#14: How to Stop “Shoulding” All Over Yourself
In the last 6 months, I’ve launched an online shop, a podcast, and a new program. People have asked me how I was able to do all of it, on top of my work with health care workers amid the COVID pandemic. And, naturally, reason number one is knowing how to manage my mind. This, of course, is the work I get to help my clients do, too. Reason number two, though, is constraint...which is NOT something that comes easily to me. Shiny objects? Strangers? They’re just friends I’ve yet to meet. Cooking? Throw it all in the Instant Pot.
Embracing constraint in my life has been challenging in the past and is oh-so-rewarding now. And it’s a natural extension of our conversation about focusing on fueling our own energy, especially if insomnia and fatigue loom large for you right now.
In this article, I’ll share:
The link between burnout and constraints
The distinction between constraints and restrictions
How to use constraints to greater effect in your life
To get started, I’ll share a client case. We’ll call this client Kelly. Like you, Kelly thinks her job is to juggle things. She takes pride in being one of the best jugglers in the business: When someone asks her to throw an extra ball into her routine, she never says no. If she doesn’t have time to get something done during the workday, Kelly’s always willing to do it at night, in between bites of dinner or after making sure the kids get to bed. Her day often begins before 6:00am and doesn’t end until after 10pm. When Kelly works late, she has the courtesy not to complain about it to her team, though she’ll occasionally hint at it.
Kelly’s VP thinks she’s one of the best directors at the company. They celebrate her juggling skills, tout her willingness to take on new projects, and tell other employees they should follow Kelly’s example.
What they don’t realize is that Kelly is putting herself, her team, and even her entire company at risk. Because Kelly’s on the brink of burnout. And she’s not alone. Recent research suggests more than 3 in 4 Americans are experiencing burnout. That’s a pretty high percentage y’all.
Kelly’s been teetering on the edge of burnout for a while. If she continues grinding herself down, she’ll become anti-productive, making mistakes that the rest of her team must spend time fixing.
To make matters worse, Kelly’s now juggling all of her tasks from home, where it’s harder for her colleagues to gauge her stress levels. And where she faces nonstop demands from her family.
Luckily, Kelly and I have been working together to help keep Kelly from fizzling out. And it all starts with clarifying and honoring what’s most important. But, first, let’s explore why we struggle with clarifying what’s important.
There are many theories as to what prompts exhaustion or, worse, burnout, but some of the more common job-related causes include:
A lack of social support at work...this is especially common among remote workers
Extremes of activity...you know, the whole “burning the candle at both ends” problem
Unclear or undefined job expectations
Work-life chaos
At the heart of so much of it is a lack of clarifying and honoring constraints.
Now...when I say constraints, what do you think of? Limits...reduced options. You might have visions of a restrictive diet...another round of the Whole 30...it’s still early in 2021. This is a common theme that pops up for people when they hear the word “constraint.” But what I’ve described is actually restriction, not constraint. And this distinction is so important...because it’s at the heart of “should”ing all over ourselves.
When we operate from a place of restriction, we’re telling ourselves we cannot or should not think, feel, do, or have something. And you know what our natural reaction to these types of restrictions is? Rebellion.
We see this in our relationship with our food...with our money...with our relationships...with our bodies. And what we think of as restriction is about control and, really, morality. Not in an overt way. But in a more insidious way that conflates outcomes with self-worth. To abide by a restriction is to feel good about ourselves; to not abide is to feel guilt or shame.
When we try to restrict ourselves, we naturally create a rebellion: between being the parent pushing veggies on a kid who wants chicken nuggets...between being the taskmaster teacher and the spacey student...between being the tidy bookkeeper and the loose over-spender. You can see the ways in which we assume roles at odds with each other between the one who’s enacting the restriction and the one who’s feeling restricted.
When we restrict, we rebel. And when we rebel, we resist.
If you’ve ever wondered why you find it so difficult to do things that you know are good for you, or things you know you should do, or sometimes even things that you kind of think you want to do but for some reason you can’t do them, this is why. The minute that you put restriction on it, the minute you tell yourself that you shouldn’t do something, that you can’t have it, the minute you make your self-acceptance hinge on it or tell yourself you’re not allowed, then you’ve transformed yourself into both the bully and the victim.
And from this place, it’s impossible to access your actual desires or agency or priorities or values or innate wisdom. Because when you place restrictions based on “shoulding” all over yourself, you create a desire for the thing that’s forbidden. This is true across topics: that slice of cheesecake...those shoes...the trip to Croatia. Your goal is to assert yourself in the face of your inner bully by rebelling against the restriction.
Restriction creates rebellion. When you understand that restriction and rebellion go together, then the question becomes, “How can you create choice?” or “How can you foster your own agency?” And, again, if we’re talking about burnout and the opposite of that, which is engagement...then it’s a question of sustained energy: “How can you sustain your energy?” The answer is constraint.
Of course, there’s always the option to just eat whatever you want, spend your money on whatever you want, and so on. But that’s not going to feel good, either.
Again, the answer is constraint. So let’s talk about how to use constraints to greater effect in your life. And how constraint does NOT equal restriction!
Creating constraint is about choosing in advance what you’re going to allow or do and then only allowing or doing those things. There’s an important distinction to be made here, though: I’m not talking about prioritizing. Prioritizing alone isn’t going to prevent burnout.
For someone like my client Kelly, who’s grown accustomed to working nights and weekends, it doesn’t matter how much tasks are minimized: She’ll find ways to fill her time with more work. It’s Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
The implication of this is simple, yet profound: To avoid working all the time — yet still get her work done — Kelly needs to limit the amount of time she allots for work.
This is the heart of constraint. Creating constraint is about creating the conditions for success in doing less to accomplish more.
You always have agency--you’re always making choices about how to respond to external circumstances. Even when you don’t think you have time. Even when you don’t like your options. And when you operate from a place of agency or active choice, then you eliminate the “shoulding” all over yourself.
Think about a situation or a topic for which you’re always negotiating with yourself. It could be related to your personal health goals for movement, nutrition, sleep, meditation, or anything. It could be related to your relationships, your job, your tendency to overwork, your community. The self-improvement industry can really be such a racket...prompting all kinds of internal negotiation for us...which most often becomes about restriction and then rebellion when we’re not managing our minds. This happens because we don’t proactively create our constraints and tune into our agency or choice in doing so.
Consider a handbag or purse. Actually, I really like using this example because I purposely never carry one. And, to my knowledge, neither do most men. For me...and I assume for a lot of men who are dads, it’s about creating an intentional constraint about what I’m committing to being responsible for in the course of my outing, my day, my trip, etc. I need to acknowledge that this is an easier choice for me because I don’t have kids. But if you have kids, and you carry a handbag, is it a big catch-all tote? If so, do you really need to carry all of it? Or do you have an opportunity to discern in advance what you’re committing to carrying? Imagine that large tote getting pared down to a smaller, cross-body bag that’ll give your mind and your back some relief. Now and especially in the years to come.
Let’s go back to the Kelly example. In Kelly’s case, a mere “commitment” not to overwork won’t lead to sustainable change. For a constraint to work, Kelly needs to face real, unmovable barriers that force her to finish her work and leave it in her home office — like scheduling a long-overdue Netflix date with her husband in the basement during a pandemic.
As I’ve done this in my own life, I’ve found a few things arise:
First, I’m great about making grand plans...too grand of plans.
Second, I’ve conflated my self-worth with the plan.
Third, when the time comes to implement said plan, I’ve listened to my brain, with its negative bias, as though the negativity means something about me doing the plan.
I imagine this pattern sounds familiar for you. If so, here are a few principles to keep in mind:
First, your brain will be negative. It will be a complainer. That’s what it does. It’s important to know and remember this because when it does, you can just make a note, “Okay, here’s the part when…” It becomes an observation, an understanding, instead of a reason to quit. In contrast, when we don’t factor in or anticipate and prepare for the negativity, we take it seriously and give into it.
Second, even if you make your decision with your own full and beautiful agency...and all is right in the world...and you’re in a good headspace, your brain may STILL complain when it comes time to execute against your pre-determined constraints.
Third, when you set a constraint, you want to still honor it even if you don’t do the thing you’d intended to do. For example, let’s say you’ve blocked time to work on a creative project for Saturday morning from 8:30-10am. And you get to Saturday and decide you’re not really feeling creative, you can opt out. But then hold that space for nothing else, just sit there. No scrolling Instagram. No Duke of Hastings and Bridgerton on Netflix. This isn’t restriction. You still have autonomy to NOT do your creative project...but you just need to sit there, because it’s about exercising constraint for yourself and honoring your energy. As you do this, over time, you’ll see that you end up doing the thing because you’re narrowing your options in ways that best serve you.
Fourth, constraints aren’t about your morality...your being a good person. Constraint is not about, “Okay, if I complete this Whole 30, then I can feel good about myself.” Remember: constraint is a positive, restriction a negative. Constraint is about what you want to achieve or accomplish, the habit you want to build for reasons that have nothing to do with your worth as a human. That’s not up for debate or contingent upon anything. Your worth just is.
Constraint means choosing ahead of time what options you have and making that contract with your prefrontal cortex in your brain, and then only giving yourself those options. And as you consider whether you may be struggling with burnout--or teetering on the edge of burnout--constraint can become a tremendous asset for you.
It can also help you knock out some impressive goals.
Think about a recent occasion when you’ve said, “I don’t have time.” This is passive and inaccurate. You always have a choice about how you spend your time. Instead, thinking and saying, “I’m choosing to make time for other things” honors your agency and creates a meaningful constraint to propel your action, while preserving your energy.
Now think about a time when you’ve left a decision until the last minute. You spend a lot of mental energy thinking about, worry about that thing. When you decide ahead of time, you cut down on that wasted energy. Sure, you might still need to expend mental energy to manage your mind, but you’ve already set yourself up for success by defining and narrowing your field of choice and the number of decisions you have to make. And you’ve eliminated the need to negotiate with yourself on the front end, which sets you up for more successful execution of your plan.
Actually, the topic of schedules and calendars and time is a really fascinating and charged topic. For starters, lots of people create “To Do” lists and just attempt to get through them. Daily, weekly, monthly...whatever the increment of time. But this allows for unrealistic expectations about what can get done. And because there’s no concrete plan in place, this often leads to scope creep and saying “yes” to more and more, and then feeling overloaded.
And for so many people, the notion of creating constraints in your calendar brings up a lot of feelings that are really the result of thoughts about people-pleasing and perfectionism. Not having a calendar of activity allows a person to stay in “la-la-land” about what they might do or who they can step in to support or how responsive and all-around amazing they can be. Creating constraints and then scheduling your calendar accordingly makes stuff real...your values, your priorities, your level of efficiency, your likelihood for success, and more.
We’ve seen this play out in the business world. Earlier, I mentioned Parkinson’s Law, which is the idea that “work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion.” There’s also its opposite--Horstman’s Corollary--that says, “work contracts to fit the time we give it.” This is scary for those who struggle with people-pleasing and perfectionism. But, in business, it’s true. New Zealand and Japan have shown us the boosts in productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction from 4-day work weeks.
Another benefit of creating constraint is that it forces you to get really specific. When it comes to goal-setting, specificity really matters. We’re talking about time of day, location, span of time, social support, and so much more to get really specific and measurable. This creates a system of optimal defaults for your success.
It’s time for another, “What I Learned About”...the part of the podcast where I share lessons from my own life to illustrate key points I’m attempting to make. Today, I’ll share what I learned about constraints from training for marathons. I’ve always been an athlete but running long distances have never appealed to me. And my physique isn’t exactly made for it, either. My ancestors definitely moved the boulders and left the running long distances for food and water to others in the community. But in my early 20s, fresh off a college fastpitch career, I fell into the “should” trap with running a marathon. I’ll spare you the details to simply say that I signed up for two marathons and a 10-miler and didn’t complete any of them. It’s not because I didn’t have the general capacity to do it--I did. But I didn’t put the constraints in place to make it possible. Fast forward 15 years and I ran the Brooklyn half-marathon one year and the Vancouver Marathon Team Relay the next year. Did my anatomy suddenly change? Nope. Did I dedicate my life to being a runner? Nope. The key to my success was in creating constraints. I had a very specific purpose and built in the scaffolding to support myself so I could eliminate the mental and emotional drama of actually following through on the training and the event itself. Yes, part of this was identity-related...being able to move on from an old, socially programmed dream of being someone who’s completed a marathon to actually listening to what lights me up. But the other part was very tactical. This meant picking a fun travel destination as incentive, enrolling friends as allies to join me and serve as training and accountability partners, following a predefined training schedule, and focusing on shorter distance runs. Lengths that would provide a healthy challenge but also not dominate my life and certainly not preclude us from having fun during a trip to NYC or Vancouver. It was such an easy process that felt so freeing because it meant I never had to wonder about my commitments or “should” all over myself about them, either. It was all very clear: for the next 12 weeks, this is my commitment...and it’ll end in a fun trip with friends! It was a set of constraints.
Going back to my opening story about all that I’ve launched in recent months, it really only happened because I knew I had a limited span of time where, with the quarantine, I’d have a bunch of built-in constraints in terms of socializing with loved ones and just general life interests of concerts and sports and other types of personal enrichment. I knew the quarantine wouldn’t last forever, so I made these projects my top priorities. I rested, too. I’m not into the hustle and grind. I’ve already lived and learned some hard lessons about burnout in previous years...and, remember, this episode is within the larger narrative of energy management.
So to recap…
Many of us expend untold amounts of mental and emotional energy every single day by arguing and negotiating with ourselves what we will and won’t do...by shoulding all over ourselves. But when we create constraints, we’re freeing ourselves of the “shoulds” and making a plan with our prefrontal cortex ahead of time...which allows us to then just focus on the execution. Our brain doesn’t get caught up in rebelling from restriction; instead, we’re operating from a more empowered place--a place of agency or choice.
You may also like…
