The illusion of control.

The desire to control outcomes creates anxiety. Especially outcomes we have little agency over.

This doesn't change the outcomes, doesn't affect their likelihood, but it does make the time we spend during the entire process quite miserable.

The alternate is to trust. To trust ourselves and to trust things as they evolve. To know that you are not in trouble. To know that irrespective of the outcome, you'd have the agency to make things better, to be at peace, to live a life worth living.

There is no rational way of achieving this. The rational way comes from the left brain thinking, the one that causes the anxiety spiral in the first place.

The trust comes when we learn to quiet the thinking brain and start trusting the whole nervous system. Start looking at how we have gone through challenging and not-so challenging situations in the past and still managed to come out to this side.

To know that the illusion of control is simply that, an illusion. That we do not have control. All we have is agency. And we can exercise it only if we are willing to let go of our anxiety.