Is our obsession with controlling our lives making us unhappy?

Radical Surrender Anna Lembke Headline (UK); Dutton (US, out 10 November) As a young woman, Anna Lembke believed her fate was in her hands. A brilliant student, she graduated with honours from Yale University and spent a year teaching in Beijing before enrolling at Stanford Medical School in California, where she would specialise in psychiatry. The whole world seemed to be within her grasp. “Whenever I faced uncertainty, I doubled down on control, which was both externally rewarding and internally validating, in the sense that the harder I worked, the bigger the payoff,” she writes of her teens and 20s. “Whether pursuing grades, training for a marathon, or simply adhering to my rigid schedule, in my professional and personal life, I was master of my universe.” Advertisement Sound familiar? In her thought-provoking new book Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to control, Lembke argues that most of us have become similarly obsessed with control – and that this need to dictate every event in our lives has become a source of unhappiness. The idea of ceding control is certainly in the zeitgeist: Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory has been one of the biggest non-fiction titles of the past two years. It is sparse on research – whereas Lembke’s scientific credentials would seem to promise more evidence. Lembke says we are living in a time when pathological preoccupation with the self is ubiquitous She offers a multifaceted argument. On the one hand, she draws on the fashionable theory of predictive processing to argue that one of the brain’s driving forces is to minimise uncertainty. We build simulations – a “mind map”, in Lembke’s language – based on our beliefs and past experiences to guide our perception and behaviour. The brain is constantly comparing the mind map with feedback from the real world, and any discrepancies between the two, known as “prediction errors”, are perceived as surprise and uncertainty. To reduce these prediction errors, we could simply update our mind maps. Unfortunately, many of us are ill-equipped to deal with the difficult emotions that this involves, so we instead rely on unhealthy coping strategies. One is denial. The second is “pathological wilfulness”, in which we attempt to change our environment so it is more predictable, even when that battle is futile. Rising narcissism, Lembke argues, has pushed us to overly depend on these defence mechanisms, as we find it ever harder to accept our mental models may be wrong. “We are living in a time when pathological preoccupation with the self and its normalisation and glorification in our culture are ubiquitous,” she writes. That has serious consequences when our mental models fail to reflect reality. “Having placed ourselves at the centre of the universe, we experience a narcissistic injury when life does not go according to plan. A narcissistic injury is a deep and abiding psychological blow to our core sense of self.” Lembke doesn’t cite much data for this apparently catastrophic shift, so I looked into the studies myself – and found the changes aren’t nearly as clear-cut as she presents them to be. This may not come as much of a surprise to some readers of her previous bestseller, Dopamine Nation, which made similarly sweeping statements about the addictive effects of technology. Radical Surrender only extends this argument. Our online lives have not just encouraged self-aggrandisement, but offered an easy escape from the inherent uncertainty of the world. “Even something as mundane as going out to eat can lead us into this trap,” she writes. “We read restaurant reviews and menus on-line about where to sit, what to order, how much to tip, such that when we finally get to the restaurant, it feels like we’ve already been there.” The problem is that this gives us little practice to deal with those titanic life events that threaten to overturn our mind maps entirely. Lembke’s own crisis came with the death of her baby son, Lucas, from leukaemia. In unflinchingly honest passages, she describes subconsciously avoiding contact with her son in the last days of his illness – a form of denial of what was happening, she now sees. Afterwards, she spent hours searching for explanations, unable to accept the cancer was caused by a random mutation, in a desperate attempt at regaining control. It is in precisely these times, she says, that we need to embrace the philosophy of “radical surrender”. It is “the moment when we are forced to loosen our rigid conceptions of the world and start again. Our new, surrendered mind map is informed by openness and humility – openness to new perceptual experiences and ideas, and humility for all that we cannot know, predict, or control”. Here, her argument veers from science to spirituality, as Lembke describes turning to God in her moment of crisis. I found this a little jarring, and Lembke readily admits that her appeal to a deity will alienate some people, but she argues that non-believers can find the same release through many other channels – such as a sense of connection with nature. The point is to look outside rather than within, she says, and recognise the forces beyond our control. Religion does, after all, bring many psychological benefits: believers are less likely to experience depression or anxiety, for example. And emotions such as awe may play a large part in that resilience. Studies confirm that awe-inspiring experiences can shake us out of our certainties and enhance our intellectual humility. The shrinking of the self and the broadening perspective that this creates can soothe feelings of shame and guilt that may arise from failure to control our fate. The result is healing, whether that comes from belief in a higher being or wonder at the world. If surrender means opening my mind to mysteries and accepting our tiny place in the universe, then I am happily on board. There may not be as much hard evidence as I would have liked for Lembke’s claims that we are facing a “psychospiritual apocalypse”, but I nevertheless found Radical Surrender‘s central hypothesis to be a welcome antidote to the endless pressure for self-reliance. There is power in letting go and embracing the great unknown. Three more great reads on finding meaning in life Bittersweet by Susan Cain Like Anna Lembke in Radical Surrender, Susan Cain asks us to seek the numinous. She explores how sublime emotions like wonder, as well as the appreciation of beauty, help us to heal from pain. Awe by Dacher Keltner An in-depth examination of the emotion’s amazing power to transform our brains, written by one of the leading scientists behind the research, Awe offers a strong scientific footing to some of the claims in Radical Surrender. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl A seminal text from neurologist, philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. He saw what many psychologists are only just recognising – that we all yearn for meaning, and this can be a powerful source of resilience. David Robson’s latest book is The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.