When "I Should" Runs Your Life: Understanding Rules That Keep You Stuck

Listen to the way you talk to yourself for a single day and count how many times the word "should" appears.

I should be more productive. I should have known better. I should be over this by now. I should exercise more. I should be able to handle this without help. I should call my mother. I should want to go to the party. I should feel grateful.

Each of these sentences contains a rule. And each rule carries an implicit threat: if you don't follow it, something bad happens — you are lazy, ungrateful, weak, selfish, or failing in some fundamental way. The "should" doesn't just describe a preferred behavior. It describes who you will be if you don't comply.

Most people who arrive in my Colorado telehealth practice are, in one way or another, exhausted from following rules that aren't working. They are doing everything they are "supposed to" and still feeling miserable. Or they are unable to follow the rules they believe they should follow, and the resulting guilt and shame have become their primary emotional experience. Either way, the rules are in charge — and the person is not.

Understanding how these rules work, where they come from, and how to tell the difference between rules that serve you and rules that merely govern you is one of the most clarifying things that can happen in therapy.

Where Rules Come From

Very early in life, we learn to follow rules given to us by the people responsible for keeping us alive. "Don't touch the stove." "Hold my hand when we cross the street." "Say please and thank you." These rules are essential. A child who cannot learn from verbal instructions — who has to test every warning through direct experience — is in serious danger. Rule-following is not a flaw. It is one of the most important survival skills our species has developed.

But here is where it gets complicated. Because following rules is so useful, and because the social consequences for compliance are so powerful, we don't just learn to follow rules — we learn to follow rules because we are told to. The child who puts on a coat when told "It's cold outside" may eventually discover that the coat keeps her warm. But long before that discovery, she is putting on the coat because Mom said so, because there will be consequences if she doesn't, and because compliance itself has become a practiced behavior.

Psychologists distinguish between two fundamentally different kinds of rule-following. The first — called pliance — is rule-following maintained by the social consequences of compliance itself. What matters is not whether the rule leads to a good outcome in the world, but whether someone (a parent, a culture, an authority, or your own internalized version of those voices) approves of your obedience. The child puts on the coat not because she has noticed that coats produce warmth, but because there will be trouble if she doesn't. The warmth is irrelevant. The compliance is the point.

The second — called tracking — is rule-following that stays sensitive to the actual correspondence between what the rule predicts and what you experience when you follow it. Think of it as following a map, but continuing to look at the terrain. The coat rule works as tracking when the person wears the coat, notices the warmth, and continues wearing it because of that experienced consequence — a consequence that would have been there whether or not anyone told her to put on the coat. In tracking, the person remains in contact with their own experience. The rule is a guide, but reality is the authority.

A useful way to understand the distinction: imagine a seasoned navigator crossing open water. She has a chart — a set of rules about currents, shoals, and safe passages. But she does not follow the chart with her eyes closed. She watches the water. She reads the wind. She notices when the chart says the channel is deep but her depth finder says otherwise, and she adjusts course accordingly. The chart informs her, but her ongoing contact with actual conditions governs her decisions. That is tracking. Now imagine a second navigator who follows the same chart but never looks up. He trusts the chart because the person who gave it to him was an authority, because deviating from it would mean admitting he doesn't know what he's doing, and because following the prescribed course feels safer than trusting his own observations. When the water gets shallow in a place the chart says it should be deep, he stays the course — not because the chart is correct, but because the social and emotional cost of questioning it feels too high. That is pliance.

Both forms of rule-following are normal. But when pliance dominates — when you are living your life according to rules whose primary enforcement mechanism is guilt, shame, or social approval rather than your own lived experience — the result is a kind of autopilot that can run for years before anyone notices it isn't headed anywhere meaningful.

The Problem with "Should"

Here is the difficulty: rules that began as useful guidance tend to solidify over time. They stop being suggestions and start being laws. And because language has a way of connecting things into coherent networks, individual rules combine into elaborate systems that feel like fundamental truths about how life works.

"I should be productive" connects to "People who aren't productive are lazy" connects to "Lazy people don't deserve good things" connects to "If I rest, I am failing." What began as a reasonable observation about the value of effort has become a rigid system that makes rest feel morally dangerous.

"I should always be there for other people" connects to "Good people put others first" connects to "If I say no, I am selfish" connects to "If I am selfish, people will leave me." What began as a genuine desire to be caring has become a pattern of chronic self-abandonment that the person experiences not as a choice but as a requirement.

The word "should" is the linguistic signature of a rule that has lost its connection to lived experience. When you say "I should," you are rarely pausing to notice what actually happens — in your body, in your relationships, in the quality of your life — when you follow the rule versus when you don't. Instead, you are responding to the anticipated emotional consequences of noncompliance: guilt, shame, anxiety, the felt sense that you are a bad person. The rule is no longer being maintained by its results in the world. It is being maintained by the social and emotional punishment that accompanies disobedience — even when that punishment comes entirely from inside your own mind.

This is the hallmark of pliance that has gone underground: the external authority is no longer present, but the internal enforcement system is running flawlessly. The parent who said "You should always put others first" may be decades in the past, but the guilt that arrives when you say no to a request is as immediate as if they were standing in the room.

How Tracking Becomes Pliance — And Why It Matters

One of the most important things to understand about these patterns is that tracking can quietly shift into pliance over time — and when it does, a rule that once served you begins to imprison you.

Consider a professional who, early in her career, discovered through direct experience that working long hours produced better results, led to promotions, and generated a sense of competence she genuinely valued. This was tracking — she followed the "work hard" rule and stayed in contact with its actual consequences. It worked, and she knew it worked because she could feel it working.

But over the years, something shifted. The long hours became an identity. Colleagues began to recognize her as someone who was always the first to arrive and the last to leave. She took pride in this reputation. Gradually, the behavior was no longer maintained by the quality of her work or the satisfaction she felt but by the image she had cultivated and the anxiety she now felt at the thought of being seen as anything less than maximally dedicated. The rule was the same — "work hard" — but what was holding it in place had fundamentally changed. She was no longer tracking the actual consequences of her effort. She was complying with an image of herself that others had come to expect and that she had come to need.

This is a shift from tracking to pliance, and it happens so gradually that most people never notice it. The behavior looks identical from the outside. The internal experience is entirely different. Where there was once genuine engagement with outcomes, there is now anxiety about appearances. Where there was once flexibility — the willingness to work less when the situation called for it — there is now rigidity, because reducing effort would threaten not just her productivity but her sense of who she is.

The same pattern plays out in countless domains. A person begins eating healthfully because they notice they feel better — tracking. Over time, the eating pattern becomes a rigid identity, maintained by the fear of judgment (from themselves or others) if they deviate — pliance. A person begins a meditation practice because they experience genuine benefit — tracking. Over time, missing a session produces guilt disproportionate to any actual consequence — pliance. The behavior persists. The sensitivity to one's own experience evaporates.

How Rules Become Invisible

One of the most insidious features of rigid rule-following is that it becomes invisible to the person doing it. When you have followed a rule long enough, it stops feeling like a rule and starts feeling like reality. It no longer sounds like "I should be productive" — it sounds like "I am someone who values hard work," which sounds like an identity, not a rule. But the behavioral signature is the same: the person cannot rest without guilt, cannot take a day off without anxiety, and experiences any deviation from productivity as a moral failure.

This is closely related to what I described in my post on self as content vs. self as context. When rules about how you should behave fuse with your sense of who you are, breaking the rule doesn't just mean doing something different — it feels like becoming someone different. And that perceived threat to identity is often enough to keep the rule in place indefinitely, regardless of whether it is leading to a life worth living.

The Alternative: Returning to Your Own Experience

The goal of this work is not to eliminate rules. Human beings need rules. We need guidance, structure, and frameworks for making decisions. The goal is to shift from pliance — following rules because of the social and emotional consequences of compliance — back to tracking: staying in contact with your own experience, noticing the actual results of your behavior, and allowing that information to guide what you do next.

Tracking, in its deepest sense, is the practice of paying attention to what is actually happening in your life rather than what the rule says should be happening. It is the willingness to observe the consequences of your own actions — not the imagined judgment of others, not the anticipated guilt, but the real, felt impact on your wellbeing, your relationships, and your sense of vitality. It is noticing that the sixty-hour work week that once energized you now leaves you depleted and disconnected from the people you love — and allowing that observation to matter more than the rule that says you should keep going.

This is a meaningful distinction. A person who exercises because "I should" and a person who exercises because they have paid attention to how movement affects their mood, energy, and presence in their own life may look identical from the outside. But the internal experience is radically different. The first person is running from guilt. The second person is running toward something they have noticed and valued through their own experience. The first person will quit when the guilt fades or when a stronger "should" competes for attention. The second person has a sustainable relationship with the behavior because it is connected not to compliance but to ongoing experiential contact with what matters to them.

In my post on Process-Based Therapy, I described how I work with clients to identify the specific psychological processes that are maintaining their difficulties. Rigid rule-following — particularly the dominance of pliance over tracking — is one of the most common patterns I see and one of the most responsive to therapeutic intervention. When we help a person reconnect with their own experience, notice the actual consequences of their behavior, and evaluate rules against what they observe rather than what they fear, something loosens. The rules don't disappear. But they shift from commands to hypotheses. From laws to experiments. From things the person obeys to things the person tests against the texture of their own life.

Noticing the Pattern

If you want to begin examining your own "shoulds," here is a simple practice.

When you notice yourself thinking or saying "I should," pause and ask two questions:

Where did this rule come from? Can you trace it back? Was it something a parent said, a cultural expectation, something a teacher or partner instilled? Or is it something you arrived at through your own experience and reflection?

What actually happens when I follow it — and when I don't? Not what you imagine would happen. Not the guilt or the anxiety — those are social consequences of noncompliance, the internal enforcement system of pliance. What happens in the world? What happens in your body? What happens in the quality of your day, your relationships, your sense of being alive? If the primary consequence of breaking the rule is a feeling of guilt rather than an actual negative outcome you can point to, that is a signal that the rule may be maintained by pliance rather than by your contact with reality.

This isn't about rebellion. It isn't about throwing out every rule and doing whatever you feel like. It is about returning to your own experience as a source of information — learning to notice the results of your behavior rather than simply obeying the instructions you were given. It is about becoming the navigator who reads both the chart and the water, rather than the one who follows the chart with her eyes closed.

Some rules you will keep. They are genuinely yours, connected to what matters to you, and when you pay attention, they lead to outcomes you can feel and value. Others you will recognize as inherited obligations that have been generating guilt for years without producing anything meaningful — rules you have been following with your eyes closed, long after the territory changed. Letting those go — not with anger, but with the clarity that comes from finally looking up — is one of the most freeing experiences in therapy.

Getting Started

If you recognize the pattern I've described — the exhausting cycle of "shoulds," the guilt that accompanies any deviation, the sense that you are living by someone else's script — therapy can help you sort through the rules and find the ones that are genuinely yours. I provide telehealth psychotherapy to adults across Colorado, integrating ACT and related approaches within a Process-Based Therapy framework. Contact me at rachael.stclaire@hush.com for a free 15-minute consultation, or visit the Appointments page.