‘Should’ – How one simple word affects my mental health

The expectations I hold of myself will always exceed my capabilities. I will never reach the standards I expect of myself, no matter what I achieve in life, if I continue the way I think.

This for me is a huge barrier to moving forward. I struggle to accept my achievements whether big or small. One of my earlier posts looked at how small achievements are still great achievements. So why am I still struggling to practice what I preach?

I find it a lot easier to give advice to others, and write down ideas within this blog. But in reality, I find it extremely hard to put my words into practice and I often feel like I am contradicting myself.

Don’t get me wrong, there are rare times when I have taken my own advice, but I can very rapidly go back to the negative thoughts and behaviours I’ve used throughout my life.

One word that I overuse is ‘should’. Now this doesn’t sound too harmful when I write this, but by defining everything with a ‘should’, I’m never allowing myself to see the positive things that I am doing.

When someone praises me, I can instantly reply with ‘well that’s what I should have done’. And instead of accepting the original praise, I focus fully on what I should have done better. My mind will quickly agree with me and then I’m justifying my original thoughts with what I think is evidence. Then before you know it I’ve crushed any idea that I may have achieved something and I’ve flipped it round to the self-hate thoughts and beliefs I have.

I’m so used to living my life using the word ‘should’ regularly, and I’m starting to realise the negative impact it has.

I’ll use it with small things like ‘I should have tidied up, or done my laundry days ago’, which will then spiral into disgust in myself that I’m too lazy, when actually I may have just been busy. Then there’s the larger things like ‘I should be a better friend, or I should have done better in my career’. By carrying the word around with me all the time, I am constantly validating the negative thoughts I have about myself.

I know that I relentlessly scrutinise everything that I do. And I know I’m not alone in this. Unfortunately we live in a society where we compare ourselves to others on a daily basis and are constantly thriving to do better.

So on the surface it may just look like a word, but for me the meaning behind it backs up the theory and beliefs that fuel my low self-esteem and inner low self-confidence.

Like I said, I have extremely high expectations of myself in my life, and also in my relationships with my family and friends. I have an incessant need to prove to everyone that I’m a good person. I very rarely believe it myself, but I really want to make sure that I’m a good friend, daughter, sister etc. at all times.

Therefore I constantly look at what I should be doing in my eyes, in order to achieve this. It may sound ridiculous and when I do step back and look, I can see that I am never really achieving it because I’m constantly changing the goal posts. When I’ve done something that I feel may be good, my mind will automatically find something that I should have done better. And the cycle continues.

I don’t know where this need to impress or prove to people that I’m worthy has come from. I was brought up in a loving family home and my parents never pushed me to achieve massive things. They’ve always been so proud of whatever I’ve done.

So it leads me to realise that at some point in my life (which hopefully I’ll realise one day), I developed this extremely negative way of thinking. I know I’ve had these standards in my head for a long time, therefore making changes to that will be a long process. But I’m more self-aware of this and I think that’s a good place to start.

This is something that I’ll be looking at more intensely through therapy and I know is not something that can change overnight. But there are ways that I believe I can start to move forward with this outside of therapy. It seems like a really simple concept but sometimes the simpler things are most effective.

Every time I use the word ‘should’ I’m going to try to stop what I’m doing and if possible write it down. I’ll then replace the sentence with a more positive sentence. Writing things down has helped me in the past, so visually seeing it on paper is a good way for me to recognise it. And every thought I will try to challenge. I think consistency is key in this exercise. It also proved to work quite well when I was struggling with negative thoughts in hospital.

I know that these thought patterns are in a way just thoughts, but they can be extremely destructive and detrimental to my mental health. They can change though and I’m hopeful that I can do this and I have hope in anyone who struggles with this too.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to live up to the person I want to be, when in reality I’ve struggled to even know who or where I want to be. I change my mind frequently and I feel like I’m never really achieving anything. But I know if I ask someone close to me, they’ll be able to tell me at least one thing I’ve achieved. So I’m also going to draw upon them to support me with this.

It’s never too late to make changes to improve the way you think. Life is extremely hard as it is without us making things more difficult for ourselves.

We need to keep pushing ourselves to turn the negatives into positives.