- “Know your limits”, you’ve been told. But what does that mean?
- We are often given this advice without any direction as to how to do this, and many of us are operating outside of our limits without awareness
- Signs you might be outside your limits: Irritability, anger, resentment towards others, a desire for someone to rescue you from having to acknowledge a limit you may may not want to be a limit.
- Sometimes it’s more like a shutting down where we retreat away. Sometimes you may find yourself avoiding.
- Many of us hit limits faster when we are tired, hungry, in pain, or scared for our safety (including both immediate threatening dangers, and more subtle /ongoing / systemic dangers, like feeling unable to provide for our families or feeling unsafe in our communities).
- We don’t always get to determine our behavior based on where our limits are, but it’s always helpful to know when you’ve hit a limit so you can take steps to take care of yourself and pause (when possible) important decisions and activities
- If you read this post and find that you are in this type of place a lot of the time / most of the time consider getting professional help, you may be struggling with anxiety or depression.
“Know your limits.” An easy piece of advice to give, and often a hard piece of advice to enact, especially if you haven’t had role models who knew and respected their limits, and who taught you how to do the same.
If you are someone who has a hard time with recognizing and respecting your limits (and you may not know this is you until you read further) it may help to consider that they may not be where you want them to be, or believe they “should” be.
Sometimes accepting our limits requires making sacrifices.
We can work towards developing awareness of our personal cues that we’ve passed our limits. It can look at feel different for everyone, so this will have to be a personal journey for each person to identify their particular signs. Here are some tips to help you get started on working towards learning where your limits are.
For many of us we get irritable or “snap”. We might say things we regret or start thinking repeated thoughts that are hard to stop (called ruminating), about how upset we are with ourselves or other people.
For others of us we shut down, fall asleep, zone out, or numb out.
Sometimes we look for someone to rescue us so that we don’t have to acknowledge a limit that we wish were not a limit, “maybe she’ll break up with me so I don’t have to”, “maybe I’ll just get fired so it could be over”, “If only he cleaned all this up then I could take a break”.
Sometimes it looks like tunnel vision where it becomes hard for us to problem solve or see the big picture. We can get fixated on one particular perspective or solution when we’re in this mindset.
If you feel the way I’ve described more often than not this is a cue that you may be depressed or anxious. I’d encourage you to seek out professional help.
We don’t always get to determine our behavior based on our limits, but we can work towards recognizing when we’re “not really here” so that we can hold off on important tasks or decisions, take breaks, ask for help, or at a minimum work on taking a few deep breaths and coaching ourselves through a difficult time.
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Notes:
- Helpful questions to ask: “Is my behavior and thinking in line with how I genuinely feel, my values, and my priorities?” Do I feel like my emotions are out of control?”
- This post has connections to other posts I’ve written, specifically: we hit our limits more easily if our shoulds outweigh our wants, we can look out for increasing internalizing or externalizing when we’ve hit a limit, and we want to offer ourselves compassion as we work towards the process of learning what our limits are and learning how to accept and honor them.
- Realizing you’ve hit a limit and aren’t sure what to say to others if you need a moment or to return to an important topic? How about “I need a minute”, “I’m not feeling well, I’m going to need to bow out”, “Can we circle back to this? I’m having trouble thinking through this right now”, “ok, I’m putting myself in a time out, I’ll be back in a bit”.
- This is not about perfection. No one can be perfectly “available” at all times, but the idea here is to work towards building that awareness of when we really don’t have it in us to be mostly there in a way that aligns with our values, our priorities, and with capacity to manage our feelings.