Before you read another word, think about the rules you’ve made for your own life. Maybe you have to hit a certain career milestone by 35. Maybe getting divorced would mean you failed. Maybe disappointing your parents still feels somehow forbidden, even though you’re old enough to have lower-back pain and a favorite brand of trash bags.
Psychologist Albert Ellis had a name for this: “musterbation.” A ridiculous word for a very familiar behavior. In his work on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, Ellis argued that people make themselves miserable by turning preferences into demands. You don’t just want to succeed. You must succeed. You don’t hope people approve of you. They have to. And when life refuses to cooperate, one setback can now feel like proof that you’ve screwed up as a person.
Those rules usually start early. CBT psychologist Jeffrey Nevid, writing recently in Psychology Today, points to childhood, when life is full of adults telling you what you must and must not do. Brush your teeth. Be polite. Don’t hit your brother. Then adulthood arrives, and some of that language sticks around where it probably shouldn’t.
‘Musterbation’ Might Be Making Your Life Harder Than It Needs to Be
You must own a house by a certain age. You must be married before 30. You must be doing better than your siblings. You must make something impressive out of every year you’re alive. No one necessarily sat you down and handed you these rules. Some have just been hanging around so long that they feel like facts.
Ellis’s advice was to ease up on the word “must.” Want the promotion. Want the marriage. Want people to think highly of you. Just don’t make any of those things a requirement for feeling good about yourself. Jobs disappear, relationships end, and people get disappointed. That’s just life. You don’t need some private rule telling you that a setback means you’re a screw-up.
Approval might be the nastiest version of this. If you believe everyone important has to like you, then your self-esteem is permanently on loan to other people. Marcus Aurelius was complaining about this nearly two thousand years ago: “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” The man was emperor of Rome and was still worried about what everybody thought of him, so at least you’re in decent company.
The trick is noticing when a want has quietly become a must. Once you catch it, the question becomes much simpler: Who said?
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