Read This When Life Feels Uncontrolable

Here are five things to focus on and remember.

Photo by Pedro Durigan on Unsplash

If you turn on the news, if you turn into your social media feeds, if you are engaging with the world around you — it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It’s easy to feel as if you have no control over what’s happening outside of your own home. It’s easy to feel as if you have no control, period, and to be swept up in the tragedy and horror and negativity that can permeate so much of the media we consume.

And yet, while you will never be able to control everything that happens in the world, there are still plenty of things within your control.

Here are five things that are within your grasp:

1. You can control the words that slip from your fingertips or your lips. Those words can be full of anger, of hate, of sadness, of love, of hope — of something else entirely. But you get to choose them. You get to speak or stay silent, and you get to listen and learn. You do not get to decide how other people navigate themselves and the words they choose, but you get to choose your own.
2. You can control how you react to situations. You can scream, you can yell, you can throw a temper tantrum. You can also excuse yourself, so you don’t lash out at others. You can also find a way to channel your energy into something that…