Worrying about things you can’t control is something almost everyone does, and it rarely helps. There is something you are worried about right now that you cannot do anything about – at least not in this moment, not today, possibly not at all. A health result you are waiting for. Someone else’s choices. The direction of something larger than you. The way something turned out that cannot be undone.
And the worry keeps running anyway. Not because it is producing anything useful, but because the mind has not yet found a way to stop what it started when the situation first felt threatening.
The Buddha understood this precisely – and what he taught about it is more practical than most people expect from a spiritual teaching.
“If the problem can be solved, why worry? If the problem cannot be solved, worrying will do you no good.”
– Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara (8th century Buddhist text)
Why We Keep Worrying About Things You Can’t Control
Worry is not irrational. It evolved for a reason. The mind that anticipates threats and prepares responses survives better than the mind that does not. The Buddha did not dismiss worry as weakness – he recognized it as a natural function of the thinking mind.
The problem, as Buddhist psychology identifies it precisely, is that worry evolved to produce action – and when there is no action available, it does not stop. It keeps running the same loop, generating the same anxiety, scanning for a solution to something that either cannot be solved right now or cannot be solved at all.
Worry about what you can control is useful. It points toward action. Once the action is taken, it can release. Worry about what you cannot control is something different entirely – it is the mind’s threat-detection system firing at a situation it has no tools to resolve, consuming enormous energy without producing anything except more suffering.
The Two Arrows – Buddha’s Teaching on Adding Suffering to Pain
In the Sallatha Sutta (SN 36.6), the Buddha describes what he calls the teaching of the two arrows. When something painful happens – a difficult diagnosis, a loss, an outcome that cannot be changed – that is the first arrow. It lands. It hurts. This is unavoidable.
The second arrow is what the mind does next: the worry about the worry, the fear about the fear, the suffering added on top of the original pain through resistance, rumination, and catastrophizing. “Why did this happen? What does it mean? What if it gets worse? What if I cannot handle it? What if-“
The Buddha was clear: the first arrow is part of life. The second arrow is optional. Not easy to avoid – but optional. And most of the suffering that comes from worrying about things you cannot control is second-arrow suffering: pain added to pain by a mind that does not yet know how to stop when stopping is the only sensible response.
“Monks, an uninstructed worldly person, when touched by a painful feeling, sorrows, grieves, laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. He feels two feelings – a bodily one and a mental one.”
– Buddha, Sallatha Sutta (SN 36.6, Pali Canon)
Worrying About Things You Can’t Control vs. What You Can
Buddhist teaching is precise on what falls within the scope of your influence and what does not. The Eightfold Path – right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration – is entirely composed of things that are within the practitioner’s sphere of effort. None of them require the external world to cooperate.
What other people decide, what outcomes arrive, what the body does over time, what circumstances produce – these are not on the list. Not because they do not matter, but because they are beyond the boundary of what effort can reach. The Buddha’s teaching asks us to put our energy where it can actually go – and to release, as gently as possible, what it cannot.
This is not resignation. It is a precise allocation of attention. Worrying about outcomes you cannot influence does not change those outcomes. It only depletes the energy available for the things you can actually do.
Equanimity – Buddhism’s Response to the Uncontrollable
The Buddhist quality most relevant to uncontrollable outcomes is upekkha – equanimity. It is the fourth of the four brahmaviharas, the divine abiding states the Buddha taught as foundations of wellbeing.
Equanimity is not indifference. It does not mean you stop caring about outcomes, or that you pretend they do not matter. It means you can care – genuinely, fully – without requiring the outcome to go your way in order to maintain your inner stability.
The difference is subtle but significant. A mind without equanimity is tossed by every result: up when things go well, down when they do not, anxious in the gap between action and outcome. A mind with equanimity can act with full effort, care about the result, and then release – because the ground it stands on is not made of outcomes.
This is the core practice behind worrying about things you can’t control: not eliminating the worry by force, but gradually loosening its grip through repeated, gentle redirection.
How to Stop Worrying About What You Cannot Control
- Ask: is there an action available right now? If yes – take it. Worry that points toward action is useful. Take the action, and the worry has done its job. If no action is available right now – the worry has no useful function. This distinction, made clearly, changes what comes next.
- Name the second arrow when it arrives. “The situation is what it is – that is the first arrow. The story I am building about what it means, what might happen, how bad it could get – that is the second arrow.” Naming it does not make it disappear. But it creates a small gap between the pain and the additional suffering, and in that gap, a choice becomes possible.
- Return attention to what is actually here. Worry lives in the future – in imagined outcomes that have not yet occurred and may not occur. The body lives in the present. Returning to physical sensation – breath, weight, temperature – interrupts the loop by placing attention somewhere the worry cannot follow.
- Practice releasing through metta. For situations involving other people’s choices or wellbeing, the loving-kindness practice offers a specific tool: May you be well. May you be safe. May you find your way. This is not passive – it is an active reorientation from anxious control toward genuine care without the grip.
- Trust the practice more than the outcome. The Buddha’s entire teaching was directed at what practitioners could do within their own minds and actions – not at controlling results. Do what is yours to do. Do it well. Release the rest. This is not spiritual bypassing. It is the most honest account of where your actual power lives.
The first arrow lands. You cannot always prevent that. The second arrow is in your hand. You do not have to throw it.
Do what you can. Release what you cannot. 🙏
If this idea of releasing what you can’t hold onto resonates, our piece on the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence goes deeper into why nothing – including this worry – stays fixed forever.
Source: Sallatha Sutta SN 36.6 (Two Arrows) · Upekkha (equanimity) · Noble Eightfold Path · Pali Canon
Tags: worrying about things you can’t control, how to stop worrying about things you can’t control, buddha two arrows sutta, upekkha equanimity, sallatha sutta, letting go of worry
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