Toxic Striving, page 8
Now that you’re aware of what matters to you, it may feel like self-betrayal to continue pursuing externally imposed values over your own. However, prioritizing your values is not always easy. Rejecting societal standards can make you more vulnerable to stigma or judgment. There isn’t a pain-free choice. It’s up to you to decide which pain is most worth tolerating—the pain of rejection by some people (in exchange for the meaningfulness of acting authentically), or the pain of forcing yourself to comply with outside standards (in exchange for the comfort and safety of fitting in). Remember that you’re not the problem. Broken systems, unhelpful conditioning, and a harsh inner critic are the real problems, as they keep you chasing moving targets at the expense of your well-being.
There is hope; systems can change, but usually not overnight. Throughout history, our species has demonstrated the ability to progress beyond an existing set of ideals. The more each of us becomes aware of unrealistic standards, the more we can actively reject them. We can stop trying to turn ourselves into a bunch of smooth, glowy, firm-bodied productivity robots. We can stop glorifying discipline and normalizing burnout. Starting with our own small worlds, we can change what is held up as ideal. By surrounding ourselves with others who are also committed to rejecting harmful ideals, and sharing openly about what we truly care about, we can appreciate one another’s differences. Over time, we can create a world that accepts and even celebrates the diversity of brains, bodies, and personalities that naturally exists across our species.
Yet even as we shift culturally, it would be unrealistic to expect a world where nobody struggles. Intrusive and automatic thoughts, stressors, hassles, and discomfort are simply realities of being alive. Even the most privileged among us will eventually experience hardship, if only through the passing of time. Brains will lose sharpness, bodies will lose function, and loved ones will pass away. This isn’t news to most of us, but we still have a hard time accepting it. Instead, we lose ourselves in striving for control, subconsciously believing that if we try hard enough, we can achieve a comfortable, pain-free life.
While there’s no secret formula for a happy, easy life, things aren’t completely hopeless. Once you recognize that you can’t control whether you experience hardship or pain, nor can you control what you feel inside, you can practice accepting what you cannot control. Accepting doesn’t mean you like it or want it (who wants life to be hard?) but it means you’re going to stop struggling against it since that struggle is just a waste of energy. The more you free up the energy you were using to try to control things you couldn’t control, you can direct that energy toward what you can control: your behavior. This is where having a clear sense of your values comes into play.
If all you can control is your behavior, you probably want to be intentional about that behavior. Don’t underestimate how much your behavior impacts not only your own quality of life but also the lives of the people around you. While you can’t control whether something causes you to feel frustrated, you can control how you behave in response to that event and the feeling of frustration that was evoked. You choose whether you respond by sulking, lashing out, storming out of the room, or taking a few deep breaths and reflecting on the situation. While you can’t choose how another person treats you, you can choose how you treat them. If someone is disrespectful toward you, it’s up to you whether you get passive-aggressive, insult them, say nothing, assert a boundary, or walk away. You can’t control the messed-up parts of society, but you can control how you engage with society. If you hold a value that differs from what society promotes (for instance, valuing authenticity in a world that rewards conformity), you can still make an impact on your own social circle and community by staying true to your personal values. This might even give others permission to do the same, having a ripple effect over time. In any situation, consider your options and choose the action that is most likely to make you proud of yourself afterward. Usually, your values will clue you in.
Your values serve as a sort of road map, guiding you toward the type of person you wish to be and the type of life you wish to lead. You can use them to set short-term and long-term goals for yourself. If you value family, perhaps a values-aligned goal would be to connect with a loved one once per week. When you consider how to behave in a given situation, you can turn to your values for the answer. What will make you proud of yourself looking back on this situation? What might you regret? Remember, it’s not about acting perfectly; it’s about making an effort to be the type of person you want to be. Take a moment to think about something you’ve already done this week that aligned with your values. It can be simple, like giving up your seat for another passenger on the bus. Then, consider how you can commit to more actions this week that align with your values. You can even create a ritual, each evening taking a moment to consider one thing you did that day (or one thing you wish to do tomorrow) that aligns with your values.
Doing the values-aligned thing is not always pleasant or enjoyable. Graciela mostly enjoys running, but that doesn’t mean she enjoys every single second of it. She commits to it because she values the benefits it adds to her life. You may value patience, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to close your eyes and take a deep breath instead of snapping when your coworker asks, for the twentieth time, when you’re going to have the report ready. When you look back on each day through the lens of “Was I living out my values today?” you’ll start to practice validating yourself. In other words, you’ll recognize when you’re acting with purpose and give yourself credit where credit is due. You value authenticity and you were open with your friend about something she said that hurt your feelings? Give yourself a mental pat on the back! You value kindness and you rushed to open the door for someone who had their hands full? Time to pop that imaginary champagne!
Sure, we all still need external validation sometimes. The need to be seen, recognized, and valued by others is an important one. However, it is only half the equation, and the other half comes from within. When you develop a habit of internally validating, you become less dependent on the approval of others. Even if nobody else notices or praises you for it, you can still feel proud of yourself.
Acting in alignment with your values can make you vulnerable, especially in situations where other people don’t share those values. Not everyone in your life will agree with your choices. You’ll get pushback from people who are used to you doing what they want you to do. You’ll also encounter that inner critic in your own mind, telling you that you’re selfish, lazy, or letting yourself go for doing anything that isn’t disciplined or productive. Yet while some will judge you for your values, others will appreciate you for them.
Most importantly, you will appreciate yourself more. Instead of asking What would so-and-so want me to do here?, you can practice asking What would my values tell me to do here? At the end of the day, you’re on this planet to live, and that means living a full, rich, satisfying life—not just placating everyone around you while secretly feeling empty and exhausted. You’re allowed to experience the full spectrum of feelings, thoughts, needs, cravings, and desires that arise within you.
In fact, when you truly believe this, you can even learn from those internal experiences. Maybe your cravings or instincts are telling you what you need, or pointing to an area where you’ve been feeling deprived. When you give yourself unconditional permission to exist as a messy human being and not a machine to optimize or control, your body and mind can work together in greater harmony. If what you resist persists, then when you stop resisting, those bothersome thoughts, feelings, and desires can simply run their course instead of plaguing you. In the next chapter, you’ll explore the role of deprivation in your life, and learn to heal through unconditional permission to honor your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs with compassion.
Chapter 6.
Unconditional Permission to Be Human
In high school, Allie was one of the only kids in class who actually studied during study hall. While her classmates passed notes, gossiped, or decorated their notebook covers, Allie sat up front and dutifully spent the hour puzzling over math homework or reading the assigned text for English lit. Allie regularly earned high grades, but she was sure that if she didn’t force herself to study so hard, she’d fall behind. Each evening as she finished her homework, Allie watched her mom come home and pop in an aerobics tape. She would tell Allie, “If I don’t exercise right when I get home, I’ll never find the willpower to do it!” As an adult, Allie took a similar approach to exercise. She signed up for spin class the night before, entering a credit card to reserve her spot so she wouldn’t be tempted to bail.
Willpower always seemed fleeting. She’d muster just enough to stick with a habit for a short while, and then it would vanish. On Sundays, she’d make five identical lunches for the week ahead, until one weekend she just couldn’t. Then she’d berate herself for ordering takeout, and vow to get back into her meal prep routine the next weekend. The Herculean effort she put into maintaining a healthy and productive routine felt essential to her success. Everywhere she went, she was reminded that without willpower, she’d never accomplish what she needed to do each day. Willpower seemed like a magical resource that was quickly depleted; when the willpower burned out, so did she.
As a culture, we’ve come to glorify denial of our basic needs as “discipline” or “willpower.” While the concept of deprivation has been glorified in many cultures throughout history, it has taken on new life in recent centuries. Particularly, in Western countries founded on puritanical, white supremacist beliefs, the idea that depriving oneself somehow made one superior was woven into the fabric of society. That mindset has trickled down over generations to color what we extol as virtuous behavior, and what is seen as lazy or gluttonous. Combine this with the Western-glorified idea that anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and it’s no surprise that when something is hard to sustain, we blame ourselves. If you’re not able to just do it, the problem must be a personal deficiency. Even as the standards we strive for shift across decades and centuries, the glorification of “hustling” remains a constant throughline (Petersen 2020; Harrison 2019; Ravenelle 2019).
Historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (2022) describes how harnessing willpower for healthy habits has become a shared priority across groups—liberal or conservative, religious or agnostic—that disagree on most other matters. She writes, “Across the political and cultural spectrum, Americans have come to rare agreement that claiming agency over one’s well-being, body and mind, is crucial to a life well lived.” When someone has achieved success in the eyes of society, they may acknowledge opportunities or privileges that helped them reach these heights. However, they almost always will also credit their sheer will. They will mention sacrifice, discipline, how they worked hard and didn’t make excuses.
Living from a “no excuses” mentality means operating in extremes. When you’re on your game, you feel superhuman. When you inevitably crash, you can’t figure out where you went wrong. After all, you were sticking with those habits, for days or even weeks on end! So why did you get off track, and how can you ensure it never happens again? Clinging harder to routines or searching for more effective productivity tools can seem like the solutions, but in reality, no living organism can sustain nonstop productivity. We all crash and burn eventually.
In Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, journalist Anne Helen Petersen (2020) describes burnout as “the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily functions, which you do your very best to ignore.” The swing from totally crushing it to catatonic on the couch can feel dramatic, as if your machinery suddenly short-circuited. People often think the antidote to crashing is to just optimize harder, so they double down on their wellness or hustle routines. Until ultimately, the pendulum swings back in the other direction, and they hit burnout once again. This tendency reminds me of a common disordered eating pattern called the restrict-binge cycle.
I know it well because I’ve lived it. For years, I believed I had a nighttime snacking problem. Really, it was a binge-eating problem. Most days, I ate a breakfast of an egg-white omelet and whole-wheat toast. Lunch was a salad with protein. I snacked on almonds and apples. Dinner was usually some form of protein, vegetables, and brown rice. I didn’t consider myself a dieter; I just tried to eat healthy. People often praised my habits and asked me for recipes and advice.
What they didn’t know was that every night, an hour or two after my healthy dinner, I would ravage my cabinets in search of dessert. I didn’t let myself buy anything that wasn’t healthified, so dessert was usually some messy concoction of monk fruit–sweetened “ice cream” topped with almond butter, dark chocolate, or if I was really in a pinch, crushed protein bars. Then I’d want savory, spreading cream cheese on crackers until I’d eaten the whole box. Then I’d go back to another sweet concoction, eating until I was in pain and vowing that tomorrow I’d have more self-control. I did this on repeat for nearly a decade. Daytime: egg whites, salads, almonds, tofu. Nighttime: fiend for sugar and salt until I was sick. I believed I couldn’t be trusted with the foods I craved, like potato chips or brownies. After all, look how I behaved with low-sugar ice cream!
I was sure my problem was one of willpower. But despite popular belief, the real reason that most people can’t stick to a restrictive way of eating for long has nothing to do with how badly they want it. It’s simply biology. Bodies are wired to get their needs met and maintain homeostasis; when your body gets off balance, it seeks to return to balance. It sends hunger signals when it needs fuel, and fullness signals when it’s gotten enough. When its core temperature gets too low, it makes you shiver, sending signals that make you want to put on a sweater. When your bladder gets too full, your body signals an urgency to pee. When we don’t respond to those signals, the body resorts to more drastic measures. When chronically sleep deprived, you eventually crash hard. When chronically deprived of food, you eventually binge hard.
There’s a reason most people don’t binge on carrots or chicken breast. When a body is deprived, it thinks there’s a famine. It doesn’t know why you’re eating too little—it just knows you’re not eating enough. Your body tries to remedy the deficit by driving you toward foods that will break down into energy as quickly as possible—foods high in sugar or carbohydrates. Maybe you get that chance to compensate when you find yourself in a situation where more forbidden food is around, like a restaurant or vacation. Other times, you reach a breaking point and buy or order those off-limits foods. Then you feel guilty for caving, and tighten the reins to make up for it. And so, the restrict-binge cycle repeats itself.
Humans are, in some ways, sophisticated animals. We don’t just have instincts; we also have emotions, thoughts, and memories. We develop complex associations between events and experiences in ways that other animals don’t. While your dog may be content eating the same meal on repeat for its entire life, you probably won’t be. Humans experience cravings and desires. Some are based on physical needs, like craving fresh fruits or vegetables when you haven’t had any for a while, and some are emotional, like desiring a warm slice of your mom’s homemade pie during the holidays. It’s not always enough to fuel ourselves—we also need to feel psychologically satisfied by what we’ve eaten. In this regard, your body senses deprivation both when you’re not eating enough food, and when you’re not eating enough variety of food.
When we aren’t satisfied, we often have cravings that are psychological and emotional in nature, rather than purely biological. You may technically be eating enough food, and you may eat whatever foods you want, so you’re not deprived of calories or variety, but you could still feel a sense of psychological deprivation if you’re placing shame on yourself around eating. For instance, maybe you scoop yourself a bowl of premium ice cream, but while eating it, you say things to yourself like I shouldn’t have this or I can only have one bowl. That guilt prevents you from reaching satisfaction, so psychologically, it registers as if you didn’t eat it at all. You still come away feeling deprived, but confused. It feels like you can never get enough, even if you’re physically full. This is often where people falsely diagnose themselves with food addiction, when what’s really happening is that they are psychologically deprived.
Just as limiting foods leads to out-of-control eating, restricting emotions can have a similar effect. The more you resist the expression or acknowledgment of a particular emotion, the more out-of-control and intense that emotion becomes. Early in my career, I worked in a chemical dependency treatment center for men recovering from opioid addiction. Much of what my clients and I focused on was learning how to move through tough emotions without using impulsive or self-destructive behaviors. One afternoon, I sat in my weekly therapy session with Tom, a sixty-year-old man who was newly sober. He had just been dumped by his long-term girlfriend, but he insisted it was no big deal. He was fine. I said gently, “You know, it’s okay if you’re not fine; heartbreak kind of sucks.” Suddenly, he began crying; big sobs shook his entire body. The tears surprised us both. As this stoic man wept, he kept repeating, “It hurts so bad…it hurts so bad.”
Opioids are such powerful painkillers that they can numb even the slightest discomfort. When you’re used to replacing any pain with a constant drip of pleasure, difficult emotions aren’t just difficult; they’re pure torture. Sure enough, at that first ping of sadness, Tom felt a craving rush back in. He was certain that if he weren’t in the safety of our treatment program he’d be relapsing that night. To Tom’s credit, he stuck it out. With practice, supportive pharmacotherapy, and lifestyle changes, he learned how to tolerate unpleasant emotions and regulate himself without using drugs. Yet every time he felt something painful, his first reaction was a desire to numb.
