You've been trying so hard to keep things from getting worse.

You check your weight. You monitor how your face looks. You review your work emails multiple times before sending. When your girlfriend criticizes small things, you push down the hurt and respond with logic instead. You've built an entire system designed to prevent yourself from slipping further down the scale from "average" to "unacceptable."

And you're exhausted.

Constantly drained. Flat mood. Disrupted sleep. The monitoring never stops, and even when the numbers are "good," you're already worrying about tomorrow.

Here's what most people in your position don't realize: the control strategies you've developed to prevent problems are actually creating them.

Why Checking Makes You More Anxious

When you step on the scale or examine your appearance in the mirror, you believe you're doing maintenance-preventing decline, staying vigilant, keeping things under control. It feels necessary, like checking the oil in your car.

But something very different is happening beneath the surface.

Researchers studying body checking behaviors-which includes frequent weighing and appearance monitoring-discovered something counterintuitive: the more people check, the more distorted their perception becomes and the more anxious they feel about their appearance.

This isn't what you'd expect. If monitoring were actually protective, it should reduce anxiety and improve accuracy. Instead, it does the opposite.

The mechanism works like this: every time you check, you're training your attention to focus narrowly on perceived flaws and normal fluctuations that don't actually matter. Your brain starts interpreting minor variations-a slightly fuller face one morning, a half-pound change-as significant threats. The checking keeps your attention locked on the very thing you're trying not to worry about.

You're not preventing the problem. You're amplifying your sensitivity to it.

And here's where it gets even more interesting: the same mechanism is operating in your emotional life.

The Emotional Suppression Mistake That's Draining You

You've watched other people "driven by emotions" make bad decisions, so you've developed a different strategy: actively numb your feelings, use rationality to control conflicts, dismiss emotional responses as invalid or oversensitive.

This should make you less emotionally reactive, right?

Research on emotional suppression reveals a paradox: actively trying to suppress or numb emotions actually makes people more emotionally reactive, not less. It's called the rebound effect.

Think of your emotions like a beach ball you're trying to hold underwater at a pool. The harder you push it down, the more forcefully it wants to spring back up. Meanwhile, you're expending enormous energy just keeping it submerged.

That constant effort? That's where your mental exhaustion is coming from.

The flat mood you're experiencing isn't calm-it's depletion. You're using so much energy suppressing emotions that there's nothing left over for actually feeling anything. And when emotions do break through (which they inevitably do), they come back stronger because of all that suppressed pressure.

The control strategy designed to make you less emotional is actually making you more emotionally sensitive.

Why Your Protection System Isn't Actually Protecting You

At this point, you might be thinking: "But if I don't monitor my weight, it could genuinely increase without me noticing. If I don't control my emotions, I might make bad decisions."

This is the logical argument your mind makes. And it sounds reasonable.

But let me ask you this: can you think of a time when monitoring gave you lasting peace? When checking your weight made you feel satisfied and secure for more than a few hours?

Probably not. Even when the number is "good," you're worried about tomorrow's number.

Here's why: you're operating in what psychologists call a prevention system-constantly working to avoid getting worse-when what you actually want is an approach system, one that moves you toward satisfaction.

The difference is critical.

A prevention system is designed around the question: "How do I stop bad things from happening?" Every action is about maintaining, checking, controlling. There's no endpoint where you get to feel "good enough" because the entire framework is built around preventing decline, not achieving satisfaction.

You can meet every single standard you set and still never feel at peace, because the system itself doesn't have a "satisfied" setting. It only has "not worse yet."

This is why, as you said yourself, you never feel anything but average at best. The control mechanism you've built structurally prevents the experience you're trying to protect-worthiness, adequacy, being enough as you are.

The Truth About Safety Behaviors

When researchers study safety behaviors in anxiety-which is essentially what your control strategies are-they find that these behaviors often maintain or intensify the exact problems they're designed to prevent.

It's like if I told you, "Whatever you do, don't think about a pink elephant." What happens? You immediately think about a pink elephant.

Your control behaviors work the same way:

• Body checking keeps your attention focused on your appearance, which increases dissatisfaction and distorts perception
• Emotional suppression depletes your mental resources and creates rebound effects
• Constant monitoring prevents you from ever testing whether the feared outcome would actually occur
• The prevention framework makes satisfaction impossible by design

The irony? You've developed these strategies because you feel "not good enough," but the strategies themselves are what's preventing you from ever feeling good enough.

And there's another layer here worth examining.

When your girlfriend criticizes small behaviors, you dismiss your emotional response and use rationality instead. In those moments, what are you actually communicating to yourself about whether your feelings are valid?

That they're not. That you shouldn't feel hurt or frustrated. That maybe she has a point, or you're being too sensitive.

You're essentially agreeing with an external message that reinforces your unworthiness. The control strategy that's supposed to protect you from feeling "not good enough" is actually feeding that exact belief.

What Happens When You Test Your Assumptions

Here's what you told yourself: "The checking is the only thing preventing decline."

But here's what you realized during our conversation: "I don't actually have evidence for that. I just assume it's true."

The fear feels like a fact, but it's actually a prediction that's never been tested.

Research on exposure therapy-which means facing feared outcomes without engaging in control behaviors-shows that most feared outcomes either don't occur or are far less catastrophic than predicted. More importantly, people discover they can tolerate discomfort they thought was unbearable.

So what would happen if you ran a small experiment?

Not abandoning all awareness-just reducing the control intensity and observing what actually happens.

How to Find the Middle Ground

Imagine a control dial that goes from 0 to 10. You've been living at a 9 or 10-maximum control, maximum effort, maximum exhaustion.

The fear is that if you turn it down, you'll drop to 0 and everything falls apart.

But what if there's a middle ground? What if a 5 or 6-moderate awareness without compulsive checking-actually gives you better outcomes with less cost?

Here's what that might look like in practice:

Reduce appearance checking by 50% for one week. Not eliminate it, just reduce. Keep a simple log of three things:

• Your anxiety level
• Any actual observable changes (not how you feel, but what actually changed)
• Whether the feared outcome occurs

This tests the assumption that checking prevents decline. If the assumption is wrong-if reducing checking doesn't lead to disaster-you've just discovered that the control was costing more than it was providing.

Practice naming emotions without judgment. When feelings arise, especially during interactions with your girlfriend, don't dismiss them. Simply notice: "I'm feeling frustrated" or "I'm feeling hurt."

You're not acting on the emotion. You're not being controlled by it. You're just acknowledging it exists. This is exercising your emotional muscles without going to the extreme of being "driven by emotions." It's building strength, not losing control.

Notice the difference between prevention and approach. When you catch yourself monitoring or checking, ask: "Am I trying to prevent something bad, or move toward something good?"

This simple distinction helps you recognize when you're operating in the prevention system that makes satisfaction impossible.

What Becomes Possible With Less Control

Here's something you said that might be the most important insight of all:

"Even if I stayed exactly the same physically but felt less drained and could actually feel things again, that would be an improvement. I hadn't thought about satisfaction being possible-I've just been trying to prevent getting worse."

That's the shift.

You've been so focused on not sliding down the scale that you haven't considered what it would feel like to actually experience satisfaction, peace, or worthiness.

The control strategies have kept you locked in a framework where those experiences are structurally impossible. You can't feel "good enough" when your entire system is designed around "not getting worse."

But here's what becomes possible when you reduce the control:

• Energy you've been spending on monitoring becomes available for actually living
• Perceptions become more accurate when you're not constantly checking
• Emotions become information instead of threats
• You can test whether your fears are predictions or facts
• Satisfaction becomes possible because you're no longer locked in prevention mode

The goal isn't zero control. It's finding the point where you're using just enough awareness to take care of yourself without it consuming you.

That middle ground-the 5 or 6 on the control dial-is where most people discover something surprising: they feel more secure with less control than they ever did with maximum monitoring.

Because security doesn't come from checking. It comes from discovering you can handle uncertainty without falling apart.

You now understand how control behaviors paradoxically worsen the outcomes they're designed to prevent. You can see the invisible mechanism behind your exhaustion. You recognize the difference between prevention and approach systems.

The next question is: if you can reduce control and survive-maybe even thrive-what else have you been avoiding that might actually be safe to face?

Because once you discover that the feared outcome of reducing appearance checking doesn't materialize, you start to wonder: what other fears are predictions rather than facts? What other control strategies are costing more than they're providing?

That's where the real transformation begins-not in adding more control, but in discovering what becomes possible when you let it go.