How to handle inactive object updates

So I'm fairly new to Unity, I've completed the Junior and Essentials Pathway and know a bit of .Net but I'm finding that knowledge increasingly useless since I didn't use C#.

I'm working on a game right now, and I'm creating all of the UI and backend stuff first, and I have my inventory UI, player stats UI, and the console UI done, and working on a central radial to navigate between them. The problem I'm having is that when I make them inactive it starts throwing errors because the script controllers are attached to the player.

What is the best way to handle this issue? Can I attach the controllers to their respective panels? If I do that will it throw the "Start" method every time the GameObject is set to Active? I'd test it myself but I'd rather ask in case there's a much better way of doing it and save some time. Thanks for any responses, its greatly appreciated!