Better Living: Learning not to "Should" on Ourselves!

I had what I call "The Slows" for much of today.

In some respects, that wasn't so good because I had a pretty long list of things I needed to get done today. So — needless to say — that small "inner voice" started talking to me, and letting me know that there were all sorts of things I "should" be doing... rather than watching YouTube videos on how to get the best yields from our tomato plants.

For whatever reasons, many of us are pretty adept at negative self-talk. In my own case, I was raised by parents who could not stand the idea of any form of idleness, so one of the things I most often heard if I wasn't busy with something was "make yourself useful!"

Typically, that meant I'd be sent off to mow the lawn, rake leaves or something like that.

In the greater scheme of things that's perhaps a pretty insignificant thing... but in the greater scheme of things, those words have made it difficult for me to just relax, without a bunch of negative self-talk going off inside my head.

So today the chatter got pretty thick inside my head, because there really were a lot of things I "should" be doing.

It has taken me many years to just get to a point of recognizing that the world is not actually going to fall apart if I am not engaged in busy-ness, all the time! In fact, most of the time, the world doesn't actually care!

"Shoulding on yourself" is not good for your mental health because it's ultimately just a person berating themselves for being anything other than perfect all the time. And in the end, that can lead to our feeling bad about ourselves and our capacity to handle life... and then our self-esteem slowly erodes because we "should" on ourselves and compare ourselves to the most workaholic people we know. Not good!

Whereas I did get a few things done today, it pretty much turned into an idle day. And I expect I will have more idle days ahead this weekend and early next week as the Pacific Northwest is facing an imminent heatwave... severe enough that our usual damp coolness will be replaced by 105-degree (that's 40+C for the metric folks) afternoons... which is particularly debilitating in a part of the world that typically doesn't have air conditioning, and the houses are built to keep heat in rather than vent it to the outside!

Again, I will refrain from getting into what I should be doing this weekend!

Let's face it, we are human BE-ings, not human DO-ings!

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Do you ever "should" on yourself? Do you pay attention, or do you ignore your negative self-talk? Did you have hypercritical parents or family members? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210625 00:33 PDT
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