Locus of Control: Who Is Running Your Life? - John Glanvill - Anxiety Specialist

Locus of Control: Who Is Running Your Life?

Locus of Control is a simple idea with large consequences. It describes how much you believe you can influence the events of your life.

An external locus of control sounds like this: chance, fate, luck, other people, God, the doctor, the diagnosis, or “the way I am” will decide what happens. Life is something that is done to you.

An internal locus of control sounds like this: my choices, my actions, my interpretations and my next step will shape a great deal of what I experience. Not everything. Enough.

If someone wants to move from feeling like a passenger to becoming a person who can influence their life, this is not a side issue. It is one of the main doors.

In practice I have found that people with a more external stance are often more prone to anxiety, depression, poor recovery after setbacks, and a kind of learned helplessness. People with a more internal stance are not immune to pain. They usually get back on their feet faster, make decisions sooner, and waste less time waiting for someone else to authorise a change.

This is not a moral ranking. It is a description of where power has been placed.

Control is not the same thing

Here the picture gets more interesting, especially with anxiety and OCD.

Many people I work with once had a decent inner compass. They could walk into a room and sense the mood. Then prolonged stress, trauma or depression dulled that signal. Feelings stopped being information and started being a threat. Once you no longer trust your own sensing, you look outside for certainty: partners, parents, doctors, forums, rituals, rules.

That is how an internal reference quietly becomes an external one.

What happens next is easy to miss. The person feels powerless about the big things — work, health, leaving, staying, speaking, wanting — so they become very controlling about the small ones. How the house is kept. What can be eaten. Where it is safe to go. What other people may say. How a day must be structured so that no surprise gets in.

Partners and carers recognise this immediately. The rules multiply. The real decisions stay untouched.

This is not strength. It is a substitute for strength. Obsessing over the controllable crumbs creates a feeling of agency while the actual life remains parked.

OCD is especially skilled at this swap. The mind cannot guarantee the future, so it demands guarantees from taps, thoughts, memories, sensations and other people’s reassurance. The locus of control looks busy. It is still facing the wrong direction.

An external locus plus a high need for control feels miserable: vulnerable, tense, and oddly bossy.
An internal locus plus useful action feels different: not because life is obedient, but because you are in the game.

Activity first

Waiting for motivation is one of the most reliable ways to stay stuck. Motivation is more often the result of action than the cause of it. You do the smaller honest thing while you still do not feel like it. Energy follows movement more often than the other way around.

That is why iStory ERP and an internal locus belong together. You stop asking the feeling for permission. You take the next action that belongs to the life you want, then you deal with the sensation that arises. The outcome is never fully yours. The input can be.

Two rough portraits

These are tendencies, not verdicts.

People leaning external often:
– defer quickly to experts and wait for a plan to be given to them
– hope medication or a rescuer will do the main work
– scan for what could go wrong
– recover slowly from knocks and stay in the story
– lean hard on other people for decisions
– control tiny household or safety rules while avoiding the larger conversation
– blame circumstances when things go badly
– sleep poorly because the mind is still trying to get certainty from thought

People leaning internal often:
– listen to advice and then test it against their own experience
– look for what they can do today
– treat setbacks as information rather than identity
– bounce back faster
– take responsibility without turning it into self-hatred
– set direction instead of waiting to feel ready
– use other people as support, not as a replacement for a spine

Age sometimes helps. After enough years you notice that a large part of what happened was downstream of what you thought, said and did. That can become humility rather than blame.

How to take more of it back

Not deciding is already a decision. It hands the steering wheel to mood, habit or other people.

Listen for the sentences “I can’t” and “There’s nothing I can do.” They are not observations. They are choices dressed as facts. Ask what a more internal response would look like in the same situation.

Set a direction. Not a fantasy of total control — a direction. What do I want to be able to do in six months that I will not practise if I keep living like this?

Look at values rather than symptoms. Integrity, courage, usefulness, play, honesty. Symptoms shrink more reliably when life has a shape.

Notice where you have become childish rather than childlike: rules, sulking, control of trivia, refusal to be vulnerable. Play and honest conversation move the locus inward faster than more analysis.

Ask two blunt questions:

What do I need to stop doing? What skill do I need to learn so that I am less dependent on other people managing my fear?

You can print the two lists and mark yourself without making a drama of it. The point is not to become a person who never asks for help. The point is to stop living as if your inner state were someone else’s job.

An internal locus of control will not make you safe. It will make you less owned. For anxiety and OCD, that is often the beginning of a different life.

Access this teaching and over 60 other videos for $15 a month, along with guided meditations and practical workbooks. These are The Chronicles of Common Sense, forged from facing life directly and learning through real-world experience. They guided me out of anxiety, OCD, bipolar depression and crippling self-consciousness — and helped me become more trusting, energetic, optimistic, self-loving and courageous.

This work reaches mind, body and soul. It gives you the tools to step courageously into the unknown. Knowledge only becomes wisdom when we test it through action. Those who act, adjust, and act again (ERP) will always move further than those who stay in thinking and worrying.

What do you desire?

The next action is yours. Take it.