Having A Personal Boundary; To Protect Your Mental Health And Sanity

For the sake of your mental health, and sanity, you need to create boundaries. When dealing with people and they know that there are limits they should not cross, they will be careful how they deal with you. If not, then everything will just be allowed and you may end up hurting yourself. The truth is that you cannot try to please every single person without displeasing yourself. Having healthy boundaries will foster respect, builds confidence, and then create conditions necessary for self-care.

In life, you have to understand and respect personal boundaries. That is, if you do not want a certain limit to be crossed, then you do not have to create what will make it to be crossed. For example; you cannot prevent people from using your treasured vessel to pack trash when you are the one that is actually starting to use it to pack trash. What they see you do to yourself is almost exactly the same way they will respond to you. In addition, you should also not cross other people's boundaries so as not to create room for them to also reciprocate and cross your own. If you want others to respect the boundaries that you have created, then you have to also respect the ones created by others.

I have come to realise that having healthy boundaries allows you to better relate and communicate your preferences and needs without having to feel guilty about them. Simply put; it helps you to say a conscious "no" to the things that you do not desire without feeling guilty or needing to explain yourself. On the same hand, it also helps you to say a conscious "yes" to the things that you prefer and stand by it. This will enable people to know how to deal and relate with you. You do not have to bend or relax your boundary for anyone if you do not have to. Rather, they should adjust and fit into it if they want you.

There are many benefits and importance of setting boundaries. The first one is that it improves your self-esteem. If you want to protect your self-esteem and your self-worth, then you have to explicitly and clear state what you should allow or not allow in your life. If people know that you will not allow disrespect, they will treat you with respect. Do not settle for something less simply because you feel it does not matter. Trust me, what you overlook today as "it does not matter" may come back tomorrow to haunt you. So you have to start on time to build boundaries. In addition to increasing one's self-esteem, setting boundaries also helps you to become a better person and to focus more on improving yourself, and also makes you to take more responsibilities for your life.

After seeing all these benefits, the next point of call is the step to create boundaries. To set boundaries, you have to learn to communicate you preferences clearly without vagueness or ambiguity, so that someone will not have an excuse to contravene it. To make it firmer, you should use a direct speech in first-person pronoun, not a reported speech. For example; it will be better to say "I will be busy by 7pm because I need to work on my project," than saying "7pm may not be too convenient." The first statement drives home a very strong statement and makes the person know that you have created a form of boundary on that day by 7pm and will not entertain distractions.

Another step towards setting boundaries is consistency. If you keep breaking your boundaries or relaxing your limits for people, others will see it as an act of unseriousness and they will not even take serious. This is why you have to be firm with your actions. Know when to be serious and take responsibility for your actions. After all, you need to protect your sanity and your mental health, not to impress or please people who may not even care much about you.

The last point is that you need to review your boundaries from time to time. Inasmuch as you should be firm, you should also be dynamic enough to know that things change. So know when to adjust yourself and your limits. You may need to improve on the boundaries or even totally create new ones while abandoning the old ones. So the bottom line is to try to balance up between being firm and being dynamic.

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