3 min read
What you can influence
Your breath, your boundaries, your energy, your responses, and the stories you tell yourself.
A lot of what weighs on us sits outside our control: other people's moods, the weather, the past, most of the news. Paying attention to all of it is exhausting, and it rarely changes anything.
There is a smaller list of things you can actually influence: your breath, your boundaries, where your energy goes, how you respond, how you treat yourself and others, how you process emotions, and the stories you tell yourself about what happened.
This is not about controlling yourself into being fine. It is about noticing where your effort makes a difference and where it only drains you.
A simple way to use this: when something is bothering you, ask which list it belongs to. If it is on the second list, there may be a small next step. If it is on the first, the kindest move is often to put it down for a while.
Key points
- Much of what weighs on us is outside our control.
- Breath, boundaries, energy, responses and self-talk can be influenced.
- Sorting worries into these two lists shows where effort helps.