How to Set Boundaries

TL;DR

• Having 0 professional and personal boundaries is a big threat to our mental health.
• Technology blurs the distinction between work and leisure, private and social lives.
• For many professions and in many areas of our life, expectations for what we can and should produce have gotten super unreasonable.
• Consequently, many of us don’t have clear boundaries for where our work ends and our leisure time begins or where our social time ends and our alone time begins. We feel like we’re always “on” and we never know when we’ve met expectations.
• Setting boundaries on work/social media time and expectations can help you be more efficient and free up time for things that actually make you happy.
• See the “How to Set Boundaries” section for concrete suggestions of how to implement better work and personal boundaries.

Society Encourages Us to Have 0 Boundaries

My hot take is that one of the biggest threats to our mental health is the pressure society puts on us to have 0 professional and personal boundaries. Technology has blurred the distinction between work and leisure, private and social lives. It’s definitely not an original take for me to say that COVID-19 made that worse.

Professionally, many of us work too many hours, check email when we should be relaxing, and let our vacation and sick time accumulate until we lose it.

Personally, we spend our alone time checking social media to see what ways we’re not measuring up today. Or we doom scroll through anxiety-provoking articles, rather than actually enjoying that alone time and developing fun hobbies. Unless we set intentional boundaries on our social media use, home is no longer the safe space we can go to relax from work and the social world. It’s just an extension of all that chaos.

Not only have our tangible boundaries (the location of work and socializing) blurred, so have our intangible boundaries. What I mean by that is that the expectations for what we can and should produce have become increasingly boundless and, as a result, unreasonable. For example, teachers are no longer expected to just teach children. They’re expected to remedy behavioral and emotional issues, support students’ mental health, cultivate students’ life skills, corral parents, and meet, nay, exceed learning standards. So basically we want them to be parents, therapists, social workers, and teachers).

Businesses are expected to produce increasing profits and a steady state is seen as a failure. Employees must constantly be productive or tracking software will signal to their employers they are “idle.” I could go on and on.

It no longer feels like enough for many of us to do our jobs and have regular social lives. We’re expected to perform just like the bots we periodically hear will take our jobs. We must optimize time, optimize profits, optimize followers. Bots don’t have boundaries, they do the job until there is nothing left to do or they crash. Which, honestly, sounds kind of relatable.

The (Potential) Consequences of Having 0 Boundaries

There are many, many things that play into mental health. However, the lack of boundaries in our personal and professional lives has a few key consequences for our mental health:

1. We can never meet the expectations that we (or others) set for ourselves because there is always more to accomplish or improve.
2. Additionally, we can never truly put our work aside because of Point 1 and, for many jobs, we almost always have the physical ability to continue work at any time.
3. We are so tired and burnt out that we end up skimping out on truly meaningful experiences that involve any kind of effort like vacations or in-person time with friends.
4. Finally, we end up reinforcing this whole messed up system because we are just trying to keep up and we can’t keep up if we’re not on the same racetrack as everyone else.

Plus, it affects how well we actually do at work. Studies suggest that working more than 55 hours has 0 impact on how much you actually get done, more work hours aren’t associated with more productivity once you account for employee engagement (feeling positively about your work and being fulfilled and absorbed by your work when you are working), and companies that have tried out the 4-day work week had no declines in productivity, some even had increases in productivity.

Overwork and work stress are also super bad for your health. In contrast, many employees who moved to a 4-day work week reported spending more time with their families and doing healthy activities. The problem is that quantity is much easier to measure than quality. The number of hours you work and the number of followers you have look good on paper, even if the quality of those hours or followers are, well, kinda sucky.

My Experience with Social and Work Boundaries

A lot of people ask me how I have time for work and my hobbies. Setting boundaries is basically the whole reason I have time for the things I love. I’m not special at all. I’ve just refused to work more than 40 hours a week since college. Why after college? In high school, I prided myself on having 1 hour of free time each day, which I used to watch Oprah while working out (can you believe how cool I was?!) and, in college, I spent most weekends and evenings working or studying (again, such a cool person).

Given this extreme adolescence, I burnt out early and learned to set boundaries. Grad school? I only worked 40 hours a week and never on weekends. The job I got where my predecessor told me I’d be expected to work more than 60 hours a week? I laughed before clarifying that I’d be working 40 hours a week unless it was truly an emergency (spoiler, I was a social science researcher, it was never truly an emergency). My work quality didn’t suffer from setting boundaries—in fact, I’m known for doing high-quality and efficient work and I believe that’s mostly because I’ve set good boundaries.

This goes back to that study I mentioned about work engagement. It’s a lot easier to be engaged at work if you put boundaries around that time that preserve your energy and mental health.

Now, I (almost) never check work emails outside of work hours, my average tends to be 15 minutes a day on social media (which I mainly use to look at memes and clips of stand-up comics), and texting is a pretty infrequent occurrence. This means I have way more time and mental space for hobbies and meaningful socializing.

A Caveat

Of course, I also don’t have kids, I only work in the office 2 days a week, I don’t work multiple jobs or overtime, I’m not concerned about layoffs (*knocks on wood*, *throws salt over shoulder*, *considers making sacrifices to appease the gods*), and I have a consistent work schedule. There’s a lot of privilege that comes with having time and being able to set boundaries in the first place.

Nevertheless, I think it’s so important that people set boundaries to the degree they are able to.

How Do You Know What Your Boundaries Are?

If you are unsure what boundaries to set in the first place, I recommend checking out this guide on setting boundaries from Sunny Days. Step 1 specifically goes over how to self-reflect and identify your boundaries. Steps 2-4 go over communicating and enforcing those boundaries in your relationships. The advice is amazing and doesn’t repeat what’s recommended here, so you’ll get even more great tips.

How to Set Boundaries

It’s important to acknowledge that until we change our values on a societal level, it will always be difficult to set boundaries because we’re bucking expectations and that’s especially hard if you are not in a leadership role in your workplace. If you work in a role where you manage others, I believe it is your moral responsibility to cultivate a good work environment and setting boundaries are a part of that *gauntlet thrown*.

If you don’t work in a managerial role and even if you do, I understand it is still really difficult to go against the grain. So here are the things I do to help set boundaries personally and professionally, some of which may be helpful for you and some of which may be totally irrelevant depending on your job/life circumstances:

Work Boundaries

• Establish your work hours with your employer and set them in your work calendar so others can see them. If needed, articulate that you are most efficient and effective during these work hours and so it’s in your employer’s interest for you to work during these times.
• Never apologize for not responding to an email outside of your regular work hours. If you absolutely need to, you can say “Thank you for your patience,” but even then, I don’t think people should be rewarded for bad work/life boundaries with a “Sorry” or a “Thank you.” Yep, another gauntlet thrown.
• Set your own expectations for what counts as good work. This doesn’t mean having 0 expectations and being a bad worker, it just means setting realistic expectations and appreciating when you put in your best effort, even if your employer doesn’t.
• Use your vacation and sick time—had a terrible sleep and feel awful? Need a mental health day? Need to take care of loved ones? Take a sick day! See this guide from Maxed Out PTO on how to best take advantage of your PTO!
• Advocate for what you need to do good work: It’s easy to think that our employers are more important to us than we are to our employers, but it’s in our employers’ financial interest to retain and support good employees.
• If you are applying for a new job, prioritize finding a place with a good work environment: ask questions about the work environment, research the company, and don’t settle for a bad employer unless you absolutely financially need to. It doesn’t help anyone to have to look for another job in 6 months when you are over it. With one of my old jobs, I ignored warnings from a former coworker that the work environment was terrible and, surprise, surprise, I ended up looking for jobs 6 months after I started.
• Remove your email app from your phone so that you have to navigate to your email from the internet—it’s super annoying, you probably won’t do it.
• If possible, keep your work computer separate from your personal computer and do not open your work computer outside of regular work hours unless it is truly an emergency.
• Cultivate hobbies and/or schedule fun activities that are not work—don’t be one of those people for whom work is a default activity when you can’t think of anything else to do.
• Encourage boundaries among your colleagues and don’t be shy about your own need for boundaries. Those social norms aren’t going to change themselves!

Social Boundaries

• I don’t actually set limits on my social media time, that can be a good strategy, but I don’t want to be somewhere bored out of my mind and have to change my settings. What works better for me is to only follow accounts that make me happy or create meaningful change (and the New York Times). If I notice an account is leading to unproductive doom-scrolling, I unfollow them. This means I usually spend a few enjoyable minutes laughing at memes and clips of stand-up comedians, feeling inspired, and viewing my friends’ stories, and then I’ve gotten my fix and haven’t gone down a rabbit hole.
• If you see something on social media that provokes a lot of anxiety, brainstorm something you can do about it and make a plan to do that thing. If there is a current event I feel a lot of anxiety about, I’ll try to donate or volunteer, if I see a post about a new kind of cancer that throws me into a doom spiral, I make sure I’m up-to-date on my preventive health screenings. In Brene Brown‘s book Atlas of the Heart, she discusses that we feel anxiety when we sense an obstacle we can’t overcome. Taking action helps empower us to feel like we can overcome an obstacle and lessens that anxiety so we can enjoy our time.
• Ask yourself periodically whether you’re enjoying scrolling. More often than not, the answer is not really, which can prompt you to think of something more fun to do.
• Minimize time (and texting and social media following) with toxic friends. See my post on how to make a hard decision if you’re considering breaking up with a toxic friend or partner.
• Set regular dates to see loved ones who make you feel good and keep those dates. It may sound weird to include this as part of social boundaries, but spending time with loved ones is huge for our mental health and can lessen the time we’re spending on social media trying to feel less lonely.
• Again, cultivate hobbies or activities you love doing! Don’t make scrolling and texting your default activities. Make something you actually love your default.
• Be clear on your values and organize your time to align with those values. For example, because family is super important to me, I go on weekly walks with my parents (so cute, I know!)

You’re only guaranteed one life on this pretty great planet. The most common regrets people have on their deathbeds is that they worked too much and didn’t spend enough time with their loved ones or doing things they loved. As Peloton instructor Robin Arzon says, “Use your ‘no’ to protect your ‘yes.’” 

Any other tips you’d like to see here? Let me know in the comments! And if you enjoyed this or think it would be helpful for others, I’d love for you to consider liking, subscribing (in the left sidebar), or sharing with others.