What Rules Are Ruling You?

Every morning, Katie woke up at 6:30 a.m. to exercise before work. She made herself a smoothie for breakfast and packed a salad for lunch. When she got to the office each morning, the first thing she did was tackle her inbox, making sure she never let an email go unanswered for more than a day.

Your brain absorbs rules from the outside world, but are those rules serving you?

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Sometimes Katie went out for dinner with friends and enjoyed a few drinks, but she tried to limit herself. She knew it was important to get to bed at a reasonable hour so that she could wake up refreshed to crush her goals again the next day.

Nobody sat Katie down and told her when to go to bed or what constituted an appropriate breakfast, yet she came to understand there was a set of “correct” habits she should develop. These rules would lead to success and well-being. When she followed them, the bully in her mind sometimes let her rest. She would feel happy and confident, like she’d cracked the code. When she messed up, the bully got cruel and insulting. It would say things like, “You’re such a lazy slob” and “Why can’t you get your sh*t together?” and she’d spiral into shame.

The Rules That Rule Our Lives

Like Katie, each of us has a set of internal rules governing what we are supposed to do. Not everyone’s rules are the same. Your rules usually relate to the values you were instilled with, or the messages you’re surrounded by. In Wellness and Hustle Culture, rules are usually about optimizing your routine so that you do things to achieve health, wealth, and productivity.

You may have rules for what to do with a free hour, what to choose from the menu at dinner, what your home should look like, how you should parent, how to dress, when to go to bed and wake up, and what to post on social media, pressuring you to perform at the highest level at every moment.

Wellness Culture instills rules about eating, exercise, and health practices, and Hustle Culture instills rules about focus and productivity. These rules are often so ingrained that you may not be conscious of them. They pop up in the form of all-or-nothing thought patterns that convince you there is a right and wrong choice for what to do and how to be, in every situation. These inner rules might lead you to dismiss or overanalyze internal cues for hunger, tiredness, desires, and cravings. You may think you’re “good” for denying yourself pleasure or pushing yourself to ignore discomfort. On the surface, optimization rules seem like they’re helping you stay on track, but actually, they just make you feel inadequate.

Rules Worth Breaking

The problem is that these rules don’t account for the natural ebbs and flows of our energy, creativity, physical needs, and attention span that vary from day to day and even hour to hour. They also don’t account for the natural diversity across our species. Just as human bodies are naturally diverse, so are emotional and cognitive landscapes. When we buy into these rules, we can lock ourselves into a toxic pattern, which I wrote about extensively in my forthcoming book, Toxic Striving.

Not everyone is wired to work best between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Some people are morning larks and others are night owls. Some focus best in a noisy coffee shop while others need silence. You may have developed optimization rules as a way to control your productivity and output, but those rules don’t account for your natural inclinations or fluctuating needs on a given day.

The first step to breaking free from unhelpful inner rules is learning to spot them. Here are some red flags that you’re dealing with a potentially problematic "rule":

It’s phrased as a demand. Rules often contain command language—words like “should,” “need to,” “can’t,” or “must.” While not all rules are harmful (e.g., “I should refrain from violence” tends to be a useful rule for living in a peaceful society), optimization rules can be rigid and disregard natural ebbs and flows to our energy levels and needs.

It encourages rigidity. Rules often contain words like “never” or “always,” but even helpful rules have exceptions. Following a rule of “I should always refrain from violence” may be useful in 99.9 percent of situations, but harmful in the rare situation where you need to defend yourself from an attacker.

It links your performance to your worthiness. Rules imply that you’re bad, wrong, or deficient in some way if you don’t achieve a particular standard. They can make you feel undeserving of anything good in life when you can’t meet that impossible standard.

It reeks of judgment. Rules put you (or others) into categories of inferior vs. superior based on arbitrary metrics (how much one eats, sleeps, or works; what someone looks like; whether they have a partner or high-status job; and so on). Sometimes these judgments can remind you of a parent, family member, boss, childhood bully, or other judgmental figure from your life.

It evokes feelings of inadequacy. One way to spot a rule is by noticing what it evokes. Do you feel anxious, fearful, guilty, or ashamed? Do you feel suffocated, resentful, or frustrated? Even if a rule seems to be “for your own good,” the way it’s presented tends to make you feel like you’re failing.

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It triggers a sense of urgency. Rules can land as threats, making you feel like you need to solve or fix things right away. Notice whether you feel inclined to engage in a “fixing” behavior in response, such as counting, tracking, planning, researching, or even just fixating on the situation at hand.

Keep in mind that a rule is harmful for its rigidity, delivery method, and attachment of “success” and “failure” to your worth. It’s not about the subject matter. You can value something without shaming yourself into achieving it. You can value health or fitness, for example, without buying into any rules about “needing” to go to the gym a certain number of times per week.

You can’t control what thoughts pop into your head, but you can control how much significance you attach to them. What you water grows. The more emphasis you put on a punishing or judgmental thought, the more important it seems. If you give those thoughts a lot of importance, they can become all-consuming and take over your life.

Meanwhile, the more you practice noticing harsh and punishing thoughts, and intentionally shift to more compassionate ones, the easier it will become to notice when a thought is rooted in optimization rules and therefore not worth taking seriously.