How to Set and Maintain Healthy Boundaries to Take Back Control of Your Life

Boundaries impact our health, our relationships, our work, and so much more. But what are they? It might help to think of them in other terms, such as limits, parameters, outlines, or expectations. Boundaries can be complex, fluid, and ever-changing. They dictate how our relationships function and can be found on a spectrum. We can also have internal boundaries that determine how we interact with ourselves and how we heal. Often, boundaries are about safety and health.

Boundaries can be energetic, mental, physical, emotional, sexual, material, and temporal. Within these realms of boundaries, we can have harsh or rigid boundaries, healthy boundaries, and lenient or porous boundaries. Relationally, harsh boundaries might mean keeping others at a distance, while lenient boundaries often lead to enmeshment or an over-entwining with other people. It’s a hard balance to strike, finding our way towards integrated interdependence–the connected space between hyper-individualism that feels taxing on the body and complete codependence that can also create dis-ease in the body.

Healthy boundaries often aren’t modeled for us by adults in our families of origin and have not been at the forefront of societal values either. As James Baldwin says, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” We may be repeating cycles of unhealthy boundaries without knowing it and subscribing to the overworked, under-rested nature of culture. Often, we can tune into the body to better understand how to know when a boundary needs to be set.

It helps to look internally and to recognize if we may have feelings such as resentment, dread, discomfort, anxiety, tension, isolation, loneliness, or depletion before, during, or after an interaction with someone. For example, we may feel exhausted every time after hanging out with a certain friend. We may feel tense and resentful when someone texts us asking for help moving. Often these bodily sensations and emotions are signs that a boundary needs to be set with assertive, compassionate communication. 

Setting healthy expectations involves knowing what our needs, wants, values, and feelings are. Growing that level of self-awareness is a practice. On the outside, our friend's request to help them move might look like a friend simply asking for a favor; on the inside, it might feel like we have too much on our plate but don’t know how to say no. Also, one of the hardest parts of setting boundaries is knowing we may disappoint other people. We can slow down and take the time to ask ourselves, is it worth my long-term health and integrity to potentially disappoint someone in the short term?

In the example of helping our friend move, maybe we’ve set the limit and told them that we cannot help them. They may test that limit and continue to ask us on other days if we can help. Holding the limit or boundary is key in maintaining integrity, or matching how we feel on the inside to our actions on the outside. If for some reason we don’t hold the boundary, we can practice self-compassion and curiosity as to why we didn’t and try again next time. Cultivating self-acceptance and self-awareness are powerful aids in developing limit-setting capacities.

We all come into this world knowing what we need and asking for it from our caregivers. Unfortunately, systems, whether it be family systems, school systems, work systems, or more, encourage us to stray from this internal knowing. Fortunately, it is never too late to cultivate a connection to our intuition and a greater understanding of what is important to us internally and relationally. Know that it is natural to feel guilty for advocating for ourselves and setting boundaries at first. We may even perhaps feel undeserving or unworthy of having personal needs, but we are all deserving, each and every one of us.

Maybe, at this point, we have determined there are some boundaries that need to be set with people in our lives. The process of nonviolent communication, developed in the 1960s by psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg, can be a really helpful tool in approaching intention and expectation-setting conversations. It can also help to know that setting limits with loved ones actually helps strengthen and improve relationships both with ourselves and with others. Setting boundaries is counter-cultural and can be a process filled with discomfort at first, but once we start setting boundaries, it becomes very hard to go back to a boundary-less or over-boundaried existence.

We can use the principles of nonviolent communication by labeling our observations, feelings, needs, and requests. It may help to start small with someone you trust. For example, we might tell a loved one, “I’m noticing you’re often on your phone when we’re together. It makes me feel a little helpless and underappreciated. I really value our connection and your attention. Would you be willing to put your phone down more when we’re together?” Remember that how the other person responds is not our responsibility and their reaction is their own. Often people are reacting to feeling like a privilege is being taken away from them—it is normal for others to not like a boundary at first, especially if they benefited from a lack of boundaries. 

Practice is really key with this kind of deep, transformative, meaningful boundary work that can strengthen our relationship to ourselves and those around us. Engaging in this work with kindness towards oneself and a lens of curiosity instead of judgment can be incredibly helpful and grounding. Be gentle with yourself as you venture into the world of boundary-setting and have fun finding courage and empowerment in the process. 

References

Baldwin, J. (1961). Nobody knows my name. Vintage Books.

Fernández, J. (2018). Power over addiction: A harm reduction workbook for changing your relationship to drugs. Invisible Work Press. ‎

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Tawwab, N. G. (2021). Set boundaries, find peace: A guide to reclaiming yourself. Tarcher Perigee.