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Shoulditis - Stressed Woman
Shot of depressed young woman thinking about her problems while sitting on the sofa at home.
Samuel, a middle-aged dad and skilled craftsman, came to see me with a locked-in mindset, one that was grinding him down to the nub, both emotionally and physically. It is understandably common in today’s breakneck pace world.
“It’s like this,” he explained. “If I’m not doing something productive, I think I should be. I feel guilty. But even when I am doing something worthwhile, it still doesn’t feel like enough, that I should do more.”
“So just passing the time or putting your mind and body in neutral is unacceptable?” I asked.
Absolutely. I feel compelled to be in gear and doing something productive pretty much every waking moment.”
“Sounds like you have what I call shoulditis,” I told Samuel.
If you’ve ever been to a therapist, you recognize how we tend to light up when people say “should” or “shouldn’t.” While there clearly are situations when one needs to lay down the law with oneself and issue commands, doing so routinely can prove counterproductive.
As for Samuel, on those rare occasions when he allowed himself to just chill, he ended up feeling guilty, on edge or pestered by thoughts about being lazy or, when extreme, even wasting his life. He found himself bedeviled by a particular form of guilt, one that drove him to, as the U.S. Army puts it, “be all that you can be.”
He wasn’t alone in that. I’ve spoken with scores of folks who suffer some form of hyper-productivity. And lest you think it’s just a nuisance, some of them discover that, if left unchecked, this internal whip-cracker pushes them right to the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion.
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“For me, it was self-destructive,” one woman client explained. “Even though I was getting all sorts of stress-related illnesses and became emotionally burned-out to the point I was becoming worthless to myself or others, I still couldn’t stop pushing myself.”
“What kept driving you?” I asked.
“I just wouldn’t let myself waste time. See? I still talk that way. I say ‘waste’ time, as if chilling out can’t serve an important purpose.”
Which it can. Obviously, people who regard walking from the couch to the refrigerator a notable achievement truly do waste time. However, for folks like Samuel, doing nothing can be akin to a treatment for a debilitating chronic illness, in this case an attitudinal one. Shoulditis usually becomes chronic, and it definitely makes people ill.
What keeps these folks huffing and puffing along on their self-imposed treadmill? Most suffer one of these fires under their posterior:
- A deep-seated mental script full of attitudes like “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop” and “Keep your nose to the grindstone,” with a guilt trip waiting in the wings should one violate these admonitions.
- A gnawing disquiet with oneself of the “don’t stop running, whatever is chasing you will catch up” variety. Ceaseless activity becomes a way to avoid one’s unfinished emotional business or to stave off an underlying anxiety or existential angst.
- The absence of a belief in one’s intrinsic value, requiring that one constantly prove worthy through endless deeds and accomplishments. This goes beyond “You must earn your keep” and well into “You must earn your value.”
As so often is the case, mental well-being usually requires living somewhere in the middle by finding a balance between crack-the-whip task mastership and the human version of a tree sloth. However, for folks like Samuel, one fundamental lesson needs to be top of mind.
At least some of the time, doing nothing is doing something—it is doing you good.
