Should Statements: The Tyranny of the Shoulds and How to Rewrite It

About this tool

Should statements are the habit of stating preferences as rules and then measuring yourself and everybody else against them. I should be further along by now. I should not need this much sleep. They should have noticed. It should not be this hard. David Burns listed should statements among the ten cognitive distortions in Feeling Good in 1980, and the reason he singled them out is that the word carries a hidden claim: not that something would be better, but that it is required, and that failing it is a kind of offense. The full set of distortions sits on our Cognitive Distortions and Thinking Errors page.

Two older thinkers got there first, from different directions. Karen Horney, in Neurosis and Human Growth in 1950, described what she called the tyranny of the should: a person builds an idealized image of who they must be, then lives under its demands, and the gap between the real self and that image produces self-hatred rather than motivation. Albert Ellis, building rational emotive behavior therapy from the 1950s onward, made rigid demands the center of his model and gave them a deliberately rude name, musturbation, for the habit of turning wants into musts. Our REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) page covers his full framework.

Ellis argued that almost all of the demands people make come in three directions. Pointed at yourself: I must do well and be approved of, or I am worthless. Pointed at other people: they must treat me fairly and considerately, or they are bad and deserve blame. Pointed at the world: conditions must be comfortable and must give me what I want, or life is unbearable. He thought the emotional consequence followed reliably from the direction: demands on the self produce anxiety, guilt and depression; demands on others produce anger and resentment; demands on the world produce self-pity and what he called low frustration tolerance.

That directional rule is the most useful thing on this page, because it means the feeling tells you where the should is pointing. Guilt that arrives after an ordinary evening usually traces back to a rule about what you should have produced. Resentment that builds in a friendship usually traces back to a rule about what the other person should have offered without being asked. The flat, cheated feeling about a week of weather, traffic and admin usually traces back to a rule that things should be easier than they are. None of those feelings is wrong. They are reports about a rule being broken, and the rule is the part that can be examined.

A should is not the same as a value, and this is where most of the work happens. Values describe what you want to move toward and can be acted on at any size, in any condition, starting now. Shoulds describe a bar you either clear or fail, and failing is the common outcome, which is why they generate so much guilt for so little behavior change. Acceptance and commitment therapy makes this split explicit, and our ACT Values Worksheet is a way of writing out the direction rather than the bar. The practical difference: being a thoughtful friend is a value, while I should have called her by now is a rule you are currently failing.

The rewrite is simple to describe and strange to do. Take the sentence and replace the should with a preference and a reason: I would prefer to be further along, because the work matters to me. Then ask what the preference actually asks for in the next day or week, and write that one action. Nothing has been lowered. What has gone is the accusation in the middle of the sentence, and with it the pull to defend yourself or to give up entirely. Ellis called this the move from demanding to preferring, and he was blunt that it takes repetition rather than insight: the sentence has to be rewritten many times before the new version is the one that arrives first.

The evidence picture is mixed and worth stating carefully. Rational emotive behavior therapy has been studied for decades, and a 2018 systematic review and meta-analysis by Daniel David and colleagues, covering fifty years of trials, found medium effects against other interventions at the end of treatment: d = 0.58 on symptom outcomes and d = 0.70 on irrational beliefs. The same authors cautioned that the included studies were highly heterogeneous in quality, and that higher study quality predicted smaller effects, which is the pattern you expect when weak designs inflate results. The narrower claim that rigid demands cause emotional disturbance, rather than accompanying it, rests mainly on cross-sectional and analog work.

The pattern shows up most clearly where standards and self-worth have been welded together: in perfectionism, where the bar moves up each time it is cleared, and in the exhausted competence that keeps a person delivering while feeling permanently behind. If high standards paired with a constant sense of falling short is familiar, the Perfectionism Test screen asks about that directly. Shoulds aimed outward show up in long friendships and marriages where nobody has said what they want out loud, and in work relationships where an unspoken rule has been quietly broken for months.

What a should rewrite is not: it is not permission to stop caring, and it is not the suggestion that standards are the problem. High standards are not in themselves the problem; it is the self-condemnation attached to missing them that tracks distress, which is the distinction Randy Frost's work on the separate dimensions of perfectionism keeps finding. Some shoulds are also real obligations with real consequences, and the honest rewrite of those is not a preference but a commitment with a date on it. The test is whether the sentence is pointing at an action or at a verdict about a person.

If the shoulds are old enough that they feel like facts rather than sentences, a sheet will show you how many there are and not much more. That is normal, and it is the point at which a therapist is useful: rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy both work on these directly, including the beliefs about worth underneath them, and you can search the Psychology.com directory to find someone who does. The printable below holds the three directions, the examples, the rewrite steps and a sheet to work through on paper.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked Ellis's three directions of demandingness and Horney's tyranny of the should against their own texts, and the outcome claims against the cited 2018 review.

References

1. Burns DD. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. New York: William Morrow; 1980.
2. Horney K. Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization. New York: W. W. Norton; 1950.
3. Ellis A. Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. New York: Lyle Stuart; 1962.
4. Ellis A, Harper RA. A New Guide to Rational Living. Hollywood, CA: Wilshire Book Company; 1975.
5. David D, Cotet C, Matu S, Mogoase C, Stefan S. 50 years of rational-emotive and cognitive-behavioral therapy: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Clin Psychol. 2018;74(3):304-318. doi:10.1002/jclp.22514
6. Frost RO, Marten P, Lahart C, Rosenblate R. The dimensions of perfectionism. Cognit Ther Res. 1990;14(5):449-468. doi:10.1007/BF01172967
7. Hayes SC, Strosahl KD, Wilson KG. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press; 2012.

Should Statements FAQ