The “Should Effect:” When Desire Gets Lost in Self-Discipline

Have you ever noticed that the thing you once wanted to do — the hobby, the career, the goal — slowly became the thing you had to do? The moment you applied strict self-discipline, it became a “should.” Then it stopped being fun.

Not only was it no longer fun, it became a depressing and anxiety-provoking burden.

It’s a pattern I often see in my patients, and it causes a surprising amount of discontent and turmoil.

I call this the “Should Effect” and it’s partly the result of excessive self-discipline.  As a therapist I’ve seen it quietly rob people of their passions. A nurse who loved helping, until helping became a test of her worth. The many parents who started pushing themselves to make money for their families and then ended up pushing themselves to make money for the money.  A young pitcher whose hopes to pitch a perfect baseball game led to excessive pressure and many imperfect games.

We start off with a desire, turn it into a Should, and then, even worse, we turn the Should into a Must. What was originally optional becomes mandatory, and then the desire is as hard to find as affection in a boxing ring.

When self-discipline stops serving your desire, it starts feeding on it. The means becomes the end. You become the servant of self discipline, not the master.

The Pattern

Shoulds, Musts and The Hit Men That Enforce Them

Here’s what happens: you really want something, so you make a plan to get it. You enforce that plan with vehement self-discipline. You hire hit men to take out any part of you that doesn’t carry their weight. These hit men are dangerously humorless and have no idea what your intention was when you engaged them. Nor do they care. They aren’t the type to say warmly, when you’re struggling, “Well bless your little cotton socks.”

They’re more likely to say, “Do what I say or else your self-esteem is going to the bottom of the East River in a bucket of cement.”

The means of achieving your desire, strict self-discipline, becomes your ends. Enforcing the way you had planned to get to your goal becomes more important than getting there. Eventually it becomes a way of living, and you forget that it was a choice to pursue something you desired.

Then the hit men are driving your car.

Here’s a scary thought: you become like the hit men you hired to execute the steps to your desire. Do you want to BE like these guys?

When you waller with pigs, expect to get dirty.

Micro and Macro Levels of the Should Effect

No job is too small or too large for these guys. They can hijack both our minor preferences and our major passions.

You prefer having the knives on the right side of the drawer organizer. Cool. But soon it becomes a necessity and the cause of marital discord.

Or you plan with precision a fun brunch for your friends. But you get stressed, flummoxed and bad-tempered when the souffle doesn’t come out perfectly. It’s not fun anymore.

You bust your butt for 20 years to get into a top media company and you finally succeed. What now? You’ve forgotten what you loved about it and now your butt really hurts.  You can’t even sit down to rest anymore.

Fear and Loathing in The Messy Middle

Admittedly, the territory between want and Should can become murky. Intermediate steps may not feel like things we really want to do, but they are necessary to get where we want to go.

For example, Mario wants to buy a new car, a very fast new car that costs more than he can afford. To get it, he should and must save more money and make more money. These are necessary, intermediate steps. So, he appoints Money Saver and Money Maker to execute the plan so he can eventually buy the car.

These were ostensibly good steps. Sometimes we need a little structure to help us reach our goals, and since it’s still a choice to buy a fast new car, Money Maker and Money Saver should serve at the pleasure of Mario, The Car Buyer. Ideally, Mario remembers that he wants to do these things so that he can get the fast new car without too much grief.

But Money Maker and Money Saver take over the entire operation. The hit men go rogue.

You see, Mario also took a misstep. Before he hired these guys, he should have interviewed them more carefully to see what their moral code was, how many convictions they had, and what their philosophy of correction and rehabilitation was. It turns out Money Maker and Money Saver are thugs. They’ve been known to steal good times from many and they’ve had their pictures posted on the “wanted” bulletin board at post offices all over the country.

Mario is attacked by the thugs for either not working enough or not saving enough. Every time he takes a day off when he could have worked, and every time he goes out to dinner when he could have cooked, the hit men him rather than executing and implementing the process of saving and earning money.  They’re not very bright, these guys, and they don’t understand the different meanings of “execute.”

Nor do they recognize shades of grey when doling out punishment.

So, my point is, yes, desire may require Shoulds and Musts that are not-so-much-fun as intermediate steps. But it’s how we execute the Shoulds and Musts that determine whether they are adaptive or maladaptive. We need to remember what the Shoulds and Musts are for and keep them in check, so we don’t end up hurting ourselves or abandoning our goal just to escape the wrath of the hit men.

Causes and Motivations

So, what actually happens to make you hire hit men that turn your desires into Shoulds? What are the motivations? Here are a few of them. Yours may be different. And if they are, consider leaving them in the comments. And then leave them for good.

Desire and Responsibility

Desire is not motivated by pleasure alone. Meaning can be an even stronger inspiration.

One source of meaning that may motivate us is a desire to meet our responsibilities. The brains we come pre-packaged with were shaped by a sense of community much more than the individualist world we grow up in today.  With community comes a sense of responsibility, and that often requires the exercise of self-discipline.

We may want to vote, not because we have nothing better to do with our time, or because we find it amusing, but because we want to meet our responsibility and be part of a larger world. So we part with our needle-point or pool cue, study the issues and the candidates, and head for the polls.

We may want to meet our ethical obligation to serve as an executor of our uncle’s estate, even though it’s burdensome.

You may be an attorney who wants to uphold the law. And that may mean you have the responsibility to prosecute someone you have empathy for and would rather not prosecute.

Self-Discipline May Compensate for a Lack of Faith in Ourselves

If you don’t trust yourself to reach your goal in a relaxed way, you apply more self-discipline than is necessary.  You have to enlist hit men since you don’t trust yourself to do it.

You swing at the baseball too fast. You injure yourself taking too many ballet classes. You become overbearing in your efforts to be the best parent with the most impressive kids on the block.

All because you don’t trust your natural, organic self to do it.  You overcompensate because you’re convinced that if you don’t try harder, you’ll never reach your goal.

The motivation here is that blasted sense of insecurity that I harp about so often in this blog [podcast].

I wrote about my personal experience with this in my book, The Healthy Compulsive: Healing Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder and Taking the Wheel of the Driven Personality.  My first lesson in psychology came from my trumpet teacher when I was about 18. He noticed me tightening up whenever I started warming up, so he warned me: Trying hard is a questionable virtue. Trying hard was my way to compensate for a fear that I couldn’t play well.

Self-Discipline May Reassure Us of Our Goodness

We may eventually become attached to the means, the severe Shoulds and Musts, because they reassure us that we’re good and decent humans that would never fail to follow through. Being self-disciplined becomes a source of pride and identity, often to compensate for shame or insecurity.

When Kaylah was in her teens she spent a lot of time taking care of her grandmother. She genuinely enjoyed being helpful in such a practical way. So, she decided to become a nurse.  She enjoyed it at first. But as the years went on other motivations started to take over, and it felt like an obligation rather than a choice and a desire. She lost her original intention.

But there was a payoff that made it harder to see what was happening.

Working as a nurse became a way not only to pay her mortgage, but also to prove that she was a good person. Her mother, strictly religious, had wanted to make sure that Kaylah never got conceited. She succeeded. As a result, Kaylah always felt she was not good enough, and any time she dropped a ball at her hospital job, she felt horrible. It all became about goodness rather than kindness.

So, it was difficult for her to find a more balanced way of going after what she wanted (helping) because it had become infected with the need to prove herself.

As another example, imagine that Kevin tells his friend Bob he’ll go to his comedy set Friday night. Friday comes and he’s exhausted. He’s not in the mood at all. But he goes because of the principle of the thing. “I said I’d go. I’m nothing if not reliable. What happens if I stop being responsible and doing what I say I’ll do? I wouldn’t be me.”

The Means Become Enticing

We may become attached to the means of achieving our desires, self-discipline. “Why would we do that?” you might ask. But it happens all the time. It can help us feel like we’re protected, in control, or powerful.

It’s like all those books, movies and real-life situations where the main character falls in love with their bodyguard. (Check it out on Amazon! It’s an entire genre unto itself!) I mean it makes sense, doesn’t it? Self-disciplined bodyguards are strong and capable and it seems like they care about you. Who could ask for more?

So, just as in the film, The Bodyguard, we fall in love with our protector or the self-discipline to get things done. And, like the movie, we eventually need to let go of the Bodyguard/Lover because they really aren’t a satisfying replacement for a real relationship or a real life. Protection, or, in our case more specifically, self-discipline, is only the means to the end. They don’t make good long-term partners.

Similarly, we can get joined at the hip to the hit men because we become attached to their power.

Remember Frodo from Lord of the Rings? He was supposed to take responsibility for getting rid of the blasted Ring, which caused the bearer to irresistibly crave and wield power. He takes on the responsibility for disposing of it, but then also gets infected with the urge for power.

Self-discipline and Musts can make us feel powerful. But they too often eclipse what we enlisted them for.

The Obsessive-Compulsive Personality: A Square Peg in a Square Hole

People who have obsessive-compulsive and perfectionistic tendencies are sitting ducks for this pattern. It’s a perfect fit because we’re primed to strive for perfection. We’re born with discipline, over-conscientiousness, and unrelenting standards. So not only do we feel we must reach our goal (we’re goal-reachers by nature), we’ve also got strategies in place, locked and loaded,  ready to shoot at the first sign of laziness. Drive, meticulousness and self-discipline come all too easily.  We’ve already cultivated these strategies in order to cope with our environment. Then we use what we’ve got. When you’re a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

Results

The Should Effect: Duty and the Death of Desire

Once the hit men take over the thrill is gone. They take the fun out of whatever you had wanted before. It’s hard to enjoy your garden when there’s a gun pointed at your face.

So, let’s say you enjoy playing the banjo. It’s a casual thing you do on your own just for fun. You love it whenever you get a chance to lock yourself in the basement and strum the old thing just for the pleasure of it.

But everyone starts to tell you they want to hear you play and that you should perform at the open mic at the local bar. The pressure is on. You start practicing every day, watching YouTube videos, and taking lessons. You’re supposed to practice an hour a day, the hit men start giving you trouble about your rhythm, and you’re afraid you’re going to wet your pants at the performance. One day you wake up and wonder what happened to the fun.

Demand Resistance

A related result is that once we feel the pressure from the hit men we push back with rebellion. We resist following through on the plan we set up because we don’t like being told what to do. Nor do we like other people’s commandments. We have plenty enough of our own, thank you.

We may rebel against externally imposed demands, or internal ones.

You join a softball team. You work hard to be a good player. No one else cares if you strike out or if you drop a fly ball that flew gracefully and gently right to you. But your internal coach has become a tormentor, telling you that you should and must play better. You quit. Nobody’s going to tell you what to do.

You can read more about this in a prior post, demand resistance. That’s on podcast episode 43.

Losing Self

These are all specific examples of a larger and more important theme: when the Shoulds and Musts of self-discipline take over, you may lose track of not just one particular desire, but who you are. Like a cancer, Shoulds and Musts can start to overshadow everything, including what you’re about and what your mission is.

We’ve been warned about this. Here are some examples:

Before Darth Vader crossed over to the dark side he was Anakin Skywalker, a talented young man who wanted to protect the people he loved from dying. But he became so obsessed with that that he lost perspective on everything else. His efforts to cheat death led him to cause more death rather than defeat it. He became controlled, authoritarian, ruthlessly focused, power-driven and emotionally repressed. He was an exaggerated version of how rigid we can become when we set our sights on something we want. He forgot what it was all for.

He forgot what Anakin Skywalker was about.

Ebenezer Scrooge wasn’t always such a stingy old guy. As a child he was actually warm and attached to others. But once he started making money, ostensibly to protect and provide for himself and his fiancée, Belle, all the Shoulds and Musts about making and saving money took over. It took a very bad nightmare to remind him of what he had lost.

And how many people, once they reached middle age, had a crisis, realizing they just spent 35 years being someone other than themselves because they felt they should and they must?

Can you think of any politicians who, once they got into office, seemed to forget why they went there in the first place? Getting re-elected becomes more important than achieving the goals they originally set for their service.

Suggestions for Reclaiming Your Passions

It’s tragic that we spend so much time and energy slogging when we could be dancing. It doesn’t need to be that way.

Here are 4 suggestions, complete with a handy-dandy acronym, CART,  to help you reclaim your passions from The Should Effect.

 

1. Call it out. Choose your own name for the Should Effect and point your finger at the Shoulds and Musts when they sap the joy from you.

• When you find yourself getting stressed, bored, resentful or resistant ask if self-discipline has taken over.
• When you injure yourself, with excessive discipline, either physically or emotionally, label it for what it is.

 

2. Ask yourself why you feel you need to over exert with self-discipline.

• What function has it served for you? Hyper-responsibility? Compensation? Reassurance?
• What has led you to distrust yourself?
• Consider that perhaps you don’t need to exert as much self-discipline to pursue your desires as you think you do, and that you may well be more inherently capable than you’ve thought.
• What natural strengths do you have that you haven’t acknowledged?

 

3. Recall your original desire and intention.

• What have you forgotten?
• Has self-discipline kept you from enjoying the things you value the most?

 

4. Take the risk of trusting yourself to pursue your desires without extraneous self-discipline.

• Start small with low stakes projects.
• Push back on the Hit Men when they start to give you trouble.
• Consider reading the Tao Te Ching or other Taoist writings. They inspire us to work less hard and to go with the flow.

 

Remember, you have a choice; these aren’t commandments.

*   *   *

I’m aware that life circumstances place many people in situations where they have few choices. Expecting those of you in such circumstances to be rosy about it is unrealistic. But still, affirming your choices may be the best way to thrive within horrific limitations. Victor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, had this inspiring advice for us:

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”