When “I should” becomes a source of anxiety
I should be further along by now. I shouldn’t still be upset about this. I should be more patient with my kids, more present with my partner, and honestly more productive in general.
If some version of that runs in the background of your day, you may have stopped hearing it as a list of demands at all, since after enough years it just sounds like thinking. Therapists have a slightly ridiculous name for the habit, shoulding, which at least has the virtue of making it sound as tiresome as it is. Karen Horney called it “the tyranny of the should” back in 1950; Albert Ellis, less politely, called it musturbation. What they were both pointing at is that a surprising amount of anxiety and self-criticism runs on rules, rigid and mostly unexamined rules about how you’re supposed to be, and that living under those rules can wear on you more than the situations they’re about.
What makes a should a should
Plenty of sentences with the word “should” in them are harmless (you should probably check the tire pressure before the drive to Tahoe). The ones that cause trouble tend to share a few features. They’re absolute, even when the words “always” and “never” are only implied. They make no allowance for circumstances, so being sick or grieving or exhausted doesn’t count as a reason, only as an excuse. And falling short of them seems to say something about who you are, rather than about what happened on a given Tuesday.
“I should be more productive” is a good example because it contains almost no information. More productive than what, by when, at what cost to everything else? The sentence doesn’t say. All it establishes is that whatever you’re currently doing isn’t enough, which means it can never actually be satisfied. “I shouldn’t feel this way” is slipperier still, because it turns one feeling into two: whatever you were feeling to begin with, plus a layer of shame about feeling it, which is usually harder to sit with than the original.
Why swapping the word doesn’t do much
One common response to shoulds is to reword them, replacing “I should” with “I’d prefer” or “it would be nice if.” That can loosen things a little, but it can also make people feel managed, as though the problem were vocabulary. Changing the phrasing doesn’t necessarily touch the reason you hold the rule in the first place, and a lot of shoulds are wrapped around things you genuinely care about. Tell someone who loves their kids to stop “shoulding” about parenting and they’ll reasonably hear it as an invitation to care less.
The more useful distinction is between a value and a demand. I want to be a good parent is a value. It points you in a direction, it survives a bad day, and it can actually guide what you do next. I should always be patient with my children is a demand, and it sets a standard no parent in history has met, so the first time you snap at your kid while trying to get everyone out the door, an ordinary lapse becomes evidence of personal failure.
The irony is that the demand tends to make the value harder to live out. Shame makes people defensive, or withdrawn, or prone to overcorrecting in ways that feel strange to everyone involved. A parent who is busy prosecuting themselves for yelling has less attention left over for the thing that matters more to a kid than perfect patience, which is coming back afterward and repairing it. The rule, in other words, gets in the way of the very thing it claims to protect.
How this actually comes up in therapy
In my practice, shoulds rarely announce themselves. People come in talking about guilt, or irritability, or being “lazy,” or a vague sense of never measuring up, and the rule underneath only becomes audible once we slow down. So the first step is simply noticing it, catching the sentence in its full, unreasonable form, which on its own can take some of the air out of it.
Then it helps to ask where the rule came from. Some shoulds are inherited more or less intact from a parent; some come from a culture, a religion, a profession, a marriage. Some made real sense at the time they formed. A kid growing up in a chaotic household may have learned that staying useful and undemanding was the safest way through, and that rule can still be running, quite efficiently, at forty-five, long after the household that required it is gone.
Once you can see where a should came from, you can ask whether it reflects a value you still endorse. Sometimes the answer is yes, and the task is to keep the value while letting go of the absolute version of it. Sometimes it turns out to be someone else’s value that you’ve been carrying on their behalf. And sometimes, once you actually look at it, you discover you don’t care about it much at all, which can be oddly disorienting after years of obeying it.
If the value holds up, the next question is what a realistic expectation looks like. “Patient most of the time, and able to repair when I’m not” is something a person can live with. “Productive enough on most days that I’m not behind on the things that matter to me” is at least a sentence you could check against reality. These versions are less stirring than the originals, which is more or less the point.
And finally there’s the question of what, if anything, you want to do. Sometimes a should points toward a real change worth making. Sometimes the honest answer is nothing, because the should was covering for a feeling (resentment, grief, plain tiredness) that needed attention more than it needed a plan.
None of this requires therapy, and plenty of people untangle their shoulds with a good friend, a journal, or a long enough walk. None of it means you should stop shoulding yourself, either. That would just be one more.
If you’d like to talk about any of this, you can reach me at will@willbaum.com or (323) 610-0112.