And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

Podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 211. It's titled Control. And if you're

ready, we'll start the show. How are things, folks? Are you coping? Things are difficult at the

minute, aren't they? And I totally understand that my cheery persona can be a bit incongruous when Putin is literally on the war path. We're trying to learn to learn how to live with COVID, and now we've also got to learn how to live with a war in practically our back garden. It's been a traumatic few years, and we're not going to forget it in a rush,

are we? One thing it highlights for a lot of people, though, which is never a bad thing,

is the importance of letting go of control. Because at the minute, a lot of our life is out of our

hands. Yet at the same time, it gives us opportunities to concentrate on the things that

are in our hands. And as long as we're okay with the things that we have no control over,

we should all live happily ever after. That's not so easy, though, I've noticed lately. Not that

all my private clients have control freaks, far from it. But the crap of the last few years has maybe exaggerated the control-freak tendencies that are in most of us naturally anyway. And it's not always a bad thing, you know. Having controlling tendencies can make us meticulous and efficient. It gives us high standards.

And when the world looks like it's falling apart, trying to gain a bit of extra control is a healthy coping strategy.

But if we don't know that we have this tendency to use control over things as a way of compensating for

our anxiety, then it can get out of hand. Because we can't actually control everything, can we?

There's uncertainty out there. We never actually know about the future, and it's hard to be okay

with that, especially at the minute.

And control issues usually come from this impossible attempt at eliminating uncertainty in our

life, because that's exactly what anxiety is there for.

Anxiety is the unconscious emotional version of the negative thinking that used to be conscious and in our awareness and now has become background.

Things like, what if things go wrong?

And if it was up to me, I'd do it like that.

Now, people without anxiety would have had those thoughts too, but they wouldn't

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