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An essential element in running our lives is creating a workable structure, and the job of mental and behavioral rules is to do exactly that. But all rules are not equal, and sometimes they can create more harm than good. Here are the three common types. See how they fit into your everyday life:
1. “Should” rules
Here we’re talking about the “shoulds” and the “musts” that can fill our brains. When they work well, they help us stay on course and make decisions quickly. When they don’t—when we have too many contradictory rules in our heads, we can feel overwhelmed. When they pummel us like a schoolyard bully, they can negatively affect our self-esteem and make us less decisive and guilty.
Shoulds are usually inherited and taken in whole from parents and other authority figures when we are growing up. They bring with them that demand, that guilt if we break them. More importantly, they can override our wants and adult values. Wants and don’t-wants are gut reactions, unlike the head stuff of shoulds, and are important sources of information about our needs. Values are grown-up, adult versions of shoulds, standards for how we want to live our lives, independent of what others might think is right and wrong.
2. Structuring rules
This is about using rules to structure our everyday lives, and we can think of them on a continuum. On one end are those looser, less demanding routines—think of those morning or bedtime series of behaviors that you automatically fall into. These routines save time, save you from having to make thousands of decisions, and save you the challenge of recreating your day every day from scratch.
But sometimes, these routines can become increasingly rigid. This is less about structuring and more about managing anxiety. Think of the person who has to eat dinner at 6 p.m. every night and can go into a tailspin if the timing is off. At the farthest end, we can think of those struggling with OCD—obsessive thinking and compulsions that are often debilitating attempts to keep anxiety at bay and take on a life of their own.
3. Trauma-based rules
Many would argue that tight rigidity and OCD have at their base some trauma or genetics. But for many others dealing with trauma, their learned coping styles as children continue to run their lives as adults. Here, we can think of adults who coped by avoiding conflict by always being accommodating or passive, never opening up to others or controlling, or always being aggressive as a way to deal with anxiety. These were not rational decisions but decisions made nonetheless with a child’s mind to help cope in a dangerous world.
Taking Stock
The reason to talk about rules at all is to upgrade your everyday life, to challenge you to step back and look at the rules that make up your life, and to decide what’s working, what you want to keep, and what you possibly want to change.
Here are some questions to help you get started:
- How much do shoulds run your life? Are you able to recognize your wants and gut reactions to tell you what you need? Can you be assertive and share this information with others? What are your values? How can you better integrate them into your life?
- How is the structure of your everyday working? Are you perhaps too routinized, or perhaps too rigid so that you leave little room for spontaneity? Is the underlying anxiety something that you perhaps need to tackle more directly?
- What did you decide at some point about the nature of the world and others, how you needed to be, and what you needed to do to be safe? Has what may have worked in the past no longer working? Is it time to begin to challenge those early decisions and begin to change those patterns that keep you from having a fuller life?
Listen to your answers, and as always, seek the help you need to resolve them and move forward.