What Should You Be Doing Right Now?

Sheree Strange
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Here’s something you might not know about me: I have a degree in psychology. I don’t blame you for not knowing that. The only reason you might know that is that you’re my husband and you’ve heard me shout “I GOT FIRST CLASS HONOURS IN PSYCHOLOGY SO I KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS THAN YOU!” during an argument. It’s hard to imagine where I went wrong in pursuing psychology as a career.

Despite abandoning the career path, a lot of fun facts have stuck with me, and they pop into my field of vision at the strangest times. For instance, the other day, I spent a good twelve hours wrapped in layers of hoodie and doona, alternating between messaging a similarly premenstrual friend and scrolling listlessly through Buzzfeed. I must have told myself a hundred times that day: “I really should be writing,”.

And then: “I should really stop telling myself what I should do,”.

Cue the flashback: a long-ago-buried chapter in a feminist psychology, with a subheading that caught my eye.

The Tyranny Of The Shoulds

This delightful phrase, and the concept it represents, can be attributed to Karen Horney. She was a bad-ass neo-Freudian psychoanalyst who made a name for herself by pointing out that penis envy and Nazi Germany were both fucked.

We use the word “should” to signify some kind of obligation or duty. Horney’s “shoulds” are the inflexible and authoritarian rules to which we subject ourselves at varying levels of conscious awareness. Without even realising it, we (especially women) hold ourselves to high standards and allow ourselves very little room to fall short.

The “tyranny” of these shoulds is the dysfunction that the imperatives create in our lives. Unsurprisingly, unrealistic and irrational rules for living impede our ability to actually cope effectively, especially when life gets just a little bit shit (as it inevitably does for everyone).

To top it off, fellow psychologist Albert Ellis went on to expand upon Horney’s work, and coined a phrase to describe the negative self-talk with which we admonish ourselves under the tyranny of the shoulds: “shoulding and musterbating”. What a legend.

Where do these “shoulds” come from, then?

Well, Horney was a psychoanalyst, so of course she assumed that the shoulds were implanted by our primary caregivers and other important authority figures early in life. Everything always comes back to our parents and sex with that lot.

Because the shoulds form so early, we rarely make the effort to consciously examine them, or identify them for what they really are. What they really are is a set of non-negotiable standards, usually very poorly formulated and almost impossible to live up to. We take them as given — they are bog-standard fish in our stream of consciousness.

Do any of these should familiar?

I should feel happy.
I should not get angry.
I should be more productive.
I should serve others better.

The shoulds become even more heady when mixed with sparkling societal pressure.

I should be thin.
I should be having children.
I should be further along in my career.

Sometimes, these self-imposed rules can be positive and fulfilling. “I should give to charity”, for instance, can prod us to be generous with our disposable income, or “I should use my indicator” can help us not to drive like a wanker. But there are times when these benign little lumps grow into hideous hairy malignancies. The shoulds exert undue pressure, and we experience them as a tyrant, whipping us without compassion for falling short of standards that are impossibly high to begin with. The shoulds stop us from feeling fulfilled, they steer us away from self-acceptance, and they make life infinitely more miserable.

Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves: says who?

What do we do about it?

Next time you find yourself shoulding and musterbating, try asking yourself: “Other than my own emotional fall-out, what will actually happen if I fall short on this one?”. Turn the lens back on the tyrant, and take a minute to really closely examine it — it often doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Identify the tyrant as rigid, unyielding, unreasonable, devoid of compassion — call the bastard for what it is.

Once you’ve picked it apart, the “should” loses a lot of its power. This gives you the perfect opportunity to counter it with a little bit of self-compassion and TLC. The fact is, no matter what “should” you’ve built into your psychology, you’re not a bad person if you fall a bit short of it now and then.

You might have noticed that a couple of my recent Medium articles (here and here) have focused on telling various “shoulds” of my own to get bent. I am stating for the record that I don’t care if I “should” take could showers or I “should” exercise until I throw up or I “should” answer the phone every single time that it rings — falling short of these ridiculous shoulds is making me a happier and more fulfilled person. So, if testimony is what really cinches it for you, there you go: it works!

If you’ve scrolled to the bottom looking for a “call to action”, here it is: depose a tyrant of your own today, and get in touch to tell me all about it.

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You can get in touch with Sheree on Twitter, or on her blog, or get her delivered straight to your inbox.

Sheree Strange

Written by

Just another millennial who quit a corporate job to chase the dream | Blogging about literature at www.keepingupwiththepenguins.com

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