Control

Without becoming a crazed control freak, the more control your have over your time and your life, the happier you are likely to be. Powerlessness in all its forms helps make you feel insignificant and unhappiness often follows closely behind.

To take an extreme example, in the First World Way, thousands of soldiers suffered from shell shock; what we now call Post Traumatic Shock Syndrome. While all major conflicts result in some people falling foul of some variant of this illness, the numbers in that war, in a time much less sympathetic to psychiatric illness, were phenomenal, and it is widely thought that this was not because of the scale of the carnage but because of the utter powerlessness and lack of control of their own lives.

Fighter pilots in WWII for example, while suffering similar or worse rates of attrition, suffered far less, because up there in the wide skies, and with your own hand on the joystick of your destiny, you feel as if you are responsible, in control and though you are in danger, you are also able to escape it, or to choose heroism and face it.

In the trenches, choice was the last thing they had, so the futility of their situation stared them in the face.

In your own life, control is the one thing that enables you to feel like an adult, to take responsibility and stand or fall by the decisions that flow from it. Steps to achieve this can be large or small.

Abandoning a soap opera may improve matters by giving you control over a small extra part of your evening. Giving up your job to set up your business is a much more radical step, and while most small business people work at least hard as the regular employed, they seem to complain much less.