Chronic "shoulding" yourself

November 1, 2022 6:51 AM

What is the root cause of a person who second guesses every decision/choice/action they make with "I should have done X" or "I should have Y'ed". Someone I know is a chronic "should"-er and wants help breaking these negative thought spirals.
posted by Anonymouse1618 to Human Relations (19 answers total)

For me, it was how I was raised. My whole family are overthinkers who, when something goes wrong, fixate on it and cope with that by trying to figure out what went wrong so that thing never goes wrong again. I am on a path to understanding that every little suboptimal outcome is not worth a huge investment of time and energy gaming out how I could have avoided it.
posted by BrashTech at 7:03 AM on November 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

Response by poster: Adding that their "shoulds" are largely reflecting on smaller, concrete actions that should have been taken like "I should have used a screw instead of a nail" -- not big aspirational "shoulds" like "I should have become a doctor."
posted by Anonymouse1618 at 7:04 AM on November 1, 2022

For me personally, it's my anxiety. If I'm "shoulding all over myself", it's a sign that my anxiety is acting up, and I need to take steps to manage it. For that, especially smaller things, radical acceptance and consciously engaging my logical brain helps. "ok. I should have used a screw. I used a nail. The nail is holding up right now. I will use a screw the next time I build a widget", and then letting go and moving on.

As far as the root cause of my anxiety? Mostly my childhood where I felt responsible for things way too early, and had unreliable parents. Plus being "gifted" and held to high expectations. And, having that kind of brain wiring/chemistry.
posted by Sparky Buttons at 7:34 AM on November 1, 2022 [12 favorites]

There's a lot of perfectionism rolled into that kind of behavior, when it has become burdensome. All it takes is a pretty modest pivot in attitude, though, to reframe that as just learning. It's normal to not get everything right the first try. It is normal to not be perfect at something when you have little to no experience. It is actually fun and exciting, rather than a failure, to have not known something and now know it - in part because this is not school and there is no report card and the stakes most of the time are pretty low.

But it is worth interrogating oneself to see if there's aspects of black-and-white or magical thinking underneath as well. Overthinkers are prone to deciding that there is ONLY ONE good possible outcome and all others will be bad, when the truth of many things in life is that there are often plenty of okay outcomes and quite a few mediocre ones and only a handful of actually fatal or perfectly perfect ones and for the most part only the fatal ones matter to anybody else.

Whatever the underlying reason, though, don't get tangled up in perfectionism trying to stop. Learning to accept an outcome and move on is a muscle and you have to train and practice to strengthen it, and then you have to keep using it to keep it in shape.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:45 AM on November 1, 2022 [13 favorites]

"Should is a dangerous word," a friend said to me a few decades ago, and I repeat it all the time to myself and others. It's incredibly effective at pointing out when someone is doing it without being mean or unkind. I'm not even joking. Give it a try. You don't have to elaborate.

I believe the use of should is about self-criticism, a lack of self-acceptance, and shame. Avoiding should (and I don't mean with complicated sentence structure, but the whole framing of it) means working towards accepting yourself as an imperfect human who can focus on making the best of the future and moving forward.

Should is a dangerous word.
posted by bluedaisy at 8:45 AM on November 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

Others have broadly covered the root causes; I'll say CBT is what worked best for me for this kind of brain habit. As modalities go it didn't do everything for me, but the "shoulds" are way quieter and don't control me nearly as much as they used to.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:19 AM on November 1, 2022

The Build for Tomorrow podcast just had an episode on this. Not sure I agree with their take (in my case it’s definitely anxiety), but they offer some explanations and ways to curb it…
posted by ClarissaWAM at 10:25 AM on November 1, 2022

In my case? Being a sci-fi nerd who has read many time travel and alternative universe stories. If every action could have gone a million different ways in other universes, it's impossible to know which one is best, so the only real option is do your best and let go. Maybe another me in an alternate universe did something better. Good for her. I'll keep trying meanwhile.
posted by emjaybee at 10:57 AM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

Especially if they are "should-ing" about small things that are already done, then they might have acquired an inner gremlin - an internal voice that is in the habit of making themselves unnecessarily miserable. Absolute best book on this is Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carlson. One thing that I loved about this book is that Carlson tells you upfront all the ways that your gremlin is going to tell you that are reading the book wrong and assures that however you are reading it, it is actually OK. I felt so seen just by that part since the worst part of reading self-help book is all the ways that just reading it makes me feel worse. Note that gremlins are often inner critics but they can come in wider range of voices that just the usual critic.
posted by metahawk at 11:29 AM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think mine comes from everyone telling me over the years I am inadequate/bad/wrong at everything.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:37 AM on November 1, 2022

For me some pre and post work surrounding the decision helped. Before making decisions, I adopted this idea that the 1st thing that makes sense is the right thing. This is helpful when you have a number of choices like when shopping. I didn't want to look for "the perfect thing' by pouring over all of the options and weighing the pros and cons. I would choose the perfect pair of gloves, for example, that fit my predetermined criteria. I committed to no regrets and the belief that it was good enough. Then, in other instances, say party planning where there are a number of small decisions needed to be made, we make the "good enough" decision and then leave a time-limited debrief session of lessons learned. The goal is to undercut the perfectionist thinking and learn that good enough is just as good.
posted by ColdIcedT at 12:01 PM on November 1, 2022

Over critical super ego. Punitive parenting. Emotional avoidance / low tolerance for bad feelings. Decision making: Optimizer not a satisficer.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:35 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

What is the root cause of a person who second guesses every decision/choice/action they make with "I should have done X" or "I should have Y'ed".

Worrying about the "root cause" of this is coming from the same sort of thought spirals that lead to chronically thinking about what one should have done. It's a trap that leads to endless rumination.

Redirect thoughts from "should have" to "next time I will" or "I learned", redirect worry about the root cause to deciding what can be done now.
posted by yohko at 3:31 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have shared this poster (pdf) on AskMetafilter before. It's from the book "SOS Help for Emotions" by Lynn Clark. He sees "shoulds" as part of a larger picture of emotions caused by inappropriate self-talk. FWIW.
posted by forthright at 4:21 PM on November 1, 2022

It really depends on the person and their experiences. It's impossible to say "X caused this" for any individual without individual therapy or something along those lines. Diagnosing root causes for an individual's neuroses is not a party game.
posted by lapis at 8:15 PM on November 1, 2022

However! One does not always need to know the root cause in order to break a pattern. One can pay attention to when it comes up, "catch" it, and consciously change one's thought patterns. After a while, the change is likely to become unconscious, then mostly unnecessary. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has some good exercises for this, but really any reframing of "I did X for a reason, and it made sense at the time. There are other ways that could have worked, but I did the best I could at the time" would likely help.
posted by lapis at 8:18 PM on November 1, 2022

I’ve been going through this recently because I had to make a major life decision. What I realized was this : no matter which option I chose, I knew it was absolutely inevitable that I would wind up second-guessing myself. What helped was acknowledging that this second-guessing would have nothing to do with the option I chose — that I would be doing the second-guessing because that’s just the way my mind works. Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t stopped the second-guessing. That is still very much happening. But it’s been a good counter-thought, because I know deep down that it’s true. So when the second-guessing thoughts hit me, I just think of how I’d be having pretty much the same thoughts even if I was choosing the other option. And then I can get on with my day.

I’ve broken the paralysis.
posted by panama joe at 5:36 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe they can train themselves to say "Next time I will..." instead of "I should have...."?

Learning from your own mistakes can be one of the most effective forms of learning, so noticing mistakes can be a useful habit. Beating yourself up about them however, not so much.

They should ask themselves, how would a good boss deal with something going wrong? Good bosses know that playing blame-games is just a waste of time and energy. The productive thing to do is always to focus on how the error can be avoided in the future. A good boss doesn't need to hear "I should have...", they want to hear "Next time, I will...".

Also, some things aren't even necessarily mistakes, but reasonable risks one took at the time that just didn't pay off. But you couldn't have known that at the time, and taking certain manageable risks is often the cost of doing business. We all have to make decisions under uncertainty, often also under time-constraints. There will inevitably often be unforseen conseuqences. Muddling through with supotimal results is still usually better than being paralyzed by perfectionism, and getting no results at all, not even errors to learn from for the future.
posted by sohalt at 6:06 AM on November 2, 2022

I'm not sure it matters much why. What helps most is replacing it with something healthier. For me, I've found that replacing any "should" sentence with a neutral statement of fact helped a ton. It didn't need to be positive. Something like "I got that problem wrong" or "I forgot to return my library book" are actually fine. You can address them or let them go from that place. You can also just let them sit in equal weight with "I got that problem right" or "I did the grocery shopping" and then you just have things you did that day. And sure, some you may like better than others. That's fine. Just tell yourself and move on.
posted by blueberry monster at 2:26 PM on November 28, 2022