The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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From an old Reddit post: When you use the words “I should”, you’re silently finishing the sentence with “…in order to be worthy of love and respect.”
Spot on! Also, “I should [verb]” is a comparison of my choices with a standard I got from someone else if I can’t truthfully say “I want to…” or “I need to…” in its place. If that replacement doesn’t help, I can try replacing it with “I could…” or “I can…” to replace obligation with opportunity and maybe even place it in my Next Actions queue, pre-choosing it in a way.
There’s also “I should be able to…” which is a similar dynamic relating ability to worth.
I’m not exactly convinced. For some things, things that are in some way visible to other people, that people see as good things, I could buy it as a good mental model. But I should (study more, eat better, reduce screen time, etc.) I just don’t see where the “worthy of love and respect” comes in. Often, I don’t even bring up what I’m doing to other people simply because it’s not about other people.
In wellness support groups among people with existing persistent unhealthy self-talk, talking about “should” statements usually involves examining whose expectations, standards, or priorities are bundled into that “should”. There’s nothing wrong with the self-owned or logical should as long as one recognizes the unspoken imperative which by its very nature involves an emotion, however dispassionate:
I get that, and I’ve seen people do it in toxic ways. I just don’t see it as something that always and universally applies to everyone in all situations. Sometimes I think self-improvement ideas can overfit just because the techniques are developed for those settings are developed to rehabilitate the sick and don’t necessarily carry that baggage for those who are not sick. I want to learn formal logic and statistics because I think they’re useful tools for understanding the world. I want to write stories because it’s an interesting and fun hobby. Saying I should study in the context of self study to better myself, or I should work out so I don’t have a heart attack at 50, or I should finish my short story— these don’t necessarily have anything to do with other people.
What’s somewhat worse to me is that in some cases, that kind of assumption can end up being just as much of a guilt trip as the original “should” thought. If everything you tell yourself you should do is really about meeting other people’s expectations, then why do anything to improve yourself? Why exercise if you are only doing it to impress others? Okay, but then you will probably end up obese and are in poor heath. Why finish that story if you’re only trying to impress people? The alternative is another failed project that you started and didn’t finish and then you feel like a loser because you don’t actually do anything. Why learn? The alternative is that you live in Sagan’s demon haunted world where you can’t make good decisions because you have no idea how anything works and don’t have the tools to figure in out.
I think a lot of mental health advice ends up that way: designed to help people with severe problems, and works pretty well there, then gets applied to the general population and not only doesn’t help, but can create the problems that it was intended to prevent. Asking whether you’re doing something to people please is reasonable if you have a severe problem people pleasing. But for most people, shoulds are what gets them off the couch and into motion and doing things that they really should be doing. You should accomplish things. You should study and build a career. You should keep up your house or apartment. And on things like ruminating on your feelings, for normal healthy people, this can make them feel depressed because they focus on the negative feelings produced by events in their lives and over time talk themselves into anxiety and depression.
And that's why I posted it in the Wellness Wednesday thread as mental wellness advice instead of the Friday Fun thread as lexical insight porn.
As far as agonizing or guilt-tripping over whether a given "should" is a problematic should inspired by bad boundaries or anxiety or low self-worth etc., sounds like an anxiety problem I don't have and thus don't need to worry about.
In other words, I shouldn't worry about shoulds, and nobody should worry about my shoulds either. And I don't, except when someone makes a particularly poignant or potent point.
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