Have you ever felt you were out of control of yourself? Not a good feeling, is it? To manage yourself and feel in control, you must learn to look in the right places. Clinical experience in individual and group therapy yields some strong impressions about factors significantly related to self-control. Most unhappy, frustrated clients typically possess low self-esteem, have trouble connecting meaningfully in relationships, and lack feeling purpose in their lives. Research shows that when people are asked to think of the single most personally satisfying event they ever experienced, five strong psychological needs emerge as most related to life satisfaction from effective self-management: the need for self-esteem; the need for relatedness; the need for independence and autonomy; the need for competence; and the need to make sense of experiences, to have a life that is coherent and understandable. Therapy clients are typically weak in those areas.
Do you have reasons to get up in the morning and face life’s struggles and complexities? Do your efforts must make sense to you? If not, a career can become just a job, parenting can become custodial care, and a marriage can become living with a roommate. A life without meaning cannot facilitate personal satisfaction. The bottom line is that a sense of control over your life must be seen in the context of doing things and exerting effort in ways that bring you satisfaction, not in ways of acquiring things. You must evaluate your life with respect to creating, learning, trying, working—all verbs conveying actions that you enjoy doing, and that make you feel useful, worthwhile, and personally alive. When you see yourself engaged in those activities, you feel in control because you are controlling your patterns of thinking and behavior, the two things that you can control, and that can bring you satisfaction.
Psychology and Stress 