Your Sphere of Influence

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog. Occasionally I jot down ideas, although I seldom find the right headspace to translate them into a format you might enjoy. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about two concepts that I believe are fundamental to human mental health: sphere of influence and perception of control.

I’ve talked a lot in the past about how humans can’t escape their evolution: all of our internal systems evolved for a particular function in a particular environment. It’s a big generalisation, but for most of our ancestors for most of their lives, their world was small. Perhaps they ranged as far as 50kms from their village, but for all intents and purposes, their environment was tiny. They probably knew everyone within that tiny world, knew where the dangerous things were, and what could become dangerous. And because they knew their local world so well, they were probably highly sensitive to any changes in that world. Change meant likely danger, so they worked hard to mitigate and control it: chase off the intruding tribe, hunt down the dangerous predators, etc. In other words, their ability to influence their direct environment was relatively high, simply because their world was very small. Their “sphere of influence” matched the size of their world.

So “sphere of influence” represents any individual’s ability to manipulate the world around them. In our very disproportionate world, where power and wealth are hyper-concentrated, a few individuals have a lot of influence. The rest of us have virtually no influence, and that’s where we run into trouble. Because we evolved having a moderate amount of influence over our perceivable world, we assume that we continue to have the same influence over the world we perceive. Our ancestors could perceive as far as they could see or walk – not much. We are presented with almost constant information about a vast world. One we couldn’t walk to in a lifetime. We’re presented with believable information about a world that is massively bigger than we can conceptualise. It makes sense, therefore, that our brains believe that our sphere of influence extends out into this vast world, and it expects that our actions will actually influence events in this sphere. When it turns out we can’t really control any of those events, it genuinely scares our brains, because we believe that we have less control than we expected to.

“Perception of control” is a key concept in psychology. It refers to our belief in our ability to control events around us. When we feel that we’re in control, stressors (i.e., external events in our environment) are perceived as exciting, stimulating, and (potentially) desirable, a concept called “eustress”. A good example is when an athlete is competing for an event she’s trained for at a level at (or just beyond) her skill level, she feels challenged in a way that is often exciting. Another example might be sitting for an exam that you’re well prepared for: it’s a bit scary, but you’re up for the challenge, and it feels stimulating. When you take that perception of control away, however, humans start to experience levels of distress. The less control, the bigger the distress. Attempting to compete against people who are vastly better than you, or sitting for an exam when you don’t understand the content, is considered stressful because there’s no perceived ability to control the environment. At the extreme end, when awful things happen and we have no control at all, or when we’re exposed to little or no control over our environment for extended periods, humans experience distress to the degree that it can cause permanent damage – we call this trauma.

Now, let’s combine our brains’ expectation that it will be able to influence events in its environment (because it evolved in a very small world), with the current state of information it’s exposed to. Our brains believe that, because they can see events in other regions or countries – wars, disasters, political arseholery – and because they interpret these events as dangerous, they believe they should be able to control these events to make things safer. When they realise they have no control over these events, the stimuli (potentially neutral information like a social media post) becomes stressful, initiating an emotional response. Initially, this will probably be frustration or anger (because this is the limbic system’s way of motivating us to try and make our environment safer). When anger doesn’t work to control the stressor, we switch to avoidance mode, so our next emotion will be anxiety or fear.

Of course, this process isn’t an isolated issue for modern humans. Most of us will be exposed to hundreds of potentially stressful stimuli every day, the majority of which are well outside our sphere of control. So our poor limbic systems are constantly attempting to control or avoid scary things in our perceived environment, with the resultant flood of difficult and uncomfortable emotions. Hence the, so called, anxiety epidemic. This experience is often way worse for teenagers, because they’ve grown up with an exaggerated sphere of influence (i.e., social media), and have literally no way to control the constant flood of danger messages their brains are giving them. No wonder the world is such a terrifying place (it always was, but now it’s so much bigger and proportionally scarier).

So, to sum up: we evolved in (effectively) a tiny world where the potential dangers were potentially controllable. Our spheres of influence often matched out perceptions of control. This didn’t mean our ancestors were happier, but they were probably less anxious a lot of the time. Modern technology has made us believe that our spheres of influence are bigger – perhaps planet spanning – but our ability to control events has probably shrunk – a guaranteed recipe for increased anger and anxiety.

Shrinking our personal spheres of influence to a more realistic size can go a long way to ameliorating our distress by increasing our perception of control. I have literally no control over the political state of the US, or the atrocities being carried out by a few psychopathic men around the world, even though my brain believes it does. I do have a lot of control over my immediate life: the people I care about, my physical fitness, the work I do, my appreciation of the small world around me (what I can actually see or walk or drive to). When I focus my attention on the things within my real sphere of influence, my perception of control increases, with a lot less limbic system activity (less anger and anxiety), and a lot more satisfaction, stimulation, challenge, and meaning.

I’m not suggesting a “head in the sand” approach to life. It’s probably helpful to be aware of world events; awareness helps us understand what’s important to us, and makes it easier to identify and potentially act on our values. But trusting our brains’ notion that they can control what they see (something that modern technology artificially augments) is a recipe for distress. Stop, breathe, focus on what matters to you here and now, then take action to make your life, and the lives of those around you, better.