Why you can't control your actions
Your nervous system vs. who you want to be
Here's a popular myth in self-help circles: you are in control of your thoughts and actions, and at any time, you can choose to be better.
I call this the "willpower myth": the idea that, through discipline, I can force myself to be the person I want to be.
This concept can be helpful in a couple of ways. It promotes accountability and self-empowerment. It is hopeful: if I can control myself, I can change myself.
But the willpower myth is ultimately misleading, for one major biological reason: your nervous system.
Your nervous system has the power to influence and even override our perceptions of the world, influencing both thought and action. You don't control when it activates, or what the result will be. Trying to "control it” is useless.
But, if we have the knowledge and patience to work with our nervous system, then we can begin to change our behaviour.
Let's start with a (brief) overview of the various levels of your nervous system, and how they work.
There are three levels to your nervous system: dorsal vagus, sympathetic, ventral vagus.
From the left to right, they go from most ancient to least ancient. The ventral vagus is most recent, and also unique to mammals. It monitors social connection and cooperation.
The ventral vagus is activated when you're feeling safe and connected. This is what we might think of as our "happy state." We're curious about the world around us, and eager to bond with others. We're willing to take risks. We have full access to our willpower.
If we alway stayed in this "happy state" of ventral vagal activation, the willpower myth would be consistently useful. But as soon as our nervous system detects danger, everything changes.
A quick note: when I talk about "danger" for the rest of this essay, I'm talking about that which your nervous system perceives as dangerous. This can range from actually dangerous (an angry bear) to something that jeopardizes our social safety (an angry parent). Your nervous system cannot tell the difference. The criteria for "danger" here is thus just "makes me feel unsafe."
The sympathetic nervous system is the next level down from the ventral vagus. It controls the "fight or flight response." When it detects (or believes it detects) a potential threat in your environment (an odd sound, sudden movement, or sudden outburst from someone nearby), it gets you ready to move.
You might feel a burst of nervous energy, or a surge of anger. But here’s the tricky part: the sympathetic nervous system can also change how you perceive the world.
It has the power to tune the muscles in your middle ear, scanning for low frequency sounds (predators) or high frequency (distress). As a result, we tune out normal human voices. It’s harder for us to hear and comprehend what people are saying to us.
We also misread human faces, seeing "neutral" faces as "angry." Anyone who is not friendly is marked dangerous.
This level is what we associate with "overreacting" in emotional situations. You're in a fight with your partner, and you misunderstand what they’re saying, while also perceiving their neutral facial expression as angry. Due to the stress hormone being released in your system, you respond with rage. The situation escalates, the feeling of "danger" increases, and you can't seem to control yourself.
If the situation doesn't improve, or escape seems impossible, we move one level lower.
The dorsal vagus gets activated in traumatic situations where we can't escape by fight or flight. Imagine being cornered & trapped. If your nervous system signals inescapable danger, the dorsal vagus kicks in.
The response is similar to the classic "deer in headlights": you freeze. You collapse and shutdown. Physical and psychological pain is numbed. You might dissociate, feeling disconnected from your body.
That feeling of dissociation happens because the dorsal vagus reduces blood flow and oxygenation to your brain. That is an automatic response; nothing we can stop or start. Dorsal vagus feels unsafe → less blood to the brain.
Depending on the magnitude of the stress response, it may become impossible for us to function normally. We don't have enough blood flow to our brain to even think of a proper response.
At this point, talk of "willpower" misses the point. It's like asking someone to make a healthy decision while holding their breath and running for their life. Good luck.
The truth is, your body is on your side. These mechanisms are protective. They're designed to keep us safe. In order to do that, they need to push us to take the safest possible actions, which also means making it difficult or impossible to override our response.
But it’s easy for our nervous system to become overreactive, especially if we suffered past trauma. What your body perceives as dangerous could be detached from what is actually dangerous.
The "willpower + discipline" crowd try to simplify the equation: better thoughts, better actions. Just do it. But our thoughts and actions flow from our conscious and unconscious perception of the world around it. And these perceptions are influenced by our body's defence mechanisms.
A better term for "controlling your thoughts" would be managing your psychology. That means working with your body, not trying to override it. That means understanding these mechanisms and how they affect you. We need to learn how to move out of a stress response, as a prerequisite to changing our actions.
It is possible to influence how you react. It is possible to guide yourself in a healthier direction. But we have to recognize that it's not about control, or willpower, or discipline: it's about patience, compassion, and care.
The answer isn't "how can we control our actions." It's "how can we move our body into a safer state." More on that to come.