Transcript
Jemma Spag (0:00)
Foreign this is Open Mind. Welcome to a brand new week. Here is your Mantra I Honor My Boundaries. I'm your host, Jemma Speg, and I'm here to guide you toward a more centered and fulfilling life. Each week I'll share personal stories and insights that are focused on a specific mantra, plus journal prompts and a weekly challenge for all of us to help put it into action. Think of Mantra as your mental reset button, a way to stay centered as you juggle work, school, family and whatever else life throws at you. Each mantra is a simple, powerful phrase you can repeat to refocus your thoughts and bring a little bit of calm into your day. It's a small tool with a big impact, clearing your mind, lifting your mood, and rooting you in the present. If you've listened to my other show, the psychology of your 20s, you'll know I'm all about those little nuggets of insight that make a big impact. So whether you're looking for some extra inspiration or you're trying to ground yourself amidst the chaos, you have come to the right place at OpenMind. We value your support. Share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow Mantra to help others discover the show. Bonus points if you post what you're listening to on your story. I'd love to see which episode is resonating with you this week. For more exclusive content, monthly bonus episodes, early access, and ad free listening, join our Open Mind plus community on Apple Podcasts. This week I'll catch you up on what's been going on in my life and then we'll dive into today's Mantra I Honor My Boundaries. This is all about recognizing your limits, respecting your needs, and creating a life that truly supports your wellbeing. Stick around. We'll be right back after this short pause.
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Jemma Spag (3:07)
Welcome back. We're going to get into this week's mantra in just a few. But before we do, it's time for my highs, lows and who knows my favorite part of the week. I've got a who knows for you guys today. It's a movie that I watched last night with Tom and it really relates to this episode. It's the movie One Day with Anne Hathaway. I think they also made it into like a miniseries maybe last year. Firstly, absolutely gut wrenching soul destroying tears were shed. But honestly, it has like such a beautiful depiction of boundaries. In one of the scenes where I'm not really spoiling anything, but the two main characters go out for dinner and one of them is behaving, behaving really, really badly. And if you've watched this movie, you know what scene I'm referring to. And the other character is just puts up this boundary and it's just so assertive and amazing. And I was watching it thinking about the fact that come today I would be recording this episode and it was just such a fantastic depiction. I think actually their whole relationship is such a good depiction of boundaries. So if you want a movie to watch tonight that is going to make you feel, I think every single human emotion, anger, joy, happiness, sadness, grief, whatever it is, One Day is the movie for you. And it was like peak. Anne Hathaway, I guess she's still at her peak actually. So it was just Anne Hathaway and it was amazing. Okay, movie recommendations aside, let's get into it. It's time for this week's mantra. I honor my boundaries. There is a lot of discussion about the importance of boundaries, today's kind of life and today's media world online. In our personal relationships, it's something that most certainly has really become an important part of relationship discussions and an important part of our psychobabble. With that being said, I think sometimes people get them wrong. Of course they do. But sometimes people get the meaning of a boundary wrong and they think it means something that it doesn't. Here is my clearest definition of boundaries. Boundaries are guidelines for how you want to be treated. And boundaries are actually a sign of love and deep respect for another person. They're not a demand. They are most certainly not controlling. They are a request for your benefit that someone can choose to follow or not follow. That's their prerogative, but which you are asking for yourself. And you're saying to this person, this is how I want to be loved. This is how I want to be treated. And I care enough about this relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship, a friendship, a relationship with a family member, even a coworker. You're saying, I want this to work. I care about this enough. I need to give you some rules and some information to treat me better, to love me better, so that this can work. I do see a lot of confusion sometimes that boundaries have gone too far. Boundaries are just people who are being dramatic. Absolutely not. It's not dramatic to say this current behavior or situation is causing me friction, is causing us friction. And I don't want that in our relationship anymore because I care about you. Here are the three steps in my mind to setting a boundary. The first is to evaluate. The second is to communicate. The third is to honour. A boundary is not a boundary if you aren't clear about it or you don't articulate it because you're not giving the other person the opportunity to comply and respect what they don't know exists. And it's also not a boundary if there is not a consequence. Some people really struggle with the consequent part of it. Because it's one thing to say I don't want to be treated this way. It's another thing to enforce that principle. But it's what gives your words credibility. And it's also what teaches people what's not okay. People need their actions to have outcomes, to learn from them. It's a pretty basic principle in psychology. All you're doing is helping them learn and teaching them. I understand as well there's quite a great deal of guilt that comes with enforcing a boundary. And we're going to talk about that just in a second. But moving back to that first component of our equation for a boundary. Evaluate, communicate, honour. People often ask me, when do I know a boundary needs to be set? I think you feel it in your body before your mind understands it. The best way to notice if a boundary needs to be set is the feeling of discomfort, is the feeling of knowing something isn't right, knowing that you don't feel okay in this situation, Knowing that you are uncomfortable emotions and reactions are often felt in the body before they are processed in the mind. Our mind has so much information to filter through every single second, but our body is where we feel emotions and feelings and instincts more automatically. So if you feel uncomfortable with a weird coworker, or having certain discussions with a family member, or how your boyfriend has treated you, that's where a boundary needs to be put in place. So once you have identified what the boundary is, you next have to tell someone. The easiest way to tell someone is immediately after they have performed the behavior. Of course, actually, anytime is the best time to tell someone your boundary. I'm going to take back what I just said. But the second best time is right after something has happened because you are able to say, hey, look, this is the behavior and I'm going to tell you how I'm feeling right now. And the distance between the action and the consequence, and therefore the outcome is smaller and there's more learning that can take place. It also prevents the, oh, give me an example of when that happened. Tell me a time when you felt uncomfortable. That can sometimes happen when you set a boundary. In hindsight, setting a boundary in the moment, it takes so much courage. But I think it has a much better outcome. Let's talk about enforcing the boundary. Enforcing a boundary looks different, but essentially it needs to involve a consequence. Something is taken away or something unpleasant happens as a result. Perhaps you stop doing favors for that person. You stop inviting them to things, to events, to places, you stop giving them access to you, you stop talking to them, you stop engaging with them, you unfollow them on social media, you stop replying to messages. Something of the sort needs to occur. Now, I spoke before about the guilt that surrounds this, and let me say, guilt is probably the first emotion you're going to feel in response to honoring your boundaries. Because for many of us, we have been raised as good, well behaved children. The fact is, is that up until the mid 2000s, really what a lot of people wanted was for their children to be obedient and to have good manners and to be inoffensive. And that was sometimes more important than a child having agency. What that meant was that we never really did get the skills to stand up for ourselves, because standing up for ourselves was seen as aggressive or arrogant. And so there definitely is an innate people pleasing instinct in every single one of us. And it comes down to, I will be more likable if I let people walk all over me. I will be more likable if I don't kick Up a fuss. The thing is, you might be more likable. You're also going to be less happy. Consistently disregarding your own boundaries can have serious long term effects on our mental and emotional health. It can lead to chronic stress, burnout in the workplace, anxiety, depression, even physical health issues. When we repeatedly say yes to things that drain us, when we don't know our limits or people overstep our limits, we reinforce a pattern of self neglect that can really erode our sense of self worth and autonomy. There's two studies I actually always quote when I'm trying to convince people that boundaries are absolutely necessary, not just for you, but for the relationship as well. The first is a study from 2021 and it showed that consistently ignoring personal boundaries led to heightened anxiety and depressive symptoms within participants. The second study from 2020 looked at the effect of loose or lack of boundaries on relationship success between couples and friendships. Let me just say a lack of boundaries and positive relationships were not positively correlated. In fact, not having boundaries actually meant that more resentment took place, more frustration. A lot of individuals felt that they were taken advantage of. And actually in a couple of cases, a real power imbalance developed over time. The relationships without boundaries were also more likely to fail. So no one is being helped. I want to remind you, someone who loves you and wants you in their life will have no issue correcting their behavior. Someone who just wants to do what they want because that's truly what it is. It's arrogance and it's stubbornness. They are going to make you feel like you're the problem. You're not. They may also make you feel like you are too sensitive, too dramatic, as if their way of seeing things is the only acceptable way. But if it matters to you, I want to say this loud and clear. It should really matter to them. I can't imagine my boyfriend or my friends or a family member saying to me, this makes me feel terrible. Please stop doing it. And still doing it and not caring that every time I do, they suffer. Literally watching them suffer. Consider how someone who claims to love you or respect you could do that. This topic definitely, it has a lot of depth, it has a lot of nuance. And this mantra really does invite us to explore not just the boundaries we set, but the reasons behind them and the impact that they have on their lives. Coming up, we are going to get personal and I want to dive even deeper into this topic. I'm going to talk about how learning to honour my boundaries has been a journey for me. I'll share some stories about times where I've struggled to set clear limits, and also my aha moments when I really didn't understand their importance and significance. So stay tuned. We'll be right back after this brief pause.