The Dichotomy of Control

The dichotomy of control is Epictetus's distinction between what is up to us, especially our judgements, impulses and choices, and what is not. The practice is to put effort into the quality of your response without pretending that outcomes, bodies, reputations or other people are completely under your command.

In December 2016 my dad came back from the hospital and told us there was an 80 per cent chance the tumour in his bowel was cancer.

I happened to be home for forty days before moving to Prague, and I happened to be deep in Stoic reading at the time. So I did the only useful thing I could think of. I sat with him and we sorted the situation into two piles: what was up to us, and what was not. The biopsy result was not up to us. His diet was. His sleep was. Whether he spent the next three weeks rehearsing his own funeral was, at least partly, up to him. He changed how he ate. He started meditating. The tumour turned out to be benign.

I wish I could tell you I handled the aftermath as well as he did. The months that followed gave me my own crop of death anxiety and hypochondria, including a couple of trips to A&E over nothing. The tool worked under pressure and then I dropped it the moment the pressure moved into my own body. That gap, between knowing this idea and living it, is what this article is about.

The idea itself is the first thing Epictetus teaches in the Enchiridion, and it is the closest thing Stoicism has to a foundation stone: the dichotomy of control.

It sorts everything you encounter into two piles: what is up to you (your judgements, your choices, your actions) and what is not (outcomes, other people, your reputation, your body). The whole of Stoic practice begins here, in refusing to spend a single ounce of worry on the second pile.

What Epictetus actually said

Epictetus opens the Enchiridion, his handbook for living, like this:

"Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing."

Epictetus, Enchiridion 1, trans. P. E. Matheson (1916)

The Greek phrase behind "in our power" is eph' hēmin, "up to us". The claim is about causality, not magic. Your judgements, your impulses, your desires and aversions, your actions: these originate in you. Everything else, including your body, your reputation and every outcome you care about, is produced partly by forces that have never heard of you.

Epictetus was born into slavery in the 50s AD and spent his early life owned by another man, Epaphroditus. When he says your body is not fully yours, he is not being poetic. He had lived it. That biography is worth keeping in view whenever the dichotomy starts to sound like a productivity tip.

The two piles

The right-hand column is not a list of things that don't matter. Your health matters. Your reputation matters. The Stoic claim is narrower and stranger: these things are not yours, because they can be taken from you without your consent. Anything that can be taken without your consent makes a poor foundation for your peace of mind.

So the practice is one of repeated sorting. The criticism arrives, the diagnosis arrives, the traffic jam arrives, and each time you ask the same question: which pile?

Doesn't effort partially control outcomes? The trichotomy debate

The modern Stoic writer William B. Irvine argues the dichotomy should really be a trichotomy: things you fully control, things you can't control at all, and a middle category of things you partially control, like your health or a tennis match. You can read his case in A Guide to the Good Life.

I understand the appeal, but I think the original two-pile version is the better tool, and I think Epictetus would say the middle category is a confusion. Take the tennis match. What you call "partial control" is really two separate things glued together: your training and effort (fully yours) and the result (not yours, because your opponent, the weather and luck all get a vote). The trichotomy keeps your peace of mind shackled to outcomes while letting you feel philosophical about it. The dichotomy makes the cut cleanly: do everything in your power to win, and hold the result lightly, because it was never in your power.

Internalise the goal. "Play the best match I can" is up to you. "Win" is not. Same court, same effort, completely different relationship to the scoreboard.

Part of the confusion is a translation problem. A. A. Long renders eph' hēmin as "up to us" and Robert Dobbin as "in our power", and both are pointing at ownership: what belongs to you as a choosing agent. "Control" sounds like power over results, which is the one thing Epictetus says you don't have. Read the phrase the way he meant it and the middle category has nothing left to hold.

The Stoics also had a tool for the tennis match already. Seneca writes his plans with a reservation attached: "I will set sail unless anything happens to prevent me, I shall be praetor, if nothing hinders me" (On Tranquillity of Mind XIII, trans. Aubrey Stewart). You commit fully to the action and add the clause. It does the job Irvine's internalised goal does, nearly two thousand years earlier. I've written up how to use it in the Stoic reserve clause.

Massimo Pigliucci keeps Epictetus's two categories in Think Like a Stoic and still recommends Irvine's book, which seems right to me. If three boxes help you plan a week, use three boxes. Just keep your peace of mind out of the middle one.

The honest criticisms

It's too simplistic. Modern psychology shows our thoughts are pushed around by hormones, trauma and biases we never chose. True. But the Stoics never claimed perfect control of the inner world; they claimed it is the only place where practice pays. You cannot train the weather. You can, slowly and imperfectly, train your responses. Twenty minutes on the mats at my BJJ gym makes the same point: you do not control what your opponent does, and yet training changes what you do next. Nobody calls that simplistic.

It promotes passivity. If you accept what you can't control, why try to change anything? But look at where the dichotomy actually directs your energy: towards action, specifically the action that is yours to take. You cannot control a corrupt system; you can control whether you organise, vote, write and show up. What you drop is not the work. What you drop is the inner demand that the universe guarantee results.

It's just CBT in a toga. Almost the reverse. Its founders said so themselves: Aaron Beck traced the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy to the Stoics, and both he and Albert Ellis quoted Epictetus. When CBT teaches you that your interpretation of an event, not the event, drives the emotion, that is Enchiridion 5 with a clinical licence.

It ignores that we need each other. Marcus Aurelius wrote that "we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids" (Meditations 2.1, trans. George Long). The dichotomy is not a hermit's tool. It is what lets you show up for other people without needing them to behave.

How to practise it

Three steps. They take seconds once they're drilled, but they have to be drilled.

Step 1: separate the event from your impression of it. Stuck in traffic, the stress you feel is not coming from the cars. It is coming from your judgement about the cars. Epictetus's instruction is to say to the impression: "You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be" (Enchiridion 1, trans. P. E. Matheson).

Step 2: ask the sorting question. Is this, or any part of this, up to me? Be strict. The interview preparation is yours. The interviewer's decision is not. The conversation with your partner is yours. Their feelings are not.

Step 3: act on your pile, release the other one. For whatever landed in your pile, act, properly and promptly. For everything else, Epictetus's closing instruction is: "if it is concerned with what is not in our power, be ready with the answer that it is nothing to you" (Enchiridion 1, trans. P. E. Matheson). Said inwardly, it is less callous and more liberating than it reads.

A concrete week of this looks unglamorous. Work stress: pour yourself into the tasks, drop the deadline anxiety it was never your job to carry. An argument: choose your words carefully, let go of scripting their reply. Health: train and eat like it matters, because it does, while accepting that bodies follow their own laws. The practice is not feeling nothing. The practice is putting your full weight only where you actually have footing.

The daily drill: a two-column card

The three steps only help if they show up when you need them, and that takes reps. This one takes two minutes a day.

The trigger is the first time each day you catch yourself rehearsing an outcome: replaying a conversation, refreshing an inbox, checking a score that hasn't moved. When it fires:

1. Take an index card or a scrap of paper and draw one line down the middle. Write the situation across the top in a few words. (30 seconds)
2. Put every piece of the situation on one side of the line. Left is up to you: what you'll say, how you'll prepare, where your attention goes. Right is everything else. Nothing goes on the line itself. (60 seconds)
3. Circle one thing on the left you can do in the next hour, and put the card where you'll see it. (30 seconds)

One card a day. Keep them for a week, then read them back on the seventh day and look for anything you keep putting on the wrong side.

The two-column page comes from Massimo Pigliucci's Think Like a Stoic course guidebook, where it is an end-of-day exercise. Here it runs in the moment, because the moment is where the dichotomy has to work.

If you'd rather be talked through it, the guided Dichotomy of Control Training takes about twelve minutes.

Is there a dichotomy of control worksheet or PDF?

You don't need one. A card with one line down the middle is the whole worksheet, and the daily drill above shows how to fill it in. If you want this page on paper, print it from your browser.

Four ways people get it wrong

1. Reading "control" as power over results. Then you either despair because you control almost nothing, or you start grading yourself on outcomes you never owned. Sort with the words "up to me".
2. Filing your own effort on the right. "The interview isn't up to me" is true of the decision and false of your preparation. If anything the dichotomy asks for more preparation, because the preparation is the only part you own.
3. Sorting once and calling it done. You can recite both lists and still spiral when the email lands. The sort has to happen when the impression arrives, which is why step one comes first and why the drill is daily.
4. Using "nothing to you" on people. Another person's pain is not up to you. How you show up for them is. That is Marcus's point above.

Common questions

What is the dichotomy of control?

A Stoic principle from Epictetus dividing everything into what is up to us (judgements, desires, actions) and what is not (events, outcomes, other people). Peace of mind comes from investing only in the first category.

Is the dichotomy of control the same as the Serenity Prayer?

They rhyme. "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can" is the same sorting move. The prayer is an early twentieth-century text, so treat it as an echo rather than a descendant. Epictetus got there about eighteen centuries earlier and added a training method.

How do I apply it when something is genuinely awful?

The dichotomy does not ask you to call awful things fine. It asks you, inside the awful thing, to find the part that is still yours: your next action, your attention, what you say to the people around you. Everything in my dad's diagnosis stayed serious. The sorting just told us where to spend the energy.

What are the best Epictetus quotes on this?

"We must make the best use that we can of the things which are in our power, and use the rest according to their nature" (Discourses 1.1, trans. George Long). And the closing instruction of Enchiridion 1: "if it is concerned with what is not in our power, be ready with the answer that it is nothing to you" (trans. P. E. Matheson).

What is the trichotomy of control?

William B. Irvine's modern three-way version: things you fully control, things you partly control and things you don't. It's a planning aid, not Epictetus's own classification. The section above explains why the original two piles are still the better tool.

Watch the practice in action

The dichotomy of control is one of those ideas that lands differently when you see someone walk through it rather than read about it. I made a video breaking down the three mistakes most people make with this concept, plus the three skills you can actually train: sorting, releasing, and responding.

If the article has given you the framework, the video gives you the practice. I share the exact exercises I use myself: the two shelves, the set-it-down practice, and the question I ask when I notice I'm holding on too tight.

The Stoics weren't promising freedom from difficulty. They were promising freedom inside difficulty.

Going deeper

The primary texts are free: Epictetus's Enchiridion and Discourses and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations at Project Gutenberg, Seneca's letters at The Internet Classics Archive. For the scholarly view, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Stoicism is the place to start. On this site, the next chapter in the series is Desire and Aversion, and if you want goals built on the right side of the dichotomy, see Epictetus's three tests.

If you want structured practice, the 7-Day Stoic Challenge is free. Nine audio lessons and a 42-page workbook.

Enchiridion Chapter One, Epictetus, translation by P. E. Matheson (1916):

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing. Things in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammelled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hindrance, dependent on others. Remember then that if you imagine that what is naturally slavish is free, and what is naturally another's is your own, you will be hampered, you will mourn, you will be put to confusion, you will blame gods and men; but if you think that only your own belongs to you, and that what is another's is indeed another's, no one will ever put compulsion or hindrance on you, you will blame none, you will accuse none, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy, for no harm can touch you.

Aiming then at these high matters, you must remember that to attain them requires more than ordinary effort; you will have to give up some things entirely, and put off others for the moment. And if you would have these also—office and wealth—it may be that you will fail to get them, just because your desire is set on the former, and you will certainly fail to attain those things which alone bring freedom and happiness.

Make it your study then to confront every harsh impression with the words, 'You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be'. Then test it by those rules that you possess; and first by this—the chief test of all—'Is it concerned with what is in our power or with what is not in our power?' And if it is concerned with what is not in our power, be ready with the answer that it is nothing to you.