When Power-over Works

I studied psychotherapy back in the days of hitting pillows.

It was the heyday of letting it all out: encounter groups, primal screaming, rebirthing … the general idea was that keeping in emotions made you sick, and letting them all out was the path to health and happiness.

While it is true that allowing yourself to feel emotions is healthy, it turns out that unrestrained venting and emoting isn’t so healthy. The continued adrenalin rush of venting just fuels even more anger.

But you know who venting is good for? The media industry. There’s more money to be made inflaming us than informing us.

One of the biggest battles being waged now: the battle for our attention.

And attention is easiest won by appealing to emotions. So we’re being bombarded daily with thousands of ads, clickbait, emails, and messages — distracting us from more productive and healthier activities with sensational headlines, outrage, conflict, and polarization.

On most days, it seems clear we’re losing the battle for our attention.

Our brains are evolutionarily designed to be alert to danger and to prioritize negative information over positive information so that we can stay alive. BAD news, DANGER, and CONFLICT get more clicks, get more votes, and ultimately more profit.

Whoever controls your attention is controlling — and defining — your reality. Thus, controlling where you put your attention is an act of power.

Your greatest power, perhaps one of your most important powers, is to determine what you focus on and how you choose to feel about it.

That is the power of self-control.

Self-control is often framed as restraint, as the ability to delay gratification or manage impulses. But it’s more than that—it’s the ability to decide what deserves our attention and what doesn’t.

It’s the capacity to choose where we invest our emotional and intellectual energy. It’s the power to resist the onslaught and retain our autonomy. When we practice self-control, we are asserting our right to critically engage with the world around us. Self-control allows us to pause, reflect, and question before reacting, ensuring that we don’t make decisions based on gut reactions, anger, half-truths, or lies.

But it require using power-over.

A common binary way to define power as either power-over or power-with. Power-over is domination, subjugation, and control.

The personification of power-over is Kratos, the Greek God of Strength, sent by Zeus to punish Prometheus for stealing fire and giving it to humanity. Kratos symbolizes brute force, and in stories and myths, he is depicted as brutal, cruel, and merciless.

Power-over gets a bad rap. Because it is a very primitive form of power. It’s brittle. If coercion, force, punishment, or reward don’t work, the only option is to escalate into brute force. It doesn’t inspire, motivate, or create commitment — it simply creates compliance.

For these reasons, we should use power-over with others sparingly.

For instance, if we have to set a boundary against hostile behavior or yank a child’s arm to pull him out of the street as a car comes.

But, when it comes to the battle for our attention, using power over ourselves is a great use of power. Because power over ourselves means using self-control.

The Power of Self-Control

We use self-control every day to get out of a warm cozy bed, to choose eggs or oatmeal over pizza and ice cream for breakfast.

We use self-control to show up at work, not yell at our boss when we’re frustrated.

We use self-control when we stop at a red light, put on our seat belts, and brush our teeth even though we don’t feel like it.

We are using power-over every day to motivate ourselves, set goals, and push ourselves towards those goals.

So, let’s rethink power-over as a necessary competency, as something that gives us power over the world that allows us to win in the struggle for attention.

Strategies for Reclaiming Power

Exerting more self-control, not allowing ourselves to be taken in by devious attempts to steal our focus, takes more than willpower. It involves cultivating habits that reinforce our autonomy. Try these:

Let me think about it. We feel pressured to respond immediately, but pausing and saying, “Let me think about it” is an act of power. Slowing down to think is an act of resistance. Everything is packaged as immediate and urgent, but it’s a ploy. So, slowing down means asking yourself, before reacting, believing, or sharing something: Is this true? Do I have the full picture? What else could be happening? Slowing down allows you to regain control over how you respond to information.

Am I willing to bet on it? Discernment is necessary. It’s different from cynicism or mistrust. Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets, counsels people on making better decisions. Asking yourself, “Am I willing to put money on this?” forces you to doubt your certainty, look for evidence, and double double-check your math. Skepticism and doubt can be a great ally, especially if something is provoking a strong emotional reaction, without offering evidence.

How will this make me feel next year? Our emotional reactions are particularly bad at one thing: consequences. When we want chocolate now, we don’t think about future consequences. We need to engage our future selves to check on our reactions and choices.

Using tomorrow, next week, next year, or when I’m 85, is a way to exert self-control by considering how our current actions will impact our future self. Cultivating a relationship with our future selves is a key to self-control.

Do I really want to be doing this now? Self-control is about setting boundaries. The algorithms behind social media are designed to keep you engaged, often by feeding you sensational or emotionally charged content. Be deliberate about how and when you consume information. Create spaces for reflection, away from the constant barrage of notifications and updates.

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Self-control is not about rigidly suppressing emotions or shutting ourselves off from the world.

We can still hit pillows if we’re angry, and let out emotions, including anger. But self-control, at its root, is about choosing how we engage with the world on our terms, with clarity and intention.