The Mental Mean Girls

the burn book is in your brain

Several years ago, I began writing a self-help book about how to be more organized.

The idea for the book blossomed after a dinner with friends who spent the evening gently teasing me about my obsession with efficiency. “You should write a book about how everyone can be as productive as you!” my friends laughed.

They were making fun of me...and it wasn’t the first time.

At my 40^th birthday party, my husband gave a heartfelt speech in which he recited 40 things he loved about me. I don’t remember any of the wonderful things he said because he repeated the word “organized” after every other attribute - to roars of laughter.

Instead of receiving an athletic award at a dinner for our tennis team, I was crowned “fastest email responder” – again to raucous laughter and applause from the assembled crowd who knew me well.

And I had spent over a decade working at a global investment bank, where to get ahead (or simply remain employed) I had worked grueling hours and handled a crushing workload. In my performance reviews at work, the phrase has a lot of capacity came up a lot, and my greatest talent was described as getting s**t done.

Proud of my “superpower,” I opened my laptop and began typing up everything I knew about cutting out procrastination and maximizing productivity. I knew a lot about managing an e-mail Inbox down to zero; ensuring presentations were finished on time; coordinating complicated global logistics; and efficient scheduling.

But as I wrote, I realized that my real “organizational” secret wasn’t anything to do with these tips and tricks at all, it was because of something else altogether.

And I was nervous about sharing it. 

What was my secret?

I had reorganized my life to almost eradicate what I had come to know as the shoulds.

Meaning: I simply stopped doing any errand, task, “duty,” or activity that wasn’t strictly required, but I was doing because I felt like I should.

I had gained back so much time I felt giddy.

But I also felt guilty.

I worried that if I told anyone why I was so organized and had so much free time, I would be harshly judged.

Because not doing the shoulds meant I was no longer trying to prove to myself (and a set of “others” who I imagined were watching and judging) that I was a “good” person: mother, wife, sister, colleague, friend, and daughter.

Instead, I was putting my own priorities first and allocating my time to the things I found most important, meaningful, and joyful. Not only was I organized, but I was a lot happier.

What are The Shoulds?

The shoulds are a form of judgment of other people - and ourselves – driven by societal, cultural, and religious norms. They are black-and-white standards that shackle us to rigid ideals or ways of being.

The shoulds are aligned closely with perfectionism, and often masquerade as essential, under the banner of duties and obligations.

Our internalized shoulds are like Mean Girls inside our brains, telling us how we should look, act, think, and feel. They know exactly who you should be and don’t care who you really are.

The big shoulds can lead to disastrous life decisions, like marrying someone you don’t really love but feel like you should because you’re a certain age or they have an impressive job or come from the “right” family; or following a career path because everyone else said you should.

The small daily shoulds, like attending events you don’t want to go to and spending time with people you don’t like, cause feelings of resentment and bitterness to build.

A life filled with shoulds leaves little room for joy.

The shoulds were first defined by psychologist Karen Horney in the 1950s. She believed that we have two views of ourselves: the "real self" and the "ideal self". The real self is who we actually are, while the ideal self is the type of person we feel that we should be.

Horney deemed the phenomenon of living in fealty to the inexorable, unrealistic ideal self as the “The Tyranny of the Should,” writing: “The inner dictates, exactly like political tyranny in a police state, operate with a supreme disregard for the person’s own psychic condition…”

Horney described the suffocating experience of should thinking this way:

He should be the utmost of honesty, generosity, considerateness, justice, dignity, courage, unselfishness. He should be the perfect lover, husband, teacher. He should be able to endure everything, should like everybody, should love his parents, his wife, his country; or, he should not be attached to anything or anybody, nothing should matter to him, he should never feel hurt, and he should always be serene and unruffled. He should always enjoy life; or, he should be above pleasure and enjoyment. He should be spontaneous; he should always control his feelings. He should know, understand, and foresee everything. He should be able to solve every problem of his own, or of others, in no time. He should be able to overcome every difficulty of his as soon as he sees it. He should never be tired or fall ill. He should always be able to find a job. He should be able to do things in one hour which can only be done in two to three hours.

Why do we do The Shoulds?

From a very young age, humans are driven to understand the world.

For a small child in a confusingly big world, placing people and behaviors into specific boxes is reassuring. We like it when we can predict how other people will behave, and we’re taught to seek the approval of authority figures.

Some people are lucky enough to fit perfectly inside the box our culture, religion, or family expects of us.

It’s when we don’t that the trouble begins.

My biggest, scariest, should…

Once I became aware that the shoulds were living inside my brain and bore no relation to reality, many were easy to drop.

At first, I expected recrimination when I said no to things I had previously said yes to out of politeness. But soon, giving myself permission to drop the shoulds became second nature, and to my surprise, no one confronted or chastised me.

One should that I didn’t immediately recognize was the one I’d believed the longest: that a good daughter should always be loving, helpful, dutiful, and available to support her parents – no matter what.

But I had grown up in a dysfunctional and abusive family and in ours, like many others, staying obedient and silent about what had gone on in our home was a very big should. Accordingly, as an adult, I had continued to pretend to have a “normal” relationship with my parents: dutifully staying in touch, sending pictures of my children, birthday, and Christmas gifts; and never asking them to discuss, explain, or apologize for their behavior.

What I most wanted was an honest relationship with my parents, and it took a long time to realize that this was something I was “allowed” to not only want but could explicitly ask for.

What are your shoulds?

Everyone’s shoulds are different, depending on how and where we were raised, and where we live and work.

For many people, pandemic lockdowns exposed a myriad of shoulds, including the big one that’s still getting a lot of attention: for professionals, commuting to work in an office now that technology allows us to get the majority of our work done from anywhere – has become a should.

What are your shoulds? Do you sometimes struggle to balance what you must do and what is most meaningful to you, amongst the demands of societal, social, and family shoulds?