Stop shoulding on yourself. A midlife conversation

As a midlifer, we often feel like we "should" have our shit together, but what if we don't? How do we get clear and honest with what's actually happening? In this episode, Syd Moreau, host of Forty AF,  discusses why shoulding on ourselves allows us to stay disconnected from our lives and gives us an illusion of responsibility without having to take actual action. 

Transcript

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Admittedly, I would go to the kitchen and I would eat a few emotional support cookies and maybe slice a few pieces of cheese and pour a few glasses of wine that evening, and I would feel like absolute shit about myself. And that process, I did that every day. I was giving a half-ass attempt to reach my goal, never really being fully honest with what was actually happening. In my mind, I lived in the shoulds. I had to change the cycle. I had the desire, but the defeat was in the should. Should give us an illusion of responsibility without having to take actual action towards a desire or a goal. This is the 40 as fuck podcast, where we have worthwhile, real as fuck conversations about midlife. What you're gonna hear on this podcast is not the fluff you see scrolling Instagram, it's the messy parts of midlife because midlife feels a little different. I wouldn't say midlife is necessarily a crisis, but it's worth paying attention to. So I have a confession for you guys. Since 2007, when I first joined Facebook, I was always hoping with every seemingly perfect Facebook post or even later with my Instagram post, I really did try to convince you that I have my shit all together. Not only was I trying to convince you, I was actually probably trying to convince myself as well. My mission with this podcast is to normalize not having our shit together in our 40s. And even if we feel like we have it all together, I still want to normalize this middle part of our life as an exploration into ourselves. Using this time to redefine and decide how we want to show up and really thinking about who do we want to show up to, I think that that's really important. It's not actually necessary that you have a crisis, but asking yourself, does my present self align with my future self? Fundamentally, that is what is at the core of this evaluation period. At this stage of our lives, we are really lucky because we have this vast backlog of experiences. And all of those experiences have very unknowingly or unconsciously formed this current version of ourselves. And the current version of ourselves may or may not have it all figured out yet. And honestly, there's a pretty good chance that we will never have it all figured out. It is really hard, though, to look at ourselves and acknowledge the areas of our lives or even ourselves that need some attention. And it's even harder to admit out loud to other people who care and love us that we're struggling. But announcing it to the social world and telling the world about our flaws and our weaknesses and areas that we need growth in, or even where we're completely failing in our life, I don't think being fully transparent or 100% authentic on social media is actually necessary. I really don't want my ex-boyfriends or my grade school nemesis knowing that I gained 20 pounds over COVID. No thanks. I will use the perfect selfie angle to hide those 20 pounds. And yes, I did do that during COVID. My point is that there should be no judgment in posting photos or videos that portray ourselves the way we want to be seen online. We're human. We're going to want to do that. Like I said before, to go through this period a crisis is not required. But it does require a level of authenticity and transparency and really vulnerability with ourselves. But what you post on social media really doesn't matter. But how you look at yourself in the mirror, I think that matters. And I mean that both figuratively and literally. Most of us have these really great intentions, even motivations to make changes. But when it comes down to it, we let ourselves down. We don't follow through and we kind of flake out on ourselves. And we do this day after day after day, but we have this desire for change. We want something more or different, and that's normal and healthy. It isn't selfish, and it also doesn't mean that your life is crap either. In labs, scientists have actually found that without desire, our action stops. Rats that were neurologically deprived of dopamine, and dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that is largely responsible for movement, motivation, taking action in our lives or going towards something pretty much describes desire. The rats without the dopamine lost all of their will to live. Now, I'm not actually saying that you're going to die by not having some version of a midlife crisis, but what I am saying is this work isn't selfish. Improving who we are and where we want to go kind of seems like it's life essential. I think rethinking what this period of time looks like for us and not calling it a crisis is helpful. Hitting rock bottom or needing to implode our life or making these huge sweeping changes, I don't think that any of that is necessary. I think this evaluation should be about defining what's important in our lives. And basically at the core of it, we're aligning the trajectory of the next 40 years of our lives so that we end up where we want to be, hopefully, knowing that we lived out our lives contentfully, with joy, and spending it with people in places who love and support us. In a landmark study by Harvard, and it's called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, it was conducted over 80 years. And during this 80-year study, they followed over 700 men. And what they found by analyzing tons and tons of data on these men is that good relationships are what keep us happier and healthier, nothing else. It came down to having good relationships in our life to keep us happier and healthier. This is in stark contradiction to surveys of millennials who 80% say being rich is a life goal for happiness. And 50% of millennials say being famous is also a major life goal for happiness. Think about that. So I would say that hindsight of the 700 participants in the Harvard study gives us a way better glimpse of how aging and experience alter and define what is actually important in life. And that's why I think that this midlife marker that we're in is so important. But unfortunately, asking these hard questions and doing this work isn't necessarily looked upon positively, not always by our family or culture. And I think most importantly, it's not always looked upon positively by ourselves. I think that we've been conditioned to feel that by evaluating where we are, by standing in some pretty uncomfortable truths and some courageous vulnerability, and maybe admitting that we aren't satisfied and that we do actually need to make changes, somehow that conveys weakness about ourselves or the choices that we've made over the years. And I think when we operate from this place of deficiency and inadequacy, shame, guilt, anxiety about ourselves, when we do that, what we're actually doing is we're we're kind of rejecting parts of ourselves. And the parts of us that we shy away from are the parts that we unconsciously formed during the demands and the experiences and the choices that we've made from the first 40 years of our life. Our current version of ourselves has quite honestly and with the best of intentions formed all the unhealthy habits that we have. It's been the reason that we've taken lackluster jobs and stayed in it. We've stayed in unfulfilling relationships, we've, you know, maybe acquired some financial issues, and we have notebooks and notebooks of unreached goals. This is not to be ashamed of, or it's not something that we should hide. It's really how we got to this point. It has served us well. But because it is so hard to stand in those areas that need attention, we rationalize our discomfort about them. And we tell ourselves that we're just not being grateful enough, or that we should be satisfied with how it is, or that it really is good enough. And don't get me wrong, I believe gratitude and blessings are at the heart of humanity. But my own evaluative state in the last couple of years that I've been going through, it's shown me how I have bypassed my own experiences and grief and then chose to wear a mask for the sake of looking like I have my shit together. And I did this very unconsciously. And I did it until I didn't recognize myself anymore. Rationalizing and disguising our discomfort removes us from being present in our lives and it creates this dissonance. And when we do that, I think the worst thing that comes of that, that comes of it, is that our confidence begins to wane in ourselves because we don't actually honor the parts of ourselves that we know need attention. It could be that you would go through this whole midlife evaluation period and decide that everything is good for you. But it takes an awareness to define what is good enough for you. And that comes through self-realization and paying attention and staying present in your life and to the emotions that you're feeling. You can't be rationalizing and numbing out to avoid the discomfort of the truth to decide that you are good enough. Back in 2020, I purchased a Peloton. When I bought it, it was because it was going to be the answer to losing those 20 pounds that I couldn't seem to get rid of that I gained from having my third kid at the advanced maternal age of 39 and a half. So that peloton came and I loved it. I rode that sucker every freaking day. But something wasn't happening. I was not losing the weight. In fact, I was actually gaining weight despite riding that bike with like serious determination. If I had to describe myself, and actually I used to make fun of myself when I would ride that bike, but I was kind of like the wicked witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. You know that scene when she's riding her bike into the tornado? She's like, dun dun, dun dun dun, dun, dun dun, dun, like that was me. I was so determined to lose that weight on the bike. I just pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal. But I felt so defeated. I felt like there was something wrong with my body. Like, why was I not losing this weight? After all, I'm riding this bike every day. And I would beat myself up. I would tell myself, you should be skinnier. What's wrong with you? And I would look in the mirror and not seeing results, I would hate myself. And if I'm honest, admittedly, I would go to the kitchen and I would eat a few emotional support cookies and maybe slice a few pieces of cheese and pour a few glasses of wine that evening. And I would feel like absolute shit about myself as I looked at my Instagram scroll and seeing all the skinny girls. And that process, I did that every day, over and over and over again. I had all this determination, then I wasn't seeing the results. So I had all of this self-hate and then shame and then guilt. And I think that we could all agree that buying my Peloton was definitely a step in the right direction. I did have the desire for change. I recognized I was uncomfortable with my weight and I did want to make a change. I did what I was supposed to do on the Peloton. I rode like a crazy lady. But I wasn't honest. I was giving a half-ass attempt to reach my goal. And then I was feeling like shit about it the next day. But I was never really being fully honest with what was actually happening. In my mind, I lived in the shoulds. Riding that bike should be paying off. Should allowed me to blame my body for not performing like I wanted it to. Should kept me feeling bad and hating myself. And I wasn't even aware at the time of how I was using should to sabotage my weight loss journey. Should was just keeping me stuck. Should allowed me to feel bad about my results. And then I used it as an excuse to numb out. Like those were my support cookies. But then I had this realization that if I was going to achieve my goals, which I thought about losing weight day in, day out, obsessively, because I wanted to be back to my pre-pregnancy weight so bad. I had to change the cycle. I had the desire, but the defeat was in the should. Should was keeping me from responsibility. And I think should is where a lot of us get stuck. A lot of us think we should not struggle. It should be easy. We should be happy. We should be grateful. We should be healthy. Should keeps us in inaction. In many ways, it keeps us away from our desires because should is a passive statement. We repeat the patterns, we allow the maladaptive behaviors over and over again in our life. We stay in unhealthy environments or relationships because we should. Should give us an illusion of responsibility without having to take actual action towards a desire or a goal. When we do little to change the scaffolding or the architecture that we operate from, we begin living this kind of groundhog type day. And that was me. I had the same pattern day in and day out, but I wasn't changing anything. We know that our current situation isn't what we want it to be, but we really don't do anything, I mean, not fully, to change that. And then we rationalize with the shoulds. We beat ourselves up for feeling the way that we do. We stay in terrible jobs or environments, maybe even relationships that don't serve us anymore, all for the should. Should is a trap. For me at least, as I started this midlife evaluation, my needs were not getting met because I was not willing to be that uncomfortable in my life. I was not taking responsibility for the results I had because I was, I was shoulding all over the place. My weight loss journey was really just the first awareness, though, in seeing how I was letting myself down with this passive context. And there would be many more of these journeys over the next couple of years, but the Peloton experience was the first time that I gained this insight. And I felt so much shame around these unmet expectations and really how I looked. Shame, which actually could be defined as feeling of distress about who we are or our behaviors, is a very, very destructive thought. Gerald Fishkin in The Science of Shame found in his research that shame is connected with the limpic system, which I imagine all emotions are, but shame is connected with the limpic system, which influences our autonomic nervous system, which is actually responsible for our fight or flight response. Now I don't want to get too deep into the nervous system with you guys, but I do think that it's really important. But when we interpret something as shame, our brain actually reacts as if there is a physical danger and it activates the sympathetic nervous system, which generates that fight, flight, or freeze response. Well, shame activates the freeze response. When they study the freeze response, it's usually an indication of feeling trapped or powerless or even in trauma. So shame upsets our ability to be able to think clearly, which results in beliefs that we're really stuck in a situation or that we don't have any power in the situation. Or in my case, we think there's something wrong with us. It really shuts us down. And this was me. I would ride that damn Peloton and I would get stuck in an abyss of should. I'd feel shame and I would really hate myself for where I was at. I would get stuck in that freeze response, which would lead me to grab the support cookies and totally numb out. Now, there's a reason that we actually numb out when we feel shame or any other emotions that have our nervous system in that activated state. The numbing out with food or alcohol or even endlessly scrolling on social media or shopping, porn can be used to numb out. We gravitate towards those maladaptive behaviors because those behaviors are pleasurable and they trigger our reward system. Well, they release dopamine in our brain. And because we are in that activated nervous system state, when we have the dopamine released in our brain, the dopamine will bring us back to a baseline level in our nervous system, kind of restoring that homeostasis. And it feels good in the moment too, because our brains are wired to value the present more than the future, preventing us from reaching our full desires or goals because we choose the present outcome over the longer term. And to me, I felt a lot of relief knowing that numbing out was a neurological response to shame that had activated my nervous system. I'm sure a lot of you guys have read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, but he has this one quote in the book that I think describes this whole point so well. He says, every habit produces multiple outcomes across time. Unfortunately, these outcomes are often misaligned. With our bad habits, the immediate outcomes feel good, the ultimate outcomes feel bad. For me, the food soothed and the scale never budged. So my attempts at numbing out gave me that instant dopamine hit when the shoulds triggered that state of shame. And I felt helpless and like I really thought I was going to carry these 20 to 25 pounds forever. And as the months went on and not losing that weight and constantly thinking about it, really obsessing about it and feeling that cycle of shame and then punishing myself and beating myself up, I really started to feel a diminishing in my worth as a person. And I had this voice in my head. We all have that voice of mine was nasty. It was like an abuser. And I would never speak to somebody the way that that voice in my head spoke to me. And in August of 2021, I reached an absolute new level of dissatisfaction with where I was at physically. And this would become a defining moment in my midlife. And it really helped me see the potential that I had to make changes in my life. And it would become where I would see the difference between self-punishment and taking personal responsibility for my results. So here's how it went down. I was sitting on my patio, drinking wine, numbing out, and I saw somebody post on Facebook about a book called The Obesity Cure, and it was written by a guy named Fung. I bought the book immediately and I devoured it on my Kindle. Now, the book was important because it gave me some good information about dietary fasting. It also empowered me to look at some of the habits that I had been choosing around my eating. When I first started fasting, I incrementally increased my fasting window or the window that I was not eating by 30 minutes each day. So those that are not familiar with fasting, fasting says delay, don't deny. Well, what I discovered about myself by committing to fasting changed everything, not just the scale, but it really changed my approach to doing challenging things in my life that I had been avoiding. As my fasting window grew longer and longer, I was still feeling a lot of shame about my physical body. Like when I would get dressed in the morning or I would see myself in the mirror, I did not feel good about myself at all. But because I was fasting, I would resist that need to run to the kitchen when I would feel those feelings after I looked in the mirror and eat during my fasting window because I knew that I was just delaying. Sometimes I would actually have to spit out the food in the sink or the trash can because running to the kitchen when I was feeling that emotional upset had become so instinctual in me. And I started to realize that my relationship with food had become a very emotional response. But I also realized that because I was delaying and not denying, I could actually be uncomfortable with that emotional feeling that I was experiencing, be it shame or anxiety or anger or boredom, knowing that the reward or food was coming at the end of my fasting window and it made it tolerable. Sometimes, though, I was actually a little uncomfortable as that window grew longer because I was actually hungry. But for the most part, I could easily resist that emotional urge to go numb out. I started showing up differently in other parts of my life too, because I had figured out that I could tolerate really sitting in that uncomfortableness. And I learned that my emotions weren't actually enemies or something to avoid. I knew each time that I felt that wave of emotional discomfort, I could withstand the feelings without having to numb out or get rid of them. This is kind of interesting. So our emotions produce a chemical response in our body. But what scientists have found is that chemical response, that initial wave of feeling from experiencing something in our environment, that only lasts 90 seconds. Any remaining feeling to the emotion is a cognitive choice that we are choosing to stay in that emotional response. Now, don't get me wrong, it is not always easy to get out of those emotional responses because we do have this thinking brain, but knowing that that initial wave fades after 90 seconds helps you get through a lot of these things to avoid numbing out. Even more interesting to me when I was doing my research, how we perceive various emotional states really does influence our body's response way more than we ever thought. There was this study that was done with 30,000 adults in the United States asking them if they experience stress. And they also asked them how they perceived the stress that they experienced. So basically, did they view the stress as good or bad? Now, during this study, what they found is that while people who experience a high level of stress, those people experienced a 43% increase in death. But that death rate only held true to the people who believe that stress was bad or harmful. And the people that had high stress but perceived stress as good, they actually had the lowest chance of dying, even lower than those people that had low stress. So when we experience stress, our body does physiologically go under changes. We have adrenaline and cortisol, our heart rate increases, our blood vessels constrict and narrow. And that's actually the reason that prolonged stress can cause cardiac issues. However, though, in a different study, those that viewed stress as a positive thing, their blood vessels did not narrow and constrict. Their blood vessels, the ones that viewed stress as good, their blood vessels actually resembled the same blood vessels of those that were experiencing joy. So how we perceive the emotions that we feel in response to stress very much dictates our outcome. I want to come back to a point that I made earlier about how unknowingly fasting would teach me the difference between self-punishment, like that nasty inner voice that told me I had no worth and really caused me a lot of stress. The difference between that and personal accountability. Because as I got more comfortable with my emotions that would come out and resisted the urge to escape, that voice actually started getting quieter and quieter. And I'm not sure why we think we need to talk to ourselves in ways that are negative about what we haven't done or goals that we haven't accomplished. I kind of wonder if we do that because it makes us feel like we have some control. From my experience with the Peloton, that it is possible to hate yourself into loving yourself. And in the beginning, too, when I would ride that Peloton, I had this mirror in front of me that I would look at as I was riding. And because I was overweight, when I would see my legs, I hated the way that they look and I would think terrible thoughts about my legs. But as the process of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable went on, I changed what I started to say to myself. I used to say things like, my legs are so strong and they carry me through the uncomfortable or they can withstand discomfort. And I didn't even know that I was doing this. But in hindsight, I think that is actually when I started to move out of hate for my body and love for my body. And as time went on, I really started to appreciate the process of all this. And the weight did finally start to come off because I was making better choices for myself. I wasn't drinking to escape. I wasn't really escaping in the ways that I had been. And because I wasn't, I was more present to my life. And this clarity of presence that I was having because I wasn't stuffing down all of these emotions, it allowed me to start seeing clearly other areas of my life that needed just as much attention as my body. So when it comes down to it, instead of shoulding my life, I was able to listen and pay attention to the whispers of my life that were telling me where something was kind of out of alignment. And because I had now learned to withstand months of uncomfortableness, it gave me the courage to start to lean into other areas of my life because now I trusted and I knew that I could handle it. And because of that, my confidence started to grow. And this is the point where I actually realized that confidence isn't something that we're born with. Confidence comes from following through with the desires that we have, even when it's uncomfortable and really even when we don't want to. Confidence comes from trusting yourself to show up and do the thing. I mentioned in the first podcast of season two that our mid-40s have been shown scientifically to be a low point in our lifespan. But interestingly, that same low point is observed in apes. Now, I have absolutely no idea how they know that, but they do. So this must be a very natural experience. And lucky for us in our 40s, not only have we been experiencing this like lifespan low point of our midlife, but we are also experiencing a confounding effect from the pandemic. When COVID hit, we all became very inward, kind of in a like a contractive state. And we faced so much uncertainty. And in some ways, I think because of that uncertainty, we lost a lot of trust with our day-to-day routine that we had become so accustomed to prior to the pandemic. We were really forced in ways to sideline a lot of our goals and ambitions. And we had to reorganize our lives. Now, I don't think that we had any way of knowing, but all of those canceled plans and birthday parties that didn't happen or weddings that didn't happen, date nights, and how we switched all of our friendships to Zoom friendships or FaceTime and not seeing our friends or family. I think all of those things contributed to a deconstruction of the selves that we knew. So as we've really emerged from this locked-in state after the pandemic, we emerged learning that our future was kind of uncertain. And so many of us, especially in our mid-40s, not only are we looking around our lives and seeing where all of the demands that we've encountered over the years that have allowed us to should and avoid, but we are also likely emerging from COVID with these expectations that we changed in ourselves to accommodate a pandemic reality. And just like for me, my expectations changed around my diet during the pandemic. I ate more Cheez-Its, I ate more Fritos, I ate more pizza. And I would have made better choices because I had a different level of expectations pre-pandemic. So recently, though, I have had the urge to be more social. But what I have found with my friends is that we are all still very much hiding. It's like we all want to go out and see each other and be social, but it's like nobody really wants to follow through. It's kind of interesting. So I've been thinking that this could actually be explained by the expectations that we change to accommodate COVID. And arguably, as social creatures, an expectation that we probably need to change back. Because you guys remember at the beginning of the podcast, and I told you about that landmark study of 700 men? Well, two of the other key findings were people who have stronger connections have healthier, happier, and longer lives. In fact, what they found in that study is that loneliness kills. It's actually toxic. And people that experience loneliness, their health declines earlier in midlife, and their brain function also suffers, and they live shorter lives. Statistically, one in five Americans reports loneliness. And that statistic is actually a pre-COVID statistic. So I would be really interested to see what it is after COVID. But there was another key finding from that study that it's not just the relationships you have, it's the quality of relationships. That is why evaluating your environment is so important in midlife. The data showed that the biggest predictor of living a long and healthy life was not your cholesterol, but it was the quality of the relationships you had in your life and in midlife specifically, like right now. Quality connection to others and the relationships that we have, and I imagine this is friends and spouses and kids and parents and work is really kind of the ultimate path to living an emotionally and physically healthy life. High conflict, mediocracy, and feeling unfulfilled are not friends to our emotional or our physical health, especially in midlife. And that study found that high conflict marriages had extremely detrimental effects on our overall well-being and health and how long we lived. So, really, just like my weight loss journey, showing up on Zoom or FaceTime with my friends, it's kind of a half-ass attempt. I realize now that that is an expectation that I altered in response to the pandemic. And it's not that I don't want to see them, but I am experiencing some resistance in that change. For a while, I was kind of blaming work and life demands, and I used it as an excuse not to see them that often. But that was just me shooting once again. I need real connection. I'm talking like putting on real pants, getting in my car, driving to see my friends, and enjoying them in person. It's a choice. Expectations are not something that happened to you. They are an active decision that you are fully in control of making and upholding. Upholding those expectations is where we grow. And I think that's where we learn to trust ourselves and our environment. But when we live in the shoulds, we are really choosing to be disconnected from our lives. We numb out and we languish in the pain. Nothing will change when we live in the shoulds. Midlife, I believe, is about choices and about being present and active as we look towards the next 40 years. I've said it once and I'll probably say it over and over again. Midlife doesn't necessarily have to be a crisis, but it is something you want to pay attention to. So with that, you guys, I am really glad that you joined me today on this journey. And I hope that these honest conversations help and they resonate with you. And I really encourage you to think about where you're shooting in your life. And I hope that this podcast can really be a place of connection as you dive into your own uncomfortableness. And as always, I look forward to many more midlife conversations with you.