Why Do I Feel Like I Need to Control Everything?

For years, I believed that if I could just change the circumstances around me, I’d finally feel peaceful and happy.

If my business felt more successful, if I could get people to behave differently, if whatever was troubling me in life became a little easier, or if I could just work out the “right” answer.

So I spent years trying to control my environment. Mainly unsuccessfully! The belief that if I could get things “just so” was so strong that I wasn’t deterred from trying.

Why We Try to Control

When we are young and emotionally very vulnerable, our brains learn to avoid emotional pain using a variety of different strategies. If the emotional pain is experienced as a result of a parent, caregiver or teacher expressing disappointment with something you have done or not done, or from peers judging you as somehow “lesser”, then it stands to reason that you would want to avoid feeling “not good enough”. A feeling that can be devastating to a young and impressionable mind.

For a child, approval isn’t simply nice to have. It can feel essential. We’re wired to seek safety through connection, so when love, acceptance or belonging feels uncertain, our brains begin looking for ways to prevent that pain from happening again.

Many of us have one or two early experiences that leave a particularly deep impression. They may not seem especially significant looking back, but because we were young and emotionally vulnerable, they became the blueprint our brains used to predict similar situations in the future. Then, each time something felt remotely familiar, the wound was reinforced.

Without someone there to help us understand and process those emotions, our brains quickly learn to adapt. They develop protective strategies designed to stop us experiencing that same emotional pain again.

Trying to Control is a Protective Strategy

The young mind starts constantly working to figure out what is “good enough” in the eyes of those whose approval it now so desperately seeks and makes every effort to get things just right.

This might look like:

• Being extremely tidy.
• Working incredibly hard at school.
• Trying to be perfect.
• People pleasing.
• Becoming the “good” child who never causes trouble.
• Always trying to be helpful.
• Becoming the peacemaker whenever people argue.
• Becoming fiercely independent because relying on other people doesn’t feel safe.
• Becoming highly competitive.
• Being incredibly assertive.
• Avoiding attention altogether.

These adaptive behaviours often work well for a child because they reduce the amount of emotional pain they experience. So, inevitably, these protective strategies get carried into adult life. The difficulty is that what once protected us can end up becoming the thing that keeps us stuck. We continue trying to control our circumstances, not because these efforts actually make us feel safe, but because our brains still believe they will.

Some of my adult protective strategies looked like this:

• Overthinking and second-guessing every decision.
• Trying to correct mistakes that I didn’t even know I’d made.
• Chasing achievement in my business so I could feel enough.
• Trying to persuade other people to behave differently.
• Changing the subject whenever someone touched on an area of my life I didn’t feel good about.

Other strategies adults may use to avoid this pains include:

• Planning every detail because uncertainty feels uncomfortable.
• Constantly seeking reassurance before making decisions.
• Chasing achievement so you can finally feel enough.
• Finding it difficult to relax because there’s always something else to organise or improve.
• Feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions.
• Becoming the person who fixes everyone else’s problems.
• Struggling to delegate because doing it yourself feels safer.
• Avoiding difficult conversations.
• Constantly researching before making even small decisions because you don’t want to get it wrong.

None of the behaviours I did made me feel safe for very long, if at all. I didn’t feel in control and I didn’t even realise how much I was trying to control things until someone kindly pointed it out.

How We Unlearn Protective Strategies

What eventually shifted everything for me wasn’t a sudden success in being able to control my circumstances. It was a change in where I was looking.

Instead of asking, “How do I change this situation so I can feel better?” I started asking, “What’s happening inside me right now?”

I stopped trying to control things and began noticing my reactions. Wondering whether they were really about the situation in front of me and becoming curious about the emotions underneath them.

Rather than immediately distracting myself (hello fridge) or trying to fix the outside world, I learned to stay with those feelings long enough to understand them. Something I’d previously avoided.

At first, it felt incredibly uncomfortable. My instinct was still to solve, fix or escape. But every time I stayed with the feeling instead, it lost a little of its power.

The emotions I’d spent years trying to avoid weren’t actually the problem. They were pointing me towards the parts of me that still believed I wasn’t safe, accepted or enough. Once I started listening instead of fighting them, they became guides rather than enemies.

Surprisingly, that was the beginning of a freedom I’d been searching for for over a decade.

I realised that my experience of life wasn’t being created by my circumstances nearly as much as it was by the strategies I’d developed to protect myself from uncomfortable emotions and painful self-judgements. Those protective strategies had become a prison for my authentic self.

Releasing Control

If you recognise yourself in any of this, perhaps don’t rush to change your circumstances just yet.

Instead, pause with kindness and ask yourself:

“What emotion might I be trying not to feel?”

You don’t have to judge the answer or fix it immediately. Simply becoming aware of what’s really driving your thoughts and behaviours is often where genuine change begins.

We often think our need to control everything is a personality trait. In reality, it’s very often a protective strategy that once helped us survive emotionally. When we begin healing the emotions underneath it, the need to control naturally starts to soften. Not because we’ve become better at managing life, but because we no longer need life to behave in a certain way in order to feel okay.

Sometimes the greatest freedom isn’t changing your life. It’s changing the relationship you have with yourself. That’s where the peace you’ve been searching for by trying to control everything can finally be found.