Letting go of control sounds simple enough, until it’s something that really matters to you… and “just accept it!” doesn’t work. Episode 356 of Let’s Talk About Mental Health explores why it’s so hard to let go of control and what actually helps. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

Why can’t you let go of control, even when you know you can’t change a thing? It’s not stubbornness, and the real reason is more interesting than you’d expect. You’ve heard “accept what you can’t control” a hundred times, and it’s genuinely good advice. So why does it so rarely work when it matters?

In this week’s episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m exploring why letting go of control is so much harder than it sounds and what the advice leaves out. You’ll come away understanding what’s really going on, with practical ways to loosen your grip that don’t involve just pretending you don’t care. 

👉 Ready to discover how to let go of control, even when it feels impossible? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: Everyone says, “Just let go!”… but why is letting go so much harder the more something matters to you? 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

Why is letting go of control so hard?

Why can’t you let go of what you can’t control?

You know you can’t change it, and yet… letting go of control still feels hard to do. You keep thinking about it and trying to find a way to change things, even when it’s out of your hands.

Whether it’s something big or small, even knowing that you can’t control it doesn’t stop you from trying to or wanting to, and there’s a real reason why your mind will not just put it down… and no, it’s not because you’re being stubborn or controlling!

This episode is about why it happens and how to actually start letting go of control without having to stop caring.

So, let’s talk about… why you can’t let go of control.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, where every week I help you understand and improve your mental wellbeing. Now, if you’ve spent any time around mental health advice or on social media then I’m sure that you’ll have heard, “accept what you can’t control” probably more times than you can count… including from me! And it is good advice, genuinely.

But the trouble is it usually shows up as a soundbite with no instructions; kind of like a ‘one size fits all’ approach to every situation as though it’s asking you to do the same thing in a traffic jam as you would when your entire world is shifting from underneath you. So today, I want to fill in the bit that the soundbites leave out.

Whether you’re new here, or you’ve been with me for a while, this is a skill that you will keep coming back to… because life keeps on asking you to let go of control, especially if you want to protect your peace. Now, to be clear, wanting to have a say in how things turn out is not the problem. That’s just being human.

The problem is holding on once that wanting has nowhere left to go. And there’s a really simple way to tell the difference: when you’re going over something again and again and nothing new has come in, there’s no new information or nothing that you can actually do about it, that’s not you ‘thinking things through’. That’s you holding on.

There is a huge difference between thinking and holding on.

And keep that in mind, because later on I’m going to show you how to recognise it in the moment. So to get there, let’s get ourselves on the same page and let’s talk about…

What holding onto control really looks like

And let me start with the small stuff, because I think that’s where most of us can probably see it without it having to hurt too much. And look, a common example might be: someone in your household loads the dishwasher ‘wrong’, and then you go in and reload it once they’ve left the room. Or a plan changes at the last minute and you’re still annoyed about it three hours later, long after everyone else has moved on with their life. Or maybe someone you care about makes a choice that you would never make or that you don’t approve of, and you find yourself building a case in your head for why they should do what you want them to do or do things your way; it’s also known as having a case of the “I’m-right-itis”!

None of that is a crisis or anything particularly huge in the scheme of things. But take a moment and notice what’s actually going on underneath it: something has already happened, it’s out of your hands, and yet some part of you is still reaching to control it.

Now let’s think about bigger ways that it happens. A relationship ends and you didn’t get a say in what happened. A job that you gave years of your life to suddenly disappears in the blink of an eye. A friendship quietly ends, and you never found out why. The kids grow up and move out, and the life you built around them moves on without asking you. Your body changes, in ways that you never agreed to. Someone you love is gone, and you’re left trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces and move forward. And in all of those situations, the reaching for control gets louder. You replay how things went. You rehearse the conversation that you’ll never get to have. You go looking for the reason for whatever happened, as though understanding why would somehow give you a say in it all.

But whether the situation is big or small, it’s the same move that you’re making. Reloading the dishwasher and replaying an ending that you never chose might look, on paper, like completely different things, and in terms of what they cost you, yep, they absolutely are. But underneath them, the same thing is happening. Something has been decided, and you’re still hanging onto it. You’re still trying to control it.

And this is where a lot of people get confused, because most of us think that we’ve already let go, right? It’s happened. You say to yourself, “I know I can’t change it,” right? And yeah, you do know, but knowing that you can’t control something and letting go of control are two completely different things. I say that from personal experience. Knowing happens in your head, in about a second; it’s intellectual, rational, logical, factual. Letting go happens everywhere else, and it takes a lot longer. It’s emotional, not rational. That’s why so many of us get stuck, and then we beat ourselves up for being stuck… which is a bit like being annoyed at yourself for still being hungry after just reading a menu.

Look, honestly, show me someone who can let go of control easily and I will show you a miracle. Nobody finds this stuff easy. Not me, not anyone. It’s hard.

Now, the other thing that also gets misunderstood a lot is the advice itself. “Accept what you can’t control” is true and it is great advice, but acceptance does not look the same at every size. With the dishwasher situation, it might take 10 seconds and some deep breaths to find acceptance. But with the biggest endings of your life, it can take years… it can come and go… and it very likely will never look and feel completely neat and tidy; I am still trying to let go of things that happened 10, 15, 20 years ago, and it’s not that I’m clinging onto them but it’s the fact that it is a process of learning how to live with it and how to move forward with it.

That’s the thing, right? When the advice about letting go treats everything as being the same size, when it treats the dishwasher the same as losing someone, that’s quietly telling you that if you’re struggling, then you must be doing it wrong.

But you’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing something hard.

So if you’ve ever wondered why you can just let go of some things in a heartbeat, while others have you clinging on for dear life weeks, months, and years later, there’s a really good reason for that. And it has everything to do with what your mind is actually trying to do when it’s holding on. So with that in mind, now let’s talk about…

Why you keep holding on, even when you know better

Alright. Your mind is built to close gaps. When there’s a difference between how things are versus how you wanted them to be, your mind goes to work on it: turning it over, looking for a different angle, trying to fix it.

And most of the time, that’s brilliant. It’s how you solve problems. However, the trouble is that your mind does not stop to check whether the gap can actually be closed.

Researchers who study grief describe this sort of thing exactly: it’s going over and over something in your mind, trying to shrink the distance between what is and what you wanted. When there’s still something that you can do, great. But when there isn’t, it keeps on going anyway… it’s like a car stuck in the mud; the wheels are spinning, there’s lots of noise and mud flying everywhere, but the car is going nowhere.

And the sneaky part is that all that going over it feels like you’re doing something. Replaying the conversation feels like preparing. Working out what went wrong feels like understanding. It gives you the feeling of control without any actual control. And that feeling matters, because the alternative is admitting to yourself that you’re powerless… and ‘powerless’ is one of the hardest things that a person can feel. So your mind will hang on to almost anything rather than feel powerless. That’s why everything gets so much harder at life’s biggest moments. When something’s small, being powerless is just annoying. But when it’s one of the biggest endings of your life, it’s devastating… and so of course you hold on to control tighter.

And there’s another layer at play here: at those big moments, loosening your grip on control can feel like you’re agreeing to it, to the situation; it’s like you’re signing off on terms that you never got to negotiate. So holding on becomes a quiet protest: “I didn’t choose this.” And that makes complete sense.

But… it costs you.

Every bit of energy that you pour into a gap that will not close is energy that is not available for anything else: for the people in your life, for the life that’s still happening, for yourself. Research on goals that can no longer be reached has found that people who are able to let them go tend to have better wellbeing, partly because it frees up all of that mental and emotional energy. And research on loss has linked constantly going over how things could have turned out differently with more pain, not less.

Holding on does not protect you it keeps you stuck… and that’s exactly the kind of quiet, constant drain on your energy reserves that I talked about at the start of this season. And so if you’re thinking, “Alright, great, apparently my brain is a car stuck in the mud…” well, yeah, mine too! Some days I’m a whole traffic jam of cars stuck in the mud.

You’re not alone with this stuff. It’s why I’m talking about this topic now, because protecting your peace is what this whole season is about… and there aren’t many quieter drains on your peace than this one. It’s something I see all the time in my work, and I’ve lived it many times.

After I moved away from Melbourne to the countryside back in 2015 with my partner, I found myself even years later mentally holding onto a life that just no longer fit either of us; it no longer had any relevance to who I am now versus who I was. And that was a very bitter pill to swallow. And it was hard to let go of control around stuff to do with that.

And look… I’ll be really honest with you here: letting go does not come with a guarantee that it’s going to somehow make everything better. It is a process. It is an ongoing process. You don’t get to know in advance how it’s going to feel afterwards. And like most things, it takes time to work through. And so, those are big parts of why people end up holding on.

So before we do get to what to do about it, I just want you to take some time to reflect on this thought: where are you still trying to change something that’s already been decided? Don’t think about trying to fix it; the point here is just be honest with yourself about whatever it is, right? Because that’s where loosening your grip on control begins.

It’s about being honest with yourself that it’s happening… and that is exactly what we’re going to work on right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! Now it’s time for the ‘how to’ part of this episode, so let’s talk about…

How to start letting go of control

And a quick word here before we start: none of this is about somehow getting yourself to a point where you never hold onto things again and you never try to control things. That’s not a thing, and it’s not realistic. It’s about noticing sooner that you’re doing it and consciously loosening your grip on control a bit more easily, in both the small stuff and the big stuff.

And a quick reminder that, as with all of my episodes, if you want to come back to any of this later the full transcript is at ltamh.com/episodes, plus it’s linked in the description. Alright! So the first thing to do is…

Catch yourself holding on.

So… earlier I said there’s a simple way to tell whether you’re thinking through something or if you’re holding on, right; it’s if nothing new has come in, then you’re holding on.

So here’s how to use that. When you notice yourself going over something, ask one question: has anything new come in? So… new information, a new option, new details of something that you can actually do. If the answer is yes, keep going. That’s problem solving, and it’s useful. And if it’s yours to control, then go for it.

But if the answer is no, you’ve just caught yourself clinging and it’s happening as you think about it, right? And so you’ll often feel it before you even register it logically: things like a tight jaw, your shoulders sort of get up around your ears, you’re rehearsing a conversation in the shower like you’re preparing for a courtroom drama… all of those things are usually when you’re worked up and feeling the need to try to control things. It might be a changed plan that you’re still stewing over, and you’re thinking about how you can control that situation. Or maybe it’s something much bigger that you’ve been over at least a thousand times. Either way, catching it is the first bit of loosening your grip. You don’t have to stop the thought, just name it: “I’m holding onto control again.” OK. Next…

Ask whose move it is.

And this isn’t the same as asking whether or not you actually can control something; I covered that back in Episode 291… and let me just quickly take this opportunity to ever so gently remind you that all you have direct control over is yourself, and more specifically your words and actions. But in any situation where you’re feeling that urge for control, it’s worth remembering why asking whose move it really is matters so much, right? A lot of our pain and frustration comes from trying to control things that we cannot control and we’ll never be able to, and that includes other people.

So this is about what happens after you’ve done your part, because that’s where the holding onto control really lives. Think of this like a game where everyone takes turns. When it’s your move, make it: do the one useful thing that you have direct control over, or make an attempt to influence the situation if it’s out of your direct control, and then stop.

Because once you’ve made your move, the next one belongs to someone else. They get to decide how they respond, whether they change, what they do next. And at that point, holding onto control is basically then trying to take their turn for them. At worst, it becomes manipulation. And no amount of messaging them every two minutes or re-explaining yourself for the fifth time or rehearsing what they might say is going to change anything.

Just remember that sometimes the next move also is not even up to someone else, it’s just up to life; things like a restructure, or a diagnosis, or an ending decided on someone else’s terms. And sometimes the game is already over and nobody has a move left at all. That’s the one that will emotionally drain you the most, because you’re still sitting at the board shuffling pieces around long after everyone else has packed up and gone home.

So when you catch yourself holding on, ask yourself: whose move is it? If it’s yours, genuinely yours, then make it. But if it’s not, get specific about what you’re actually trying to get a say in: is it the outcome, or someone else’s choice, or the timing, or how it all looks? Whatever. Naming that matters, because it’s hard to loosen your grip on something that you haven’t even named or acknowledged. And once you have done that, your job then is to take your hands off the board. Next…

Let small things stay unfixed.

And I know, I know, this one might sound almost too simple, but it actually matters way more than you might think. Just pick something small this week, and deliberately leave it unfixed: let someone else load the dishwasher their way. Let the restaurant you go to for dinner be the one that you didn’t pick. Let a plan change without providing commentary on it… or at least without much commentary, let’s be realistic here!

Then I want you to notice what happens in your body. There’ll be a feeling, like an itch, and a pull to step in and take control. And if you don’t scratch that itch, right, if you don’t act on it, that feeling rises… but then it peaks, and then it eventually fades away. That’s what loosening your grip on control actually feels like. You don’t have to scratch the itch as soon as it comes. Get to know that feeling in ordinary, small moments. Don’t wait until there’s too much riding on it, right? That way it won’t be completely foreign when life goes and hands you something way bigger that you never get a say in.

This stuff is worth practicing when you’re doing OK, not just waiting until you’re struggling, because it helps you to feel less uncomfortable over time. And if you’re already facing something big, it still helps… because it’s never too late to learn what letting go feels like. Next…

Separate wanting from caring.

I asked you earlier to name what you’re actually trying to get a say in. So now, here’s what to do with it. A big reason why people don’t or won’t loosen their grip is that it feels like that would mean that they’ve stopped caring. But it doesn’t. ‘Wanting’ and ‘caring’ are two different things, and you can let go of one while keeping every bit of the other.

So try finishing these two sentences out loud, or on paper. First: “What I wanted was…” and then complete that. And then second: “What I still care about is…” and then complete that sentence.

So look… maybe what you wanted was for your adult child to grow up and take a sensible job, and what you still care about is them, and their safety, and their security, and their wellbeing. Maybe what you wanted was for something to end differently, or not at all, and what you still care about is everything that it meant to you. The wanting is what you loosen your grip on, because that’s out of your control, while the caring… that gets to stay exactly where it is. Next…

Give your energy somewhere to go.

All that effort and energy that you’ve been pouring into trying to control a gap that’s not going to close, especially when it is something out of your control… that doesn’t just vanish when you decide to loosen your grip on control. That energy has to go somewhere, otherwise it’s just going to drift back to the same thing. So, give that energy a job. The irritation about plans changing can go into making the next plan better. The care that you can’t give to someone can instead go to something that can actually receive it, someone who’s still here or something that you’re building or yourself.

Researchers call this ‘reengaging’ and it’s been linked with better wellbeing when a goal can no longer be reached. It doesn’t replace what’s gone; it just stops all of that energy spinning like that car with its wheels in the mud. Redirect that energy somewhere. Next…

Say it’s not up to you.

A lot of holding on is your mind trying to protect you from feeling powerless, like we talked about before. So one of the most useful things that you can do is to stop running from that feeling, and name it instead. When you notice yourself trying to manage something that isn’t yours to manage, acknowledge it to yourself… or even better, to someone you trust. You could say something like, “This isn’t up to me and I don’t like that.” That’s it. You’re not saying it’s fine. You’re not approving it.

You’re not judging yourself. And you’re also not giving up. You’re just being honest about the situation, about your feelings, and most importantly, about where your control ends.

You only have direct control over yourself. You can influence others, but you cannot control what they do or don’t do. Now, this works with the small stuff, right, like when someone else is driving and they’re taking the long way; you could just think, “It’s annoying, but it’s not up to me, so I’m moving on.”

And it also works with the big stuff. Let’s say you’re waiting on someone else’s decision about your job, or you’re watching someone you love make a choice that you don’t like. Feeling powerless is uncomfortable, but acknowledging that allows it to pass a lot faster, right?

Things need to be felt. Don’t spend your entire day trying to outrun those feelings. Next…

Expect the urge to come back.

Here’s the bit nobody ever seems to mention: you’ll loosen your grip on control, and then one day you’ll find yourself holding on again; you know, you’ll let the dishwasher go on Monday, and then by Thursday you’ll catch yourself reloading it again. That’s totally normal. But pay attention to when it happens, because the urge to control tends to get louder when you’re tired and stressed, or emotional, or when something bigger feels like it’s out of your hands. That’s when people start reorganising the pantry at 11 o’clock at night, or micromanaging everyone at work or at home, or planning every minute of the weekend down to the last millisecond.

When you can’t control the big thing, your mind goes looking for something small that it can control instead. So if you notice yourself suddenly needing everything to be ‘just so’, it’s worth thinking about what’s really going on underneath it. It doesn’t mean that you’ve failed or you’ve gone backwards; catching it and loosening your grip on control again just gets more familiar each time you notice it and each time you practice it.

And look… if you don’t do any of this, then you’re just going to keep on pouring energy into things that are never and were never yours to control. Nothing changes if nothing changes. You need to come at this from a different angle. But every time you do catch yourself holding on and you decide to loosen your grip, even just a little bit, that’s when you get a bit of yourself back.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Wanting a say in things is human… but trying to control everything is what happens when that want has nowhere left to go, and so loosening your grip on control means letting go of the wanting, not the caring.

So, what’s one thing you’ve been trying to control that you need to let go of?

Because when you boil it all down, letting go of control is how you protect your peace.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by Viktor Frankl, and it is:

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves

Viktor Frankl

Let me repeat that.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves

Alright, that’s nearly it for this week. If you’d like to work through how to protect your peace in your own life with support from me instead of doing it on your own, then you might be interested in my upcoming Protecting Your Peace On Purpose program. It’s a small group program running for 12 weeks where you spend time live with me every week, starting in late January 2027. Doors open for registration on the 25th of October, 2026. It’s linked in the description, or head to: ltamh.com/programs.

My Patreon supporters get a discount on the program, as well as weekly early access to my podcast, so consider becoming a supporter. You can also check out my book Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck for more practical advice for better mental health. They’re all linked in the description.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week to talk about why protecting yourself keeps you stuck, and check out my episode on why navigating uncertainty feels so difficult next. It’s linked in the description. I release new content every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
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Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.