is Self-Efficacy: having Agency.
“Among the mechanisms of personal agency, none is more central or pervasive than people’s beliefs in their capability to exercise control over their own functioning and over environmental events”
Albert Bandura, Widely described as the greatest living psychologist, until his death in 2021. Originator of the concept of Self Efficacy (Agency).
Agency is a compound state, made up out of these qualities:
- Confidence — feeling sure that you have the skills and experience to complete the task or tasks in front of you.
- Energy — knowing you’ll have the strength and endurance — physical and/or mental to get the job done.
- Positivity — having the optimism and psychological fortitude to deal with any setbacks and keep going.
- Direction — owning a clear idea of: a) how you’re going to start and finish your project; b) knowing and believing in why you’re doing it.
A Powerful Example
When Hannibal was told it would be impossible to cross the Alps by elephant, his reply was a potent illustration of what a person bristling with Agency would say:
“I shall either find a way or make one.”
Why you need Agency
Do you want to get out of your own way and get stuff done? — the right stuff (for you), not just any old stuff? Whenever you’re looking back with pride at the results of a worthwhile job, well done, it was Agency which made that possible; it was Agency that got you over the finish line.
How to Protect what Agency you already have
Multiple factors and situations can conspire to block your Agency or to rob you of it. Listed below are some of the major causes and the bare minimum you should do to counter their effects.
Apathy/depression
This leads to (or from, it’s interchangeable) you losing faith in the value of your goals and in your ability to achieve them — robbing you of direction. There can be environmental causes — being broke or having a relationship breakdown for example — but there can just as often be neurological causes, especially if you’re not physically active.
“..EXERCISE is the most potent yet underutilized antidepressant” — Bill Phillips
At least take a stupid walk for your stupid mental health. Physical activity and a change of scene — like going outside — can interrupt Rumination, which can have a powerful effect on keeping you stuck.
Fatigue
Not getting enough quality sleep or being dehydrated will both rob you of energy and mental energy/resilience. Go to sleep an hour earlier and, during the day, drink an extra litre (2 pints or 30 ounces) of something that has no caffeine or sugar.
Bad news and negativity
It’s all around us — on rolling news channels and in social media. You may feel that you need to keep upto date on events, but to what end? Do these things directly affect you? Can you do anything about them? If not, anything you can do to limit your consumption will save you wasted time and help you maintain a more positive outlook. I’m not saying you should bury your head in the sand, just ration yourself and be more intentional. Maybe even try going cold-turkey for a week? Someone will soon tell you if anything important happens ..
Under-developed plans
Acknowledge that what you’re doing something complicated; break it down. To get your project finished or your goal realized, at any point you must know what specific practical action you need to take next that will move you a step closer. If you don’t do it already, set aside 15 minutes a day to think this through. Don’t let the thinking become an end in itself, but don’t go acting blindly either.
Under-developed ideas
If you haven’t properly gotten in touch with your true motivation, you might be mistakenly aiming for things you think you ought to want, but deep down don’t really care about. Easy stuff is .. easy — no problem — but in order to get anything challenging done or anything that will take a while, you really need to want it. Want it so badly that you can taste it. Otherwise, the urge to give up can be too hard to resist. Elbow out 30 minutes to sit and think — to connect only with what really matters to you and to no-one else.
How to develop your Agency
Find Joy, Celebrate It
Joy is the gateway emotion to your best self and the ultimate in Agency, not the other way around. Find joy and you will naturally find your way to Agency. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you can just get everything under control, then you will be happy. It doesn’t work that way.
Joy is far more easily found than you might think because it starts in small, easily achieved pockets. This is hard to believe when things aren’t going well, when the odds seem against you, or when you’re just plain depressed. If that’s where you find yourself, try to imagine some of the simpler things you think joyful people might do. Pick one and do it for half an hour. Maybe clear up a small room; do some laundry; or do the dishes. You might hate it. That’s okay. When you’re finished, tell yourself thank you for showing up; tell yourself that you’re proud of you for that and for what you got done. Chances are that you haven’t heard (any?) encouragement in a while — maybe even never for some of us. It’s just as valid coming from yourself: your own opinion of you is the most important one.
The day after, see if you can manage another 30 minutes of something else a joyful person might do. Then thank yourself again for showing up. Try to keep going. I hope this works for you — helps you thrive, like you deserve to.
The two paragraphs are inspired by Ella, a beautiful soul who already started that journey and is a fantastic example of how to dig out of a rut with your bare hands — she describes her Tiktok page as “a mental health love letter” — tiktok.com/@ellawillthrive
If you’re one of the lucky ones who already has a lot to be thankful for in their lives, then why not celebrate that and start a Gratitude Journal? Attempt to identify what brings you joy, commemorate it and amplify it.
As a testament to the value of joy, it’s worth knowing that one of the best techniques for subjugating groups of people is to keep them anxious, and fearful — specifically because it isolates them from their Joy and stops them feeling they have any kind of control over their lives. It’s one of the oldest confidence tricks there are, but that’s all it is — it has no more actual power than what you give it.
Move, Get Outside Every Day
Ever wondered why we’re hairless as a species? Apart from Sand Puppies, Sphynx Cats and us, all other land mammals are hairy like bears aren’t they? And did you know it does not lock your breathing rhythm to your leg movements when you run? Unlike horses, dogs and most other mammals.
Running and breathing in mammals National Center for Biotechnology Information — ‘Science’ Jan 1983
There’s a ton of evidence that we developed these characteristics over hundreds of thousands of years, to run down large prey.
“Dogs can gallop for only about 10 to 15 minutes before reverting to a trot, and so their distance-running speed tops out at about 3.8 meters per second. Horses’ average distance-running speed is 5.8 meters per second — a canter. Wildebeests’ is 5.1 meters per second.
Elite human runners, however, can sustain speeds up to 6.5 meters per second. Even run-of-the-mill joggers typically do between 3.2 and 4.2 meters per second, which means they can outrun dogs at distances greater than two kilometers.”
Why nearly every sport except long-distance running is fundamentally absurdSlate.com
We might not need to run down prey any more but equally, we’re not well adapted to sitting still all day long either — it messes with our heads just as much as it does with our bodies.
Try switching up how you think about exercise. Make it a celebration of what your body can do (however modest) rather than some kind of punishment for what you haven’t done.
And if it seems like exercise is a distraction from other things you should get on with, remember that you will end up being able to do nothing at all without your physical vitality and the mental vitality that comes with it. Both come ‘free’ to some extent when you’re young but take more conscious effort to preserve later in life. Look after what is valuable.
You don’t have to run marathons (or even run at all). Whatever you can find that’s fun to do (or at least not hateful), regularity is more important than distance and intensity. Both, in turn, are less important than the diversion, especially if you can get out into nature — even if it’s only for a walk in a city park.
Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health — Yale School of the Environment, January 2020
Track Your Sleep; Track Your Fluid Intake
I’ll bet that whatever you think you need — sleep or fluids — it’s not enough. Long-term shortages of both wreak havoc on both your physical and mental wellbeing. Just Google ‘effect of chronic sleep deprivation’ and ‘effect of chronic dehydration’ — both are horror-shows but both can be very easy to put right.
Sleep
You first need to work out how much sleep you need. We’re all different: some of us need more than average, some of us need less. Not enough and you compromise your Agency, too much and you might do the same, bizarrely, but you’ll also be wasting time when you could be doing something more useful. Here’s a simple way to find out how much sleep is best for you:
• … count back 7.5 hours from your normal wake up time and use that as your bedtime for a week.
• If you’re not waking up five minutes before your alarm after a week, push your bedtime back a half an hour and continue to do so until you can wake up without your alarm.
A sleep specialist reveals how to figure out exactly how much sleep you need every night — Source: Insider.com
Another way is how I did it, using a sleep monitoring app (Sleep as Android in my case) and a wristband tracker (a Xiaomi MiBand). I let the app monitor my sleep via the band for a few weeks, after which it had collected enough data about my sleep patterns to give solid advice on duration. I started this some time ago and I keep it up to track whether I’m ever slipping into a sleep deficit, so I can make it back up.
Fluids
You could Google ‘fluid intake calculator’ and take your pick — there are plenty online — or you could do what I did and go with the suggested intake from an app that will track your consumption. For me, the suggested amount was double what I’d been habitually drinking!
It prompted me to take my fluid intake more seriously after a close relative ended up in hospital with a range of scary symptoms, only to find they were just dehydrated.
In case you want to know, the app I use is Water Drink Reminder
Curate Your Own News
What’s wrong with broadcast or online news?
Rolling news is toxic to Agency. There’s now even a word coined that hints at its toxicity when consumed habitually, reflexively and unthinkingly: Doomscrolling.
Why is ‘the news’ specifically toxic to Agency?
“While pretending to inform us about the state of the world, the news has become a formidable instrument of self-forgetting.”
Do we need to read the news? — The School of Life (more articles on the subject)
The gist — of many of the arguments — is that mostly, news stories are about subjects that don’t truly concern us, whilst inappropriately stimulating those parts of our brain affected by things that actually do concern us. So then we experience a certain level of agitation or unhelpful stimulation to take action on issues that we have no power to affect. So that’s pointless then, isn’t it?
On another level, ‘news’ is now designed to be addictive, to kidnap your eyeballs for advertisers. Some time in the late 1960s news stopped being a public service when magazine-style, longer-format, single topic news shows appeared and attracted huge advertising revenues in the ad-breaks. This inevitably meant that news came to be broadcast for its own sake to produce what Social Media giants would call ‘engagement’. ‘News’ now expands to fill time slots regardless of whether anything truly newsworthy has actually happened. Hence the stupid term ‘slow news day’ — like it was problematic that life just went on as normal for a while? Huh.
Last and worst of all is editorial bias, or spin. Look at the ownership of major news outlets for any type of media and think about the political outlook and connections of those owners. How much do you think they’re acting in your interests? Or societies …
What’s the alternative? — Detox and get picky.
Detoxing
It might not be what you think it is. Unless you’re a stockbroker, a journalist or a news or a news editor, checking the ‘news’ multiple times a day is usually a displacement activity — something quick and easy to turn to when you know deep down you ought to be doing something else …
“procrastination can be understood as “the primacy of short-term mood repair … over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.” Put simply, procrastination is about being more focused on “the immediate urgency of managing negative moods” than getting on with the task”
Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) — NY Times
Procrastinating is a stress response — you’re not disorganized or lazy — there’s something about that thing you know you ought to do instead that is making you feel uncomfortable. Figure out what that is and you can take the sting out of it.
I felt quite a lot of initial resistance to the idea that I might be anxious about something, but when I was eventually kind of enough to myself to look, this came up for me:
- “I’m worried I might not finish this perfectly”
- “I’m frightened I might not be able to do this thing at all”
- “I’m concerned that I’ll be judged, punished somehow ..”
- “I’m worried this will be a miserable thing to do”
These feelings don’t have to be rational — I’d consider myself a capable and confident person — but they were (and are) affecting me, anyway. I’ve always worked in jobs where more than half my pay was results-based. Maybe the level of scrutiny, being measured all the time, has been getting under my skin? Who knows wherever it came from, there has been an element of hidden self-sabotage all the same.
Sometimes the source can be obvious, though. If you’ve spent time in an environment of judgment, negativity, resentment and belligerence, you may have a fierce and harsh internal critic:
Always Left Feeling Not Good Enough? The Real Reasons Why — Andrea Blundell
The solution, in either case, is to be kinder to yourself. You absolutely do not have to be cruel to be kind. I would suspect whoever came up with that motto as being self-serving rather than philanthropic (Spoiler: it’s a line from Hamlet, where he’s excusing himself for stabbing Polonius to death — “I must be cruel only to be kind”. Dude, seriously)
If you think it would help to learn how to be kinder to yourself instead of cruel, here’s a good place to start: self-compassion.org
Getting Picky
So long as you’re confident not turning to news to avoid doing something else, there’s no need to cut yourself off, just get selective and choose what serves you.
- Choose your own list of subjects to keep up to date on instead of consuming from a list made by someone at a news outlet. They will have an agenda that serves their organization and their sponsors, not you.
- Find a News Aggregator like Feedly or Inoreader — tools that find and delivers that subject material to you, letting you make your own newsfeed with just the subjects and stories that serve you and your interests.
- Sign up for Reddit
“Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. There’s a community for whatever you’re interested in.”
Reddit has around 130,000 different special interest communities that are routinely active — five comments/day or more, with some getting 100,000+/day. You can pick (subscribe to) communities that match your interests and see only the news that corresponds. - Listen to a podcast that provides a weekly news roundup. For example:
The World This Week — BBC World Service
60 Minutes — CBS News
Pod Save The World — Crooked Media
Summary
We all may or may not be lucky to have some Agency naturally, but it’s under assault in the modern world, so it pays to be aware and protective. It’s also worth knowing that it’s like a muscle insomuch as exercises can make it more powerful.
If you didn’t already know about Agency, I hope you found it interesting finding out. I also hope you’ve found some of these suggestions helpful.
