What Are Boundaries?
Boundaries are invisible psychological and emotional lines that we draw with ourselves and others as we interact with the world. They determine what we will or won’t do, and what we will or won’t accept from others.
Boundaries are not intended to shut others out or to become rigid and distant from others in our lives. Rather, boundaries are intended to help us manage our energy wisely, protect our survival, and promote our well-being and evolution throughout the course of our lives.
Boundaries Help Us Manage Our Energy Wisely
Managing our energy with boundaries is actually an act of humility because we admit to ourselves and to others that we are limited human beings. We wake up each day with a limited amount of energy to offer to the world. We cannot be everything for everyone all of the time. And that is perfectly alright.
Using boundaries to manage our energy requires that we decide what’s important to us, what really matters in the grand scope of our lives, and what our priorities are. Then, we put in place boundaries to help us direct our energy toward the things that do matter and push aside or say ‘no’ to the things that don’t.
This is about embracing quality over quantity. It’s about going deeper in the few things we do choose to do, instead of spreading ourselves thin over many things. It’s about showing up as our best selves for the things that we choose to care about and choose to give our energy to.
Boundaries Help Protect Our Survival and Well-Being
When it comes to protecting our survival and well-being it’s about understand that as humans, we have limits and thresholds. Beyond those limits and thresholds, we can experience harm or potentially even destruction.
When we put boundaries in place, it’s about honoring those limits and thresholds. It’s about determining how far others can or can not go with us, or how far we will or won’t go with others. Beyond those limits and thresholds — or if people disregard a boundary we put in place — we ultimately choose to leave the interaction or the relationship because staying can cause us harm.
This is not about controlling the behavior of others because we can’t actually do that. This is really about having guidelines for how we will take responsibility for our own self-preservation. It’s about managing ourselves in interactions and relationships and pulling out of them if people cause us harm. We still should communicate our boundaries to people, but if they cross them, it’s on us to leave.
Boundaries Go Both Ways
We don’t just set boundaries with others, we also set them with ourselves. Boundaries with ourselves look like a) choosing which thoughts we will or won’t indulge, b) what kinds of behaviors we will or won’t engage in, c) how we will or won’t speak to ourselves and others, and d) what we plan to do with our emotions as they arise.
Boundaries go both ways: They are about managing our interactions with ourselves and our interactions with the external world.
Why Are Boundaries Important?
Individually, they promote our mental health well-being by protecting us from the anxiety of taking too much on and from becoming overwhelmed or burnt out.
Relationally, they ensure that we show up as our best selves in all of our interactions with others. They also set the standard for how others will interact with us and show up for us.
Collectively, they promote more peaceful and harmonious societies. Imagine if hundreds of people in your community — or millions of people in your society — were all working on having healthy boundaries and good emotion regulation skills. That would be a very different society than we live in today.
Boundaries matter. They matter individually. They matter relationally. They matter collectively.
A Final Note
As we work on ourselves and practice healthy boundaries with ourselves and others, we show up differently in the world. This eventually inspires others to change and to rise to the standard. By doing our own inner work, we slowly but surely shift the collective.
As cheesy as it sounds, we end up being the change that we wish to see in the world. As we change ourselves and then show up in the world as evolved beings, we inspire evolution in all of those around us as well.
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