Musterbation – The Self-defeating habit of making everything a “Must”

Musterbation

Musterbation is the name given to the unhelpful tendency that some people have to setting themselves and others perfectionist demands.

This often appears at work in someone feeling an internal set of drivers of must. These could include feeling that they must do perfectly at something to be validated and deem themselves competent at work. Or that they must complete a whole host of things. Or that they must work very long hours.

Similarly, it can appear as a set of outward “musts” as well. For example, someone might feel that their boss much always appreacite their contributions and, if they don’t, then the world will fall down. Alternatively, it could appear as believing that colleagues must always work late, or back you up in meetings, or say thank you.

Why does this matter?

When we impose these rigid and unhelpful framings and requirements on ourselves and others, they can often become self-defeating lowering both our perfomance and wellbeing.

One of the big impacts they have is to increase our levels of stess, anxiety and frustration. We feel constricted by these “musts” and when reality falls short of them, which is nearly always must at some point, then we feel emotional turmoil and distress. The pressure that comes with the must mindset can also lead to procrastination and other unhelpful behaviours that, combined with our stress, mean that we don’t do as well as we’d like at things, lowering our performance.

The upshot of all of these things, including the impaired job performance, can be decrased self-confidence and esteem, reduced job satisfaction, damaged relationships, damaged reputations and burnout, as well as the negative wellbeing experienced along the way.

What should we do about it?

Overcoming musterbation involves cultivating a more flexible and realistic mindset. Cognitive-behavioral techniques, such as challenging and reframing irrational beliefs, are said by some schools of thinking to be particularly effective. For example, replacing “I must never make mistakes” with “It’s okay to make mistakes; they are opportunities for learning” can alleviate pressure and promote resilience.

It’s also good to talk about these things with your colleagues and friends, and to consider getting some coaching or talking therapy if that could be helpful. Some organizations provide support for things like this, if it materially impacts people, through employee assistance programme.

At it’s core, a lot of behaviours like this appear to be linked to our underlying beliefs and the predictions our brains have learned to make about the world and the outcomes that result based on our different actions. Unpicking this can be difficult.

This topic links to many areas that we don’t cover, including Ellis’ work on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and the wider subject of perfectionism (Both links are to Wikipedia), which we know can be pretty unhelpful in the workplace, as well as in our own lives.

In terms of things we cover, we think that procrastination comes into this. We also think that emotional intelligence matters as does developing emotional intelligence.

Learning about Metamood, Metacognition, social pain and other factors can also really help inform our self-awareness and improve our wellbeing and our working and life experiences.

More recently, we’ve found Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions are Made” to be excellent.

We also think that acceptance our own human limitations and making peace with them has a great role to play in overcoming some of these challenges. We recommend Oliver Burkeman’s book “4000 weeks” as a great starting point for this.

In addition, we have many podcasts covering topics that you might find helpful including the below one exploring Psychological Flexibility could be interesting:

Musterbation is such a human thing to do, particularly here in the modern western world.

We all, in the words of Thomas the Tank Engine, want to be useful engines. We often deeply internalise the relationship between getting stuff done and feeling like we’re valued and contributing members of society. When we do this, we obviously want to do more of it, and that can lead to that sense of must.

In fact, this is very much part of our history as a wider society, being part of our cultural grammer, the understandings we don’t even really know that we hold about the world. Some trace this back to Martin Luther (e.g. Weber’s ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’).

Whatever our views on this, it surely can’t help that the world is constantly trying to get our attention to tell us about all the things we “must” do. And don’t get us started on those people posting daily routines that start at 4am and seem to be optimized beyond anything humanly possible. What jokes.

So where do we stand on all of this? Well, I guess we think it’s great to be aware of musterbation and we think the starting point of overcoming it lies in many of the tools we’ve outlined about.

A great mindshift can happen as soon as we realise that it doesn’t actually help up. If we can get to that stage, then perhaps it gets easier to move on from this unhelpful habit.

• Ellis, A. (1994). Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (Revised and Updated). Birch Lane Press.
• Beck, J. S. (2011). Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

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