It’s been several months since my last post, and the reason is very simple – I’ve consciously taken on way too much work, and some of the fun but (currently) unprofitable ventures like this blog have ended up taking a back seat for a while. The last week or two I’ve been feeling like I should get a post out, and I was dutifully working on a post entitled “How to Consciously Handle Overload” (coming soon).

Trouble was, I have spent most of the last 3 months feeling massively conflicted over what my priorities were supposed to be, and I ended up spending most of my time nibbling away at all my projects, moving them all forward in tiny increments everyday – not an optimal way to get anything done!

Then I realized… I was full of “should”!

I had spent almost half a year working on things I felt I should be doing – I should write that speech, I should finish that website, I should empty my inbox (still not done!). I didn’t really do anything I wanted to do, other than occasional recreational activities, the rest of the time was spent hammering away at my to-do should-do list.

The end result of 6 months of should? A happy boss. Happy clients. An unhappy me!

When I realized how negative and dis-empowering it is being full of should, I set out to discover more about this condition…

Shoulditis

Published by the Scramblejam health information team, September 2008.

This factsheet is for people who suffer from shoulditis (commonly perceived as being “full of should”), or who would like information about it.

Shoulditis describes the condition where the mind and heart feel heavy – caused when the sufferer feels they have a great deal of responsibilities, goals and tasks that they should do in life.

About Shoulditis

Shoulditis is a symptom of feel overburdened with responsibilities and things you feel you need to do. Exact figures are unknown, but surveys indicated about 140 million people worldwide may be affected.

Shoulditis typically manifests as chest pain or tightness, feelings of lethargy, mental feelings of distractedness – especially when you you have a lot to do. It may feel like you’re being pulled in several directions at once. Shoulditis is especially likely to occur during acute procrastination. Anger or stress also tends to make it worse.

Shoulditis is commonly felt as a background condition, where subtle symptoms affect quality of life – on occasion sufferers may experience flare-ups, where the condition becomes intensely painful and debilitating. During flare-ups the pain doesn’t usually last for more than a few hours and subsides fairly quickly after resting, or when the symptoms are masked with procrastination, or indulgence in “comfort habits”. As well as the pain, you may feel breathless, sweaty and have a sense of fear. It can often be controlled, and even eliminated,  with a combination of lifestyle and psychological changes.

Types of Shoulditis

There are three main types of shoulditis, which can occur individually or in combination:

Behavioural Shoulditis

Behavioural shouditis is the most common of the main forms of the disease. The symptoms manifest when the sufferer is faced with low-level behavioural choices that they feel they should make, choices they may face regularly, on an everyday basis.

For example:

• I should pass up that Chocolate Éclair
• I should get up when my Alarm goes off, rather than hit snooze
• I should put this DVD back on the shelf – I don’t need it
• I should choose the healthy salad at lunch
• I should go to the gym this morning

Individually, the negative consequences of each poor choice are negligible – It’s the cumulative effect of all those shoulds that causes chronic sufferring, and the long-term debilitating effects that can ensue.

Unique symptoms: Tightness of the chest, eye and head-rolling, fist-clenching and subvocal muttering.

Performance Shoulditis

Performance shoulditis is triggerred under high pressure situations – Delivering a complex report for a superior, landing a client contract, delivering a speech or buying a gift for a spouse. The demands one is placed under by the situation cause extreme anxiety, and fire off a number of highly-specific, performance-related shoulds (usually with catastrophic results implied for failure).

For example:

• I should land this contract, or my boss will fire me
• I should buy my wife a nice gift, or she’ll think I don’t love her
• I should talk to girls at this party, or I’ll be alone forever
• I should ask my boss for this payrise, or I’ll never afford the mortgage

The high-pressure situations that cause performance shoulditis are demanding enough without the additional psychological burden of dealing with all these shoulds. Performance-related shoulds are the most debilitating, because they not only divert attention from the task itself, they cause damaging distractions by highlighting the potential negative consequences.

Unique symptoms: Anxiety, sweaty palms, increased irritability and perceived physical weakness.

Future-focused Shoulditis

Commonly experienced by people who have a lot of goals and aspirations for the future, that they feel they should be working on. Sufferers tend to spend a lot of time daydreaming and considering their desires for the future, all the while subtly reinforcing a negative self-image.

Future-focussed shoulds tend manifests in the following pattern:

1. What I want in the future
2. Why I haven’t got it now

For example:

• I want to run my own business > for now I need the stability of a regular salary
• I want to be slim and healthy > I can’t exercise because of job demands
• I want to find the man of my dreams > I’m too shy to date at the moment
• I want to be a millionaire > I have to concentrate on making ends meet
• I want to be successful > I have to organize my life first

Future-focussed shoulds have a subtle negative influence – They pay-offs of staying at the current position are more positive than the perceived risks of taking action to realize those future desires. Sufferers are often very skilled at defending their lack of action, to themselves and others, even though their life is less fabulous than it could be if they did get started.

Unique symptoms: Melancholia about life, sighing, complaining and wistfulness.

Moving forward with Shoulditis

Shoulditis is a common illness, affecting a great number of people worldwide – Despite this, it is not recognized by medical or psychiatric practitioners, and to date there is no known cure.

Anyone who believes they are sufferring from shoulditis is recommended to develop their own programme of self-treatment in order to overcome the condition.

The Scramblejam programme for self-treating for Shoulditis:

1. Recognition – Now you understand shoulditis, you can begin to notice it’s influence in your life – When you are having an episode, what type it is, and the effect it has on you.
2. Desire – Once you have identified a particular should in your life, you can move past it and “find the want, behind the should”. This is not easy, and may take a great deal of soul-searching to find an answer, but once you understand why you feel a particular should, you are in the best possible position to affect a permanent cure for that particular outbreak.
3. Focus – When you understand why a particular should occurs, you can focus on treating the cause, rather than the symptom. This may mean creating a strategy to overcome a particular mental block, like self-discipline of confidence; It may also mean learning to accept somthing you’ve always fought against (such as a negative belief about yourself or others).
4. Choice – Shoulds do not disappear overnight, but once a strategic treatment has been created, you can choose to action that strategy, rather than succumbing to the feeling of should. Repeating the choice every time the should appears will lessen the likelihood of recurrence and will eventually cure you of that particular effect.

Do you suffer from shoulditis? Are there untreated shoulds in your life, which keep you from enjoying your existence more fully? It is our sincere hope that this guide will help you discover the insidious effects of shoulditis, and help you find a cure.

For more information on the research, diagnosis and treatment of shoulditis, please make sure you subscribe to our feed to get the latest developments as they occur.

How do you see yourself? How do you see other people? If you were to try to describe a person, either yourself or someone else – How would you do so? What words would you choose to use?

Do you see people, yourself included, as individuals? As members of society? As family or friends, strangers or lovers? How do you relate to other people?

We all have variety of different ways in which we see and define our relationships with other people, and with ourselves. Some common ways of how we identify with other people are:

• Seeing people as better or worse than us
• Defining people by the roles they carry out – Lover, daughter, friend, enemy
• Judging people by their beliefs (and how they agree or disagree with our own)
• Comparisons of worth through status symbols and social standing

All relationships, including those we have with ourselves, are strongly influenced by our own unique viewpoint – the opinions and beliefs we hold about each other. One of the most important factors in ensuring successful, open communication is understanding the way we see people, and how our opinions and ideas about them can affect what we’re trying to say and how it is received.

Aspects of a Person

As we build a relationship with someone, we gradually cultivate and come to believe in a broad range of interpretations about that person. Except in extreme cases, none of the ways mentioned above are particularly exclusive – our identification with others is most often down to a combination of factors – ideas, beliefs and opinions we hold, which I tend to refer to as aspects of a person.

Typical aspects of a person, which help or hinder how we relate to them:

• How we feel about them – Do we love or hate this person? (Or ourself?)
• Our opinions of the roles they carry out – We might be proud of them for being a good father, annoyed at someone for being a lousy employee or happy someone is our friend.
• Religious Beliefs or Political Alignment – Let’s not go there!
• Perceived Social Status – Do they have greater or lesser standing than our own?
• Wealth (or lack thereof) – Who has the most?
• Qualities we admire – Courage, discipline, a caring nature…
• Flaws we dislike – Hogging the remote, atrocious driving, personal hygiene issues…

In learning to understand how relationships are built, I started to use the term aspects because it is neither positive or negative – Even with people we are very physically or emotionally close to, the concepts we hold about them are rarely exclusively positive – there are often negative opinions which colour how we see them, if only on occasion.

Most perception is projection – we often like or dislike in others what we most like or dislike in ourselves. Commonly, the deciding factor in whether a relationship between ourself and another, and how positive or negative it is, is how well the aspects of the other person match the self-held beliefs and aspects of ourselves.

Dwelling on the Flaws

Without conscious awareness, it’s all to easy to dwell on the negative aspects of a relationship

In most person-to-person relationships, the aspects and ideas we each hold about the other are going to be a selection of positive and negative. We may love our sibling, but dislike the way they borrow our stuff. We may struggle to relate to our boss, but admire the way they handle problems.

Unfortunately, unless there is some measure of conscious awareness in how we identify with other people, it is all too easy for us to dwell on the negative aspects of a relationship. The partner we adore becomes an ogre when they don’t let us get our own way… The boss we respect becomes a tyrant when they give you more work than you want… The pleasant waiter becomes an incompetent when the food is wrong, or delivered cold.

In times like this, a single aspect about someone overshadows the rest – which may all be predominantly positive – that one decision or action, no matter how short-term, can temporarily drown out all the happy, loving, positive parts of that relationship. When we see others only as a collection of aspects, then it is easy for us to allow just one of those aspects to become dominant.

This tendency is especially prevalent when we know very little about someone – We’re much more geared up to focus upon the negative aspects of strangers than we are the positive. How often do your criticize the driving of other people on the road? How often have you ever thought “Wow, that person is an excellent, courteous driver?” Yeah, me neither…

For some of us, entire relationships can become centered around a particular flaw, or negative aspect. This is what happens when we hate people – we have selected one aspect of who they are and turned that single fact into our entire definition of them. In some cases, perhaps involving violence or abuse, the nature of that negative aspect means that intense dislike or even hate is morally justified, but more often than not it is some small perception about another that has grown out of all proportion.

Persecution of others, because of religion, nationality or class, is at the extreme end of this spectrum. Over and over in our history, those in power have singled out one aspect of a group of people – their religious beliefs, where they were born or the color of their skin – and because they see it as a negative, they have used it as excuse to dispossess, torture and execute those people – committing atrocities in the name of one single aspect of that group.

The Whole-Person Paradigm

In order to transcend this limiting way of seeing and relating to others, we need to learn see other people as more than just a collection of aspects – we need to see above and beyond our facts and opinions of them and see them as whole and complete human beings.

This is not about changing things about other people, it’s about changing things about ourselves. We have to learn to monitor how we think about other people, and to correct ourselves when we realize we are thinking about aspects, not about people.

The best way to begin is by paying closer attention to how you talk about and think about others – start to notice the words you use, and what you’re focusing on. When you become more familiar with paying attention to what you’re thinking, you can start to look beyond it and see what judgments and beliefs are affecting what you’re thinking. You will begin to understand at a very personal level how your relationships are affected by the way you identify with others, and you will be able to look deeper and see people as who they really are.

This simple change is difficult for a lot of people because it involves having to let-go of deeply entrenched judgments and beginning to accept others, and ourselves for who we truly are. For those of us who are strongly attached to our opinions of others, this can be quite painful or shameful – If those beliefs we had about someone caused us to treat them poorly or unfairly, it can be a tough process to release those opinions and accept that person as more than just what we thought.

The value of this making change cannot be easily explained – At a low level it is simply about noticing how you think, and trying to be a bit more relaxed and open-minded. At a higher level, this change can achieve a quantum leap forward in your relationships with others, bringing greater strength, depth and clarity to your ability to relate to other people.