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.

Photo by Kalandrakas

I received a lot of positive feedback about the previous post, Upgrade your Relationships, but many of the comments pointed out that although the concept was sound it was lacking in practical advice on how to begin making these changes.

As a follow-on from the original post, I wanted to share with you some of the best ideas and techniques that I am aware of, which can be applied to your life now to help you follow this process.

1. Acceptance

The first vital change to make is a change in perspective – In all your relationships, including the one with yourself, you must practise acceptance, and accepting the other person completely for who they are, not who you would want them to be.

This means accepting their good points and their bad points – both are equally valid parts of who that person is, and they would not be the same if one were missing. Genuine acceptance is seeing someone as whole – seeing their good and bad sides, and realizing that they are more than the sum of their parts.

True acceptance is seeing others without judgment. You attach no labels, no conditions or opinions to that person; you simply see them as who they are – perfect, whole and complete.

2. Tell the Truth

Truth elevates relationships, falsehood damages them. When you intentionally keep the truth from someone, even yourself, you are devaluing the worth of both parties – you are subconsciously saying “we cannot deal with this”, meaning either the facts of the concealment, or the expected consequences of the truth.

Telling the truth is a conscious choice – Even when the truth may have difficult or painful consequences. By sharing the truth consciously, you are affirming that the people involved are both worthy of hearing the truth and can handle it. Even when the truth is hard, sharing it strengthens the relationship.

3. Take Responsibility

All the relationships in your life, whether you sought them out or inherited them, are your responsibility. How you treat that relationship, as a pleasure or a chore, is completely down to you – the condition of that relationship is directly related to the way you see it and the energy you put into it.

For each relationship in your life, take some time to think, and consider whether you are putting everything you could into it. Are you taking responsibility? Are you putting in the effort that relationship is worth?

Taking responsibility for your relationships sometimes means having to let go – of your expectations of the other person, and sometimes the relationship itself. I’ve consciously released several friendships over the years, not because anything went wrong, but simply because the relationship wasn’t a good fit for me anymore.

4. Understand the Plus

Following on from taking responsibility, is understanding what you get from a particular relationship. It might be something simple, like companionship or shared interests, or it could be quite complex – a particular challenge for you to overcome. No matter what the relationship, there should always be a tangible benefit you derive from it – a plus, even if it is often hard to find.

I believe that every relationship, even the difficult ones, holds a benefit for us – Something that soothes our spirit, brings us joy, or helps us grow. You can come to appreciate your relationships better by finding that benefit, and in doing so your relationship becomes less transactional, and more transformational.

5. Nonresistance

Nonresistance is the next level up to acceptance – Once you can accept someone as complete, you stop resisting who they are, the next step is to stop resisting what happens between you. This isn’t the same as simply giving up and not getting involved, it’s more consciously allowing what happens to happen.

Wanting to be “in control” is a pervasive and destructive impulse that a lot of people cling to in their relationships – trying to make things go the way they want it. Trying to control their relationships is the main way people resist what is happening – it’s an outlook based in fear, which, like concealing the truth, devalues the worth of both parties. Overcoming the need to control is the main part of nonresistance, and can have a substantial positive impact on the quality of your relationships.

6. Synergy

By practicing acceptance, responsibility and nonresistance with those around you, you will experience a deepening of those relationships as a clear space begins to develop around the relationship. This space allows all parties to be themselves, without fear or judgment.

The bigger the size of that space, the more creativity and playfulness can emerge as a result – The people involved can bring their individuality, strengths and inventiveness to bear, and can express themselves more freely. This cultivates synergy – that interdependent creative force which becomes more than the sum of it’s parts, more than what individuals alone can create.

Synergy cannot be made, it has to grow of it’s own accord. The most important task for you in the synergistic process is ensuring you create space for synergy to grow, by allowing everyone to be themselves and bring the best of who they are to the endeavor.

7. Listen Fully

Listening is a distinct art in the world of communication – one that many of us overestimate our skill with. We all like to think we are great listeners, when all we are really good at is making the noises and gestures that make it seem like we are listening.

True listening is more than just having your ears open and hearing what is said, it’s about allowing the other person to have the space to express themselves, and then paying attention – with your whole self. When you align yourself completely with what that person is communicating, you notice more, you understand more and the other person will mirror that alignment. Your communication deepens from just words into full rapport, where deep meaning and important ideas can be shared much more openly and effectively.

8. Build Integrity

Integrity means “wholeness” or a sense of being complete, and congruent. Your personal integrity is your ability to walk your talk, and your ability to do the things you say you will. Stephen Covey describes personal integrity as your ability to make and keep promises.

Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do
Don Galer

If people perceive you as saying one thing, and doing another it damages your reputation and how you are seen. If you are asked to do things, and you don’t – not only do you damage your own integrity, but you devalue the other person – your choice says that you don’t value what they have asked you for.

By building your integrity within the sphere of your relationships, you will be reinforcing who you are and what you do. You will not only feel better about who you are, but your relationships will gain a deeper measure of shared trust and responsibility.

9. Cherish their Uniqueness

Like understanding the plus (#4 – above), no matter who your relationship is with, there is something unique, valuable and wonderful about that person. It might be a sense of humor, a confidence or a kind way of speaking – it could be an intangible, heady mixture of character traits that result in a special, but hard-to-define fabulousness.

Make a commitment, now, to discover the uniqueness of all the people you know – Find it, celebrate it, cherish it. In doing so, you affirm to that person their worth and value to you and to others – a precious gift beyond measure, which honors the giver.

10. Look above and beyond

The true depth of many relationships becomes most apparent when there is a sense of connection between the people involved. This could be through intimacy with a partner, through your family or through a sense of teamwork or camaraderie with colleagues or the people you play sports with.

A lot of the time, that sense of connection is fairly obvious – you love your partner or your family, and you enjoy playing for your team. When you start to become more conscious of your relationships, it becomes possible to look beyond the obvious, and start seeing further connections with the people around you.

You might see that you and your colleagues outside your immediate department share a common mission of making the company a great place to work, and a successful business.

You might see that your neighbours are united with you in wanting a safe, clean environment for your street.

When next you are interacting with someone, be it a store clerk, a colleague or an old friend – Try to look above and beyond to see what connections there are between you. When you start to see how deeply interconnected we all are, you will start relating to people in a different, more considerate and more honourable way.

***

Since writing the original Upgrade your Relationships post, I have really been making an effort to apply these techniques to my life, and cannot recommend this practise more highly.

Consciously changing the way you interact with other people is one of the most transformational activities you can undertake – the benefits are far-reaching, profound and deeply humbling.

This isn’t a change anyone can force you to implement – your relationships are your responsibility alone. The only person who can make these things happen is you.

Do you want mediocre relationships, which are fundamentally limited in depth and joy they can offer? Or do you want vibrant, fulfilling relationships which challenge, nurture and inspire you?

It’s your choice…