The Dichotomy of Control: A Practical Guide With Everyday Examples

What Epictetus said

The idea opens the Enchiridion, the short handbook of Epictetus's teaching put together by his student Arrian. The first line, in George Long's translation, is blunt: "Of things some are in our power, and others are not."

Then he fills in both sides. In our power: our opinions, our impulses, what we desire and what we avoid. In a word, whatever is our own act. Not in our power: the body, property, reputation, office. Whatever isn't our own act.

That second list surprises most people. Your body? Your reputation? Surely you have some say there. Hold the objection; it's a fair one, and we'll come back to it. For now, notice where Epictetus draws the line. The things that are fully yours are all on the inside: how you read a situation and what you decide to do about it. Everything else, including outcomes you care about a great deal, depends partly on the world.

He had his own reasons to draw it sharply. Epictetus grew up enslaved, in a household where very little outside his own mind belonged to him. There's more on his life in Epictetus: The Slave Who Became a Stoic Master.

Why sorting takes the weight off

Marcus Aurelius read Epictetus closely. In the first book of his Meditations he thanks his teacher Rusticus for introducing him to Epictetus's discourses. Elsewhere he put the payoff of this idea in one sentence: "If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it" (Meditations 8.47, Long's translation).

That can sound like blaming yourself for being upset, but the point is practical: your judgment is the part you can work on. The thing itself, the reorg or the silent phone, will do what it does whether you lie awake or not.

Worry tends to fuse the two. "The reorg might cost me my job" bundles an event you can't steer with several things you can: how current your CV is, whether you've asked your manager a straight question, how much money you've put aside, how you talk to yourself on Thursday morning. Pull them apart and the big fused worry turns into a short to-do list plus one honest acceptance, which is a lot lighter to carry.

The sort-your-worries exercise

This takes about ten minutes and a sheet of paper. A notes app works, but paper slows you down in a useful way.

Draw a line down the middle. Label the left side "Mine" and the right side "Not mine."

Now write down whatever is bothering you, big or small. Don't file each worry whole. Split it, because most worries have pieces on both sides. Here's the 2 a.m. list, sorted:

• The reorg. Mine: update my CV this week, ask my manager on Thursday what the timeline is. Not mine: the decision, the budget, who else gets moved.
• The car noise. Mine: call the garage tomorrow. Not mine: what they find.
• My father. Mine: send one warm message with no guilt in it. Not mine: when he answers, or why he hasn't.
• The group chat. Mine: if I think I was rude, say so in one line. Not mine: how anyone reads it now.

Then do two things. Pick one item from the left column and do it today, even if it's tiny. And for each item on the right, write one sentence about what you're choosing to accept for now. If it isn't fine, don't write "it's fine." Write something truer, like "I don't know how the reorg will go, and I'll find out on Thursday."

Skip that second step and the right-hand column just becomes a tidy list of things you're still going to worry about.

The honest objection: most things are partly yours

Back to the body and the reputation. You obviously influence your health by how you sleep and move, and your reputation by how you treat people. So is Epictetus simply wrong?

As a description of daily life, partly. The philosopher William Irvine argues in A Guide to the Good Life that we need a middle category for things we have some, but not complete, control over. He calls it a trichotomy of control.

The Stoic response is to look inside that middle zone and find the piece that is fully yours. You don't control whether you finish the marathon in under four hours. You control whether you train today. You don't control whether a colleague respects you. You control whether you keep your word to her. In each case the outcome stays in the right-hand column and the effort moves to the left.

There's a second limit worth naming. The dichotomy can be misused as an excuse to shrug at things you could change, or at unfairness done to other people. That misreads it. For Epictetus, your choices were the one thing you could never hand off to anyone, so the left-hand column is a list of things you're expected to do. And if your worries are constant and heavy, a sheet of paper is no substitute for talking to a doctor or a therapist.

Small places to practise

The sort works best on ordinary days, done small and often.

Stuck in traffic, the jam isn't yours; leaving earlier tomorrow is, and so is what you do with the twenty minutes. A lost parcel works the same way: the courier isn't yours, but one clear complaint is. Waiting on a medical test, the result isn't yours; writing down your questions for the doctor is. When your kid comes home from a bad day at school, their feelings aren't yours to fix. Listening without rushing to solutions is.

After a few weeks you'll probably find that the "Mine" column is mostly small, unglamorous actions. Calm tends to come from doing the next small thing properly.

If the list still won't stop on bad nights, 5 Stoic Hacks for Crushing Anxiety has more tools for that. New to all this? How to Start Your Stoic Journey gives the bigger picture, and When Everything Falls Apart is for the weeks when the list is very long. You'll find more in our resilience guides.

One question to keep with you

If you use the Daily Stoic Wisdom app, you could treat its daily reflection prompt as a nudge to run this sort on whatever is bothering you that day.

Otherwise, keep one question in your pocket. When something grips you, ask: which part of this is mine? Do that part. Let the rest be the world's business.