Stop Shoulding Yourself: How Shame Gives Rise to Bad Prioritizing Habits
There are always things you ‘could’ be doing. We often amend that word to ‘should,’ which is just a little-known conjunction of ‘shame’ and ‘could.’ Don’t let the grammatical syntax fool you—‘should’ makes us feel immediate shame and guilt that whatever is being “neglected” is more worthy of our time and energy than something else (the former often being things we do for other people, while the latter generally is prescribed for our own needs). Let’s break down some common things we tell ourselves while using these words, and debunk the supposed truth in them.
The Situation: ‘Have some time to’ indicates there is a spot in your day which allows for FREE time, where you can do anything you WANT.
Verb: What you clearly WANT to do is to read, as this is the first thing that came to mind when you realized you had free time.
The Shame Game: ‘Should really’ — Where your default response is to fill that FREE time with obligations. And not only are you thinking of this obligation as secondary to something you’d like to do (read), but you will ultimately choose the obligation over the want.
The Grammatical Paradox: The paradox of this sentence is that your WANT could actually be a NEED, but because your brain determined it’s efficacy as a desire before you reached the comma, it provided a more ‘productive’ use of your time while shaming you for wanting your need in the process. Don’t forego a want because you feel like it’s selfish. You are entitled to be selfish not because you’re more narcissistic than others, but because **everyone deserves downtime**. And whether that downtimes is used productively, or relaxingly, or spent staring at a wall, it’s valid so long as you feel better afterwards.
TRYING: IT’S USES AND FAILURES
We are so often made to feel that we’re never doing ‘enough.’ The sense of overwhelm on any given day is enough to make our heads spin. How many times have you heard the phrase, “Not enough hours in the day”? How many times have you said it yourself? In our culture, we are inundated with task after task, never ending obligations which we fight tooth-and-nail to accomplish each day, ticking off the boxes as if there were a prize at the end. The prize: Going to bed, and subsequently doing it all over again the next day.
We rarely afford ourselves the ‘luxury’ of rest. In fact, I have struggled with the concept of rest so often that my husband celebrates when I can take a nap, or willingly choose to read instead of working on the budget (although this could be simply because he hates being on a budget).
We try so hard to keep up that we end up falling behind in all the things that TRULY matter—mainly, our physical and psychological well-being. What’s particularly difficult to navigate for T/MIs is that we were never raised to see the needs of our own body as more important than the needs of others. We were brought up to understand that obligations were as necessary as our personal hygiene.
So as we strive to TRY to do all the things, we utterly FAIL to take care of ourselves the way we deserve to be taken care of—with consistent affection.
THE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT: A PERSON’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE THEIR TIME SELFISHLY
You don’t need permission from others to take care of yourself. There may be some backlash if you cancel plans with a friend to spend a night in, or fail to make an appearance at a family gathering because you are completely beat from the past week, but that backlash will invariably be less of a consequence than it will be when you’ve smothered your own needs for a long enough period. The body has a way of subtly punishing us for not taking proper care of it. Have you ever gotten a common cold or a stomach flu seemingly out of nowhere and thought, “Where did that come from?” Have you ever had a week where no matter how many ibuprofen you took, the headache just wouldn’t go away, but it was gone as suddenly as it came? What about brain fog, muscle aches, fatigue, nausea… you name it. Any of this can come from the access amounts of stress that build up because we’re consistently putting our shoulds before our needs.
If we can’t break through the stigma of selfishness being a crime or a character flaw, then we have to rewire our brains into believing that our needs come first. To do this, start your sentences to line up your verb with “should”, instead of the other way around.
As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons, “should” can be used for good. When you transpose your sentence to reflect what you want/need to do with what you should do, this re-trains your brain to believe that nothing more productive or pressing can be suggested, because reading is something that should be accomplished. Once you start tricking your mind into lining up with your needs, the obligations will become secondary and, therefore, optional.
Try this trick the next time you have some free time. Your brain is malleable and has an inherent thirst for learning. Teach it to respect the rest of your body by beating it at its own game before it ever has a chance to counter.
