Agency: The Art Of Feeling In Control (& The Magic Of Watering Plants)
We don’t always have to take drastic steps to feel we have a bit of control in our lives
We can frequently find ourselves in incredibly demoralizing situations.
Take the average office. For many of us, it provides little more than a delightful daily cocktail of insufficient pay, mindbogglingly repetitive tasks and stifling levels of box-ticking.
Feeling like a cog in a wheel is hard enough when this is a job to pay the bills (rather than a step up the ladder to something greater).
It can become intolerable, however, when we are perpetually undermined, given insufficient freedom to make decisions and are left feeling overworked, undervalued and underpaid.
For many of us, quitting isn’t an option, which just compounds the misery we feel. We can’t take action to rectify the situation and the feeling of helplessness takes root, with no visible remedy in sight.
It‘s’ the perfect recipe for apathy, at best. Really, why bother?
Why Agency Matters
The reason why we get dragged down so much, says Johann Hari in this Big Think video, is that we have a strong psychological need for “agency” — the sense of being in control of the direction of our lives.
Having a lack of agency is a key factor behind work-related depression and anxiety, he says, quoting the work of Australian scientist, Michael Marmot:
“If you go to work and you feel controlled — you feel you have few or limited choices — you are significantly more likely to become depressed.”
The psychologist Edward Deci has effectively said the same thing, when it comes to the negative impacts of “Controlled Motivation” on our psychological well-being. Being obligated or controlled in a work setting, he says, has been shown to be a “precursor to psychopathology” and addiction.
So what’s the answer when we feel beaten down and we lack this sense of control over our lives?
Not surprisingly, it is to take back control.
Big Leaps Vs Small Steps
The example Hari cites in the Big Think video might seem to be a bit too much of a jump for some, but is instructive all the same.
In the case he highlights, a husband and wife took back control by quitting their jobs to run a bike shop together. The act of being responsible for it had the inadvertent effect of combating their feelings of depression and anxiety.
This is great, but...
While we might aspire to do that (run our own show), we can’t always change our external environment at the click of our fingers.
The key, then, is to understand how we get that feeling of being in control in our everyday life.
A 1970's psychology study in a U.S. care home might give us some clues about how to achieve that.
Arden House
In the late 1970’s, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer and her colleague Judith Rodin, conducted what was to become a landmark experiment in Arden House, a care home in New England.
Offices are obviously not the only places where we can feel helpless and hopeless — care homes, for many, are quite literally the final nail in the coffin.
What they did at Arden House, however, to see if they could combat this, was deceptively simple but startlingly effective.
Langer and Rodin divided the residents into two groups, both of which were given plants to care for and films to watch, with a subtle variation in the parameters set around the control group.
While one group had everything done for them, the other was given the power to make decisions for themselves.
Nothing grand, they were simply given the ability to decide where and when they would receive visitors, if and when they would watch the films being shown and in what way they would care for their houseplants (how often they would water them, where they would place them in their rooms and so on).
The idea being, writes Langer in her book Counterclockwise, was to make this group feel actively engaged with the world around them — and less of a passive bystander.
The results were remarkable.
The Magic Of Watering Plants
Eighteen months later, they revisited Arden House, compared the two groups and found that the control group were not only healthier, happier and more alert but twice as many of them were alive.
It raised the tantalizing idea that not only is the feeling of control directly linked to happiness — it might be linked to longevity, too.
(In fact a later study in Germany found that having a sense of control over one’s life reduced the risk of death by 13%).
What is so reassuring about Langer’s study, is that sometimes the desire to be in control of our lives can take on what feel like unreachable goals — we want to own a house, run our own business, be in a position of status.
And, of course, these things might come.
But for the time in-between, it is wise for us to stay aware of the fact that the things that markedly improve our happiness levels right now are the little decisions we are able to make every day.
What You Can Do Now
Even if it is just choosing what we focus on, there are always some aspects of our lives (if not all) that we are in control of — and they might be more vital to our long-term health and happiness than we realise.
Here are a few suggestions to get started:
- Find Meaning: If you can, find something in your life that gives you meaning. This can be volunteering, it can be adopting a pet pooch, it doesn’t matter. We can never underestimate the power that a meaningful existence has on us as individuals. It literally gives us a reason-to-be which is the polar opposite of feeling helpless and hopeless.
- Pet Projects: If you feel inclined, think about starting a project that is yours and yours alone (it could be growing vegetables, it could be starting a blog). No-one is asking you to do it, you’re not getting paid for it and you won’t be reprimanded if you don’t do it. This is something that belongs to you, that you can take ownership of and that you can always come back to, regardless of what else is going on in your life. It is your safe haven.
- Small Actions: Apply The “Do Something Principle”, coined by Mark Manson. Take action on something — literally anything . It will change your state of mind. The motivation levels you might begin to feel will then have a ripple effect — and you might actually begin to realise that you can make other changes in your life as well.
- Physical Movement: Move if you can. It sounds like obvious advice but physical movement helps. A short, brisk walk will blow away the cobwebs and ideas might start to flow a bit more freely that sitting and ruminating (but sometimes just sitting helps too — see point 7).
- TV Exposure: Control what you watch on the TV, particularly the news when it’s always bad news. Our negativity bias draws us towards catastrophes and disasters which can leave us feeling demoralized and demotivated. It’s a perfect recipe for feeling hopeless. Restrict your exposure to that.
- Tap: You won’t be able to maintain a feeling of control if you aren’t fully engaged with how you feel. Learn a D.I.Y. technique like tapping (EFT) which literally puts your well-being at your fingertips.
- Rest: Take a break every now and again. Reset yourself: turn off the laptop, switch off the TV, put down your phone. Stare out the window, meditate, take a nap, deliberately relax. Take a step back and give yourself a chance to gain a new perspective. If you are waiting for a “break-through moment”, a flash of insight, a way to get out of this situation you’re in, they tend to come knocking at times like these.
