How to Set Healthy Boundaries – and Stop Letting Anxiety and Guilt Get in the Way of Living Your Life
Recently, I had a reunion with some old university friends. After dinner and a bottle (or two) of wine, we slumped down together in front of the television. A few minutes later our host slid open his laptop and started moving parts around on a PowerPoint presentation. “Just getting ahead of something for Monday,” he shrugged.
The next morning we went for a walk. In the middle of taking in the fresh air and catching up about work and kids and life in general, a friend who runs a small business dropped behind a little to look at his phone. “Emails,” he sighed. He was on holiday, but not really. “It’s not like I’m abroad,” he reasoned.
It used to be that work was an ironed shirt and a train journey away. But during the pandemic WFH changed all that for many people, and it seems to have stuck. Back in 2020, my partner and I would convene from different ends of our flat at the end of the workday with a slightly crazed look in our eyes and compare notes on how we’d barely eaten or taken a break. No one was demanding or expecting this behaviour, – on the contrary, our bosses would have been appalled – but the boundaries between work and life had suddenly become porous, and we didn’t know how to deal with it. Three years later, it’s not clear anyone has really figured it out.
The idea of setting boundaries has been fodder for self-help books since around the mid-80s, but in 2022 the idea is making a roaring comeback. And it’s no surprise. After a period in which our digital lives expanded at the same time as our physical freedoms shrank, knowing where to draw the line has never felt more difficult – and it’s not just a work thing. Technology means that as parents, partners and friends we are available to anyone who might want our attention at any time. If we’re single and trying to find love we have to accept we can be tracked, studied and judged by people we haven’t even met yet, assuming we’re active on social media (and if we’re not, it’s hard to even play the dating game in the first place).
Everywhere you look, boundaries that helped put our lives in clear compartments have been flattened by digital technology and many of our psychological boundaries have crumbled with them. Whatever the self-help gurus were contending with 40 years ago, it wasn’t this. But what can we do about it?
“A very common misconception about boundaries is that they are selfish. That they’re cold. That they’re mean. That they’re about keeping people at a distance. And that could not be further from the truth,” says Melissa Urban, who as well as being a CEO, life coach and author is a self-described “boundary wizard”. Her book, The Book of Boundaries: Set the Limits That Will Set You Free, certainly enters a crowded field of recent releases on the subject (titles due out over the next few months making similar promises include The Sugar Jar: Create Boundaries, Embrace Self-Healing, and Enjoy the Sweet Things in Life by Yasmine Cheyenne; Take Good Care: A Guided Journal to Explore Your Well-Being, Boundaries and Possibilities (couldn’t find this: KE); The Vulnerability Workbook: Embrace Fear, Set Boundaries, and Find the Courage to Live Greatly by Anouare Abdou).
Urban has a helpful definition of what boundaries actually are. “Boundaries are limits you set around how people are allowed to engage with you in a way that keeps you safe and healthy, and improves the relationship.” The first step, she says, is to figure out exactly what boundaries are required in any given situation – whether work, emotional or digital – which isn’t easy because they tend to telegraph themselves, at least at first, in vague feelings of dread and anxiety.
“You come into situations and just feel uneasy about them, and that’s a signal that you need to set a boundary,” she says. “I’ll give you an example. I spoke with a woman not long ago who was thinking about the upcoming Christmas season. She said: ‘I can’t do it. I can’t deal with all the pressure. I can’t do all the gatherings.’ When we really drilled down into it, we realised it wasn’t going to three different houses she was stressed about, it was the guilt her mother put upon her when it was time to leave her place and go to her dad’s. They were divorced. And it was like, OK, that’s the boundary you need to set. You need to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to come for the holidays, I’m really looking forward to seeing you. But I need you not to express any sort of sentiment when I leave to go to dad’s because that’s not fair to me and not fair to him. I want to spend time with each of you equally.’”
Figuring that out and articulating it enabled the woman to enjoy visiting her family again. But does setting boundaries always require what is, in essence, a therapy session?
“It certainly can be helpful to talk it through. But you can do it on your own just by thinking: ‘OK, this event is giving me stress or anxiety. What aspect of it am I least looking forward to? Is there something I could do with this one aspect that would make all of the stress and anxiety, or the bulk of it, just go away?’”
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