Shortly after I bought it, it has been the case that every few seconds / minutes I can no longer control my character and, for example, it just keeps running and I can't do anything. Then for some reason it stopped but now it's back and felt even worse. What could be the reason?
Too bad PC
But what if it was normal in between?
It could be that your game is damaged, you could return the game and get you a fresh copy of minecraft.
Bad PC, Bad Internet, or a Bad Server. With the server you can quickly rule it out, just look at another one to see if the problem persists. By pressing F3 you can display your FPS (top left with all the data). If it drops below 60fps you have a bad PC. Then you can try to install optifine, there you can scrape out a few FPS. Last option: reinstalling Minecraft, can sometimes help.