'Taking charge of one's life' involves risk, because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'

Risk concerns future happenings - as related to present practices - and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised.

The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.

Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

[C]ultivated risk-taking represents an 'experiment with trust' (in the sense of basic trust) which consequently has implications for an individual's self-identity. (...) In cultivated risk-taking, the encounter with danger and its resolution are bound up in the same activity, whereas in other consequential settings the payoff of chosen strategies may not be seen for years afterwards.

Regimes are modes of self-discipline, but are not solely constituted by the orderings of convention in day-to-day life; they are personal habits, organised in some part according to social conventions, but also formed by personal inclinations and dispositions. Regimes are of central importance to self-identity precisely because they connect habits with aspects of the visible appearance of the body.