Why Poor Boundaries Aren't Just Bad for Your Mind
It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to keep your Aunt Maisy out of the intimate details of your personal life or avoid taking on yet another project at work or a committee board position. The often overlooked fact is that poor boundaries don’t just wreak havoc on your mind… they’re also terrible for your body.
Consider the chain of events. Someone asks you a question you’d like to say ‘no’ to or avoid altogether. Rather than saying something like “Thanks so much for asking, and that’s not something I’d like to discuss.” or “Wow, what a great project! Why don’t you ask Chuck if he can take it on right now?” you take on the questions. Hemming and hawing around an answer or just saying “Sure, I can do that.”
Then what?
Well, you have to deal with the fallout. Aunt Maisy has a very clear, very loud opinion of your choice to not have children right now. You’ve said yes, and now you’ve got an extra 10 hours a week of work to add to the 60 hours you’re already doing.
In both cases, what’s happening is a stress response. As that dreaded question or request is coming at you, you’re brain signals the rest of your body with a neon flashing WARNING sign. While your conscious mind knows you’re not in immediate physical danger, your body doesn’t know the difference between Aunt Maisy stress or running from a bear stress. What it knows is that it needs to mobilize resources to keep you ALIVE.
So, more blood sugar is released into your bloodstream to make sure your muscles have the energy to start moving. Your blood flow is shifted so that more of it goes to your brain and muscles. Your adrenal glands start releasing adrenaline and cortisol. Your brain clicks on the most primal areas that will guide you away, just away from this hazardous situation.
In the case of Aunt Maisy, if you only see here at Thanksgiving or Christmas once per year, this isn’t a huge deal. You maybe aren’t excited about going, mount an acute stress response that then resolves once you’re comfy at home again in your PJs with your parakeet.
Meanwhile, if you live with Aunt Maisy, and she’s always got something to say about your life choices, well, that stress response isn’t going away any time soon. Well, at least until you learn to set some Artful Boundaries. And that has some SERIOUS long-term health consequences.
Three Major Physical Effects of Poor Boundaries
There are some effects of poor boundaries many folks are already aware of: overwhelm, frustration, anger, irritation, anxiety, depression…These are all the emotional/psychological effects. It’s impossible, however, to separate your mind from your body. And if your mind is suffering from the chronic stress induced by poor boundaries, you can be darn sure your body is too.
Sleep
Sleep is, in my opinion, the foundation of health. While you’re awake, your brain is churning away tons and tons of information that comes in from your senses and your internal organs. It’s reworking information and putting it together so that you can make sense of the world around you and also communicate in a semi-intelligent way. As your brain is doing so much hard work, it naturally generates waste products. There’s nothing good or bad about this, it’s just the way the system works.
While you’re asleep, your brain is largely at rest. It has the chance to clean up and clear away the clutter of the day. Think about a household of four while everyone is busy and working at home. Breakfast happens, doesn’t get totally put away. Then someone wanders in for a morning snack and leaves some crumbs on the counter. Lunch happens in a rush, and the dishes are left in the sink. Somebody else wanders in for an afternoon cup of tea and forgets to toss away the tea bag. Then dinner is made and enjoyed. After dinner, there’s finally time for everyone to pitch in and help clean up the space. The dishes are washed and put away, the food is properly stowed, counters and table get wiped down. This is what your brain does while you’re asleep. It washes up and gets all that waste cleared out.
What do boundaries have to do with sleep?
Well, if you’re not setting good, Artful Boundaries, chances are your sleep is interrupted. Either you’re thinking about that think Aunt Maisy said and how you wish you’d responded differently, or you’re just not going to bed with enough hours left in the night because you’re up working on that extra project you said yes to by accident.
When you don’t get good quality sleep (long enough and deep enough), your brain cannot do what it needs to do in order to keep you up, running, smart, sharp, and healthy. It just can’t. So before you tell me how you “only need 5 hours” let me stop you and say, no, no you don’t. Unless you’re part of the tiny, tiny percentage of folks who naturally don’t need a full 8 hours, you need a full 8 hours.
Without adequate sleep, you’re not going to be at your best cognitively. You’re going to forget things, leave things where they ought not be, and not be able to be present during the day for those things that really do matter to you. Poor sleep — especially in later adulthood — is also linked to increased risk of dementia (read more on that here and here).
So, without personal boundaries like a regular bedtime and interpersonal boundaries to back that up (saying ‘no’ where and when you need and want to), you’re setting yourself up for some potentially harmful and heartbreaking effects down the road.
Blood Sugar
Speaking of sleep, let’s talk blood sugar. Approximately 1 in 10 people in the United States has type 2 diabetes (T2D), according to the CDC. This is a (reversible) disease that, if not appropriately managed, can cause loss of eyesight, limb, and life. It’s a big deal, and unnecessarily common.
While, of course, food and exercise habits have a massive role to play in the development and course of T2D, a couple of other inputs also matter. One is sleep. There’s evidence that inadequate sleep correlates with the development of T2D, to the tune of 2x more folks who don’t sleep well have T2D than those who get adequate sleep. As of this writing, I’m unclear about the mechanism of why exactly this is, but my guess is that it has to do with hormonal imbalances that often go hand in hand with both disordered sleep, chronically elevated stress levels, along with lifestyle habits that don’t leave room for exercise or a healthful diet.
When you’re in a state of chronic stress — say, if you’re on 3 committees in addition to being a full time parent and having a full time job — your body makes some changes in an effort to make sure you have the resources you need.
Remember, your body cannot tell the difference between life-threatening, bear-chasing stress or taking on too many commitments at once.
So, when you’re chronically overwhelmed, your body wants to make sure you have enough resource to run away or fight if you need to. For the muscles and brain, that means having enough sugar ready to go. Which means that blood sugar levels increase over time with chronic stress. Of course this is a highly simplified view of the situation, but, in essence, the combination of a Standard American Diet (high in refined carbohydrates and high in fat) with poor sleep with ongoing stressors equates to an almost certainty of T2D, sooner or later.
As if that weren’t enough to kick you into gear about taking the extra commitments of your plate, it’s worth noting that Alzheimer’s disease is, in some circles, known as Type 3 Diabetes. This is because T2D is a result of insulin resistance — i.e. although insulin is present, the cells of the body are unable to respond to it and move sugar into the cells. It’s thought that this metabolic hang-up contributes to the development of the plaques in the brain that eventually lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Whereas T2D refers to high blood sugar due to insulin resistance in the muscles, dementia is essentially an insulin resistance of the brain.
Blood Pressure
As if all that weren’t enough, there are also profound consequences of poor boundaries and chronic stress for your cardiovascular system.
You see, when your body is kicked into its ‘flight or fight response’ as it is when you’re stressed out, in an effort to get resources where they need to be so you can flee or fight (i.e. getting sugar to muscles), your body shifts to increase blood flow. Because of an increased release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands, heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, and blood is directed away from digestion and toward the skeletal muscles. [Note: this is part of why many folks who experience anxiety and chronic stress also tend to have more sensitive gastro-intestinal systems]
In the short term, this is tremendously helpful — the blood is flowing, the muscles have access to everything they need to get moving (fast) at a moments notice.
Over the long term (years), however, such increases put you at risk for things like high blood pressure and stroke. If you couple the cardiovascular changes with the shifts we’ve seen above, particularly high blood sugar, you also end up with things like high triglyceride and lipid levels in the blood, which increase risk of heart attack. It’s really not nothing that you learn to set Artful Boundaries as soon as possible!
Certainly there’s much more we could dive into here, but I’ve addressed the more common chronic diseases we’re dealing with in the United States. Like I said above, about 1 in 10 folks in the US has T2D, whether or not they know it. Meanwhile, about 1 in 4 (!!) deaths in the US is due to heart disease. WOW.
Of course, lifestyle factors matter — are you eating well? Sleeping enough? Moving your body regularly? Enjoying social time? Having some fun?
Most folks don’t do these things because ‘there isn’t time.’
But guess what?
You’re in control of how much time you do or don’t have to devote to activities you deem most important and enjoyable.
If you feel out of control of your time, and at the mercy of the requests of the people around you, it’s time you learned to set some Artful Boundaries to reclaim not just your physical or mental health, but your life!
Can’t wait to see you there with us!