I have been thinking a lot about limits and boundaries recently. All the times we don’t listen to our body and push on through. Knowing what a Yes, No and Maybe feels like in our body. In truth I feel like speaking about this now because I see it as an issue in almost everyone I work with and recently I have had a lot on my plate and my body has told me it has hit a limit and I had to listen to it. If you read my blog regularly you might have noticed I haven't written in almost a month. My body said no to writing.
I let my creative juices boil and brew in my time off until they could no longer be contained. So here we are.
Many of us have been taught to ignore the feelings and sensations inside. We override to keep on going. Some of us have been taught to do this in our families or in the cultures we grew up in, the cultures we work in. We often value people who persist and grind.
Modern society treats boundaries as an inconvenience and limits as a weakness to overcome. We glorify the grind of the worker who pulled an ‘all-nighter’, or the caregiver who selflessly gives until their last drop of energy. The athlete who plays through an injury. But both biologically and emotionally our body is constantly signalling to us where our limits lie. Learning to notice those sensation based cues can be one of the most empowering things we can do for ourselves.
So how do we know what a limit feels like? Well our body has a surveillance and alarm system in our autonomic nervous system. Before we consciously know that a boundary has been crossed in our thinking brain, our body already knows. It picks it up first. It shows up as a tight jaw, shallow breathing, a heavy chest or that feeling we all know in the pit of our stomach. There is an experience of friction when we override these cues and it can look like, pushing through physical exhaustion, swallowing resentment that givies us a tight jaw or sore throat, or maybe you have experienced freezing up when you want to say no.
The water doesn’t need a wall to know where is meets the land. The edge is constantly moving but it is still an edge. They have permeability, movement and relationship without losing distinction. The boundary is fluid.
We learn to override either in the family or cultural systems. Workplace cultures are notoriously bad for this - stretch goals anyone? Popular culture celebrates and hero worships high performers who override their human limits all the time. We frame exhaustion as dedication and self-abandonment as loyalty. Our economy and workplaces value what we produce over how we feel, and that conditions us to treat our bodies as machines rather than a living system that has hard thresholds. On that note, I find in workplaces when I am doing work around systemic change, many people have a mental model of the organisation as being a machine and they struggle to comprehend complex change. Well maybe if we started treating our bodies as the fluid, dynamic, organic, living systems that they are, the mental model would change?
What is the difference between limits and boundaries? Well this is how I see it.
A limit is internal, what your bodymind can handle and a boundary is external. It is our behaviour demonstrating how we protect that limit in our interactions with the world. To be able to set a boundary you first have to be able to tolerate feeling your own emotions and sensations in your body, including anger, guilt and anxiety. Because anger tells us when a boundary has been crossed, it is our body saying No. For many of us when we start to set boundaries we may feel guilt and anxiety, particularly around people who have taken advantage of us pushing ourselves in the past.
When we learn to tune into our emotions and sensations we begin to hear what the Yes, No and Maybe feel like inside of us. It becomes very clear. Also I find a maybe is just a No that takes a bit of time to be spoken by our body. That deep sense of inner knowing that you are developing and refining by doing this work, it knows that a maybe is a no.
Healthy boundaries are never rigid. They are fluid, always in relationship and can always be renegotiated. If they are too rigid we cannot let people in, we say no to opportunities that come our way that might benefit us.
One thing I notice in myself and also with clients, when we start setting boundaries with the people who have been on the receiving end of our over giving and over working they might not like it. You might lose a few friends in the process but you will gain so much for yourself in the long run.
We gain time for ourselves. It also often brings with it more energy, more creativity, more time to invest in the relationships that are important to us. Most importantly, it strengthens our connection with our deep inner knowing so we can become ourselves.
Boundaries aren’t just about saying no, they are about becoming more available to an authentic yes. Boundaries are not a luxury, they are an essential ingredient for a healthy bodymind and happy life.