I found it much easier to get less terrorized by the “shoulds” once I realized the mechanism of how they got embedded into my cognition in the first place - and by that why previous attempts of trying to get rid of them failed miserably.
See, it’s not something you can easily (or even at all) think yourself out of, similar to how you can’t think yourself easily out of loving somebody, mourning your deceased loved parents or needing to release the leftovers from your metabolism.
Schema “Should X” was conditioned into my cognitions by binding via association to a (previously) learned Schema of “Y is unsafe”/“Y impacts your probability of survival/mating/continued existence negatively” or summed up “Y makes you anxious”.
Somewhere in this process your brain (maybe falsely) infers ¬X -> Y. This might be e.g. by purely experiencing Y and ¬X at the same time (e.g. being bullied for ¬X, being in a overwhelmed state - think not enough met bodily needs, not enough slept, too much stress, too much hangover etc - and focusing on ¬X), explicitly arguing for the validity of the implication in some discussion (e.g. “People who chose to ¬X leads to Y, as we learned by reasons Z”).
The pitfall here is that once Y is concerned, it can for many of us be very difficult to stay rational. That is, because Y was in this recursive way already associated with the topic of bodily safety. And as we know, in war and love there are no rules, so basically one run risk of associating many many new ¬X to Y, which then themselves become new Y for the next recursive step, because the reasons Z seem to be true while they might be not.
And I get it, let’s not take chances, we might be playing with our lives here and end up without a partner, without a long list of exciting experiences, bad health etc.
But where is the end to this style of thinking? Eventually people realize this and stop conditioning themselves and others to new “Shoulds”, but what I see with many is that the huge stock of already conditioned Ys is not worked against, rather, they continue to seek to fill the Shoulds they already collected and lower the rate of adding new baggage of Shoulds.
The approach I chose is to be as conscious as possible (e.g. do all the things they say, eat well, sports, meditations, journaling etc etc) in order to witness - on a meta level if you will - when my behavior is a function of the “Y makes me feel unsafe” schema. And then, consciously and hard not to fulfill it and instead seek other ways to make me feel safe. Then I have the chance to break the conditioned association, stop adding new baggage, and slowly reverse the huge amount of Shoulds that exist in my cognition.
So to sum it up, it’s not sitting down and actively thinking “Should I really?”, it’s more like “I probably believe I should because I’m scared. Let’s remove being scared to wash out the interference. Then let’s lay out whether I really should”.
And most often, the answer really is “No, I shouldn’t”.
See, it’s not something you can easily (or even at all) think yourself out of, similar to how you can’t think yourself easily out of loving somebody, mourning your deceased loved parents or needing to release the leftovers from your metabolism.
Schema “Should X” was conditioned into my cognitions by binding via association to a (previously) learned Schema of “Y is unsafe”/“Y impacts your probability of survival/mating/continued existence negatively” or summed up “Y makes you anxious”.
Somewhere in this process your brain (maybe falsely) infers ¬X -> Y. This might be e.g. by purely experiencing Y and ¬X at the same time (e.g. being bullied for ¬X, being in a overwhelmed state - think not enough met bodily needs, not enough slept, too much stress, too much hangover etc - and focusing on ¬X), explicitly arguing for the validity of the implication in some discussion (e.g. “People who chose to ¬X leads to Y, as we learned by reasons Z”).
The pitfall here is that once Y is concerned, it can for many of us be very difficult to stay rational. That is, because Y was in this recursive way already associated with the topic of bodily safety. And as we know, in war and love there are no rules, so basically one run risk of associating many many new ¬X to Y, which then themselves become new Y for the next recursive step, because the reasons Z seem to be true while they might be not.
And I get it, let’s not take chances, we might be playing with our lives here and end up without a partner, without a long list of exciting experiences, bad health etc.
But where is the end to this style of thinking? Eventually people realize this and stop conditioning themselves and others to new “Shoulds”, but what I see with many is that the huge stock of already conditioned Ys is not worked against, rather, they continue to seek to fill the Shoulds they already collected and lower the rate of adding new baggage of Shoulds.
The approach I chose is to be as conscious as possible (e.g. do all the things they say, eat well, sports, meditations, journaling etc etc) in order to witness - on a meta level if you will - when my behavior is a function of the “Y makes me feel unsafe” schema. And then, consciously and hard not to fulfill it and instead seek other ways to make me feel safe. Then I have the chance to break the conditioned association, stop adding new baggage, and slowly reverse the huge amount of Shoulds that exist in my cognition.
So to sum it up, it’s not sitting down and actively thinking “Should I really?”, it’s more like “I probably believe I should because I’m scared. Let’s remove being scared to wash out the interference. Then let’s lay out whether I really should”.
And most often, the answer really is “No, I shouldn’t”.