Healthy Boundaries and How to Set Them for Your Mental Health

​The need for healthy boundaries can often be felt long before they are understood and implemented.

It might explain why you feel stuck, overwhelmed, struggling with decision fatigue, attached to people, tired, doing things that you don’t want or align with, resentful, mentally tired, over-responsible for others, anxious about disappointing people and more.

Boundaries are often talked about in terms of how you spend your time with your family. However, personal boundaries go much deeper than this and are vital for your mental wellbeing and selfcare.

In this blog, we will look at health boundaries and how to set them for your mental health.

What are healthy boundaries?

Healthy boundaries protect your inner resources by placing limitations on your life. They help with things like:

• Physical, emotional and mental energy
• Physical, emotional and mental safety
• Time
• Values and alignment
• Sense of self

Boundaries define where you end, and others begin. They are about what you:

• Participate in
• Allow
• Tolerate
• Take responsibility for

The shift here for many people is how healthy boundaries help you take responsibility for yourself, rather than for everyone else. Which, if you’re here, is something you probably do a lot.

When you don’t have healthy boundaries, you end up responding to external demands in the world and neglecting your own internal needs.

Healthy boundaries and learning how to set them first means considering questions like:

• What is my responsibility vs. not mine?
• What behaviour feels okay for me and what doesn’t?
• How much of myself can I give without harming/neglecting myself/it having a cost to me?

Health boundaries can help with:

• Protecting your self-worth and values
• Preventing burnout and resentment
• Reducing stress and anxiety
• Allow for more authentic relationships (rather than relationships that are rooted in approval or transactions)

It is also important to note here that boundaries are not walls, but more like filters, protecting you from harm.

Boundaries and their connection to anxiety and people pleasing

It is important for any people-pleaser to know that it is often a survival strategy and a nervous system response, not a personality trait. It was something at some point you adapted to do to keep yourself safe.

Underlying this might be feelings of:

• Fear (of conflict, abandonment, rejection)
• Compliance (learned and rewarded for it earlier in life)
• Conditions (love or being liked = easy, agreeable, useful)

However, when you lack boundaries, you neglect a part of yourself.

These might have been something you learned along the way, with some experience where:

• Love felt conditional
• Conflict felt unsafe
• Approval was tied to self-worth
• Emotional needs were ignored or minimised

You begin to ask what the other person needs so that you can either stay safe, connected or liked, rather than what you need.

This can then result in:

• Difficulty saying no
• Guilt when resting
• Fear of letting down or disappointing others
• Hypervigilance (always scanning your environment, being super aware of everything, e.g. mood and tone shifts)
• Anxiety and stress around conflict or decisions

This is a strategy that you learned somewhere to keep you safe, so a boundary may seem even more threatening to a people-pleaser, as it will disrupt that.

How do you know you need boundaries?

Many people get stuck in this in-between stage, where they may not know (or want to admit) that boundaries are what they need, no matter how hard they are. There is a stage before realising, where someone may experience:

• Doing everything right > but feel exhausted
• Feel like they are being taken for granted, or invisible
• Resentment > then shame/guilt for feeling that way
• Anxiety without a clear reason why
• Disconnected from themselves
• Regretting saying yes to things
• Taking on things without thinking about them first or the impact
• Feeling responsible for others’ emotions

But still, internally, there is a feeling of:

• Needing to do more
• Just have to find the right thing
• Other people have it worse
• If I stop, then I will lose them

You see yourself as the problem.

The process of realising you need boundaries

​It is a hard place to be in when you begin to realise that you may need something to change, but you are not sure what.

​People tend to start considering boundaries when something along these lines occurs:

• Burnout/exhaustion/mentally drained
• A relationship becomes different or even unbearable
• Anxiety is high
• Someone crosses a line that just can no longer be ignored
• Therapy or coaching helps you to reflect / introduce new language
• Resentment builds
• Resentment turns into anger

The key shift that happens here is the move away from something being wrong with YOU and instead moves to how you are living.

Supporting the difficult shift to having healthy boundaries

When you are coming from a stuck or difficult situation, boundaries can feel like too much or too harsh. It is also important to note here that there are very different scenarios in life, so this is just for the ones where boundaries fit. It is important to consider what is toxic, abusive or any trauma involved.

Boundaries may be a gradual process. It can be helpful to look at what boundaries in a different way:

• Having limits
• Protecting yourself
• Not neglecting yourself
• If saying yes hurts or costs you, it might not be the best thing
• Discomfort doesn’t mean something is wrong

To then take this a step further, you can ask yourself some reflective questions, such as:

• What needs are going unmet?
• What are you afraid is going to happen if you say no?
• How would you feel if you didn’t have to justify yourself all the time?
• Who benefits from you saying yes/ignoring what you want?
• How much does it cost you when you say yes to something you don’t want to?

The purpose of creating healthy boundaries

Healthy boundaries can be seen as:

• Staying connected to yourself
• Self-respect
• Information
• Nervous system regulation
• Protection of time, energy, emotional capacity, identity, and safety

They are not:

• Abandoning
• Punishment to you or others

Healthy boundaries and how to set them

Healthy boundaries don’t necessarily start with you walking around saying no to everyone and everything.

They start with self-awareness.

Start to notice within your day where you may be feeling:

• Resentment
• Anxiety
• Guilt

These might be signals of:

• A crossed boundary
• Taking on too much responsibility
• Conflicts with self-care and what you have learned to do automatically

Here are some questions to help you:

• Where do you feel obligation instead of choice?
• What makes you feel stressed, hot, anxious, like it is going against what you want, but you can’t say no? (and essentially overriding your body’s signals)
• What can sometimes feel like “too much” (mentally, physically, emotionally), but you tolerate it?

Boundaries are discovered through these kinds of signals and information.

Important things to consider with boundaries

• You don’t have to earn love, safety or rest
• Learning boundaries is not selfish

Boundaries help you to become more present in your own life.

If you want to deep dive into boundaries with some prompts to help you take action on what you have identified and want to change, download the free workbook to support you.

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