I should be further along by now.
Than what? Set by whom? The sentence carries a standard, a judge and a verdict, and it never names any of the three. It just delivers the result.
What they are
Burns describes the mechanism as motivational: “You try to motivate yourself with shoulds” and shouldn’ts, as if you were someone who had to be coerced into doing things [1]. His verdict on how well that works is blunt — should statements “generate a lot of unnecessary emotional turmoil” [1].
The detail worth keeping is the one most summaries skip. The direction matters:
“The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration” [1].
Same grammar, two completely different results. I should have handled that better produces guilt. They should have told me produces resentment. If you’ve wondered why some days you feel ashamed and other days furious with everyone, this is often the switch — and it’s just a matter of where the sentence was pointed.
What they sound like
Pointed inward:
- “I should be perfect at everything I do.”
- “I shouldn’t be this tired.”
- “I ought to be further along by now.”
- “I have to get this right.”
Pointed outward:
- “They should have known.”
- “He shouldn’t talk to people like that.”
- “This ought to be easier than it is.”
The tell is the vocabulary: should, shouldn’t, must, ought to, have to, supposed to. And the second tell is what comes after — guilt, or a flare of resentment. If a thought is followed by one of those two feelings, go back and look for the rule that produced it.
A rule you cannot state is a rule you never agreed to. Most shoulds turn out to be inherited — from a parent, a first manager, a piece of culture you absorbed without examining. They feel like your standards. They’re often someone else’s, still running.
Why they’re convincing
Because they feel like integrity. Dropping a should feels like lowering your standards, or letting someone off the hook, and neither is appealing. So the rule stays even when it’s producing nothing but turmoil.
They also masquerade as motivation, which is Burns’ point. I should go to the gym feels like the thing that gets you to the gym. Mostly it produces guilt about not going, and guilt is a poor fuel — it’s heavy, it doesn’t last, and it makes the activity itself unpleasant to think about. I want to feel better this week, and going would help is weaker as a command and considerably more effective as a plan.
And outward-pointed shoulds have a structural problem: they’re demands on things you don’t control. They should have replied can be entirely justified and still leave you stuck, because the sentence has no next move in it. It’s a verdict on a world that isn’t listening.
How to catch them
Circle the word. Should, must, ought, have to, supposed to. Like always and never, they’re loud, and they’re much easier to spot in writing than in thought.
Ask who set the rule. Say it out loud: “I should be further along.” Further than what, and according to whom? If you can’t name the source, you’ve found an inherited rule rather than a standard you chose.
Notice which way it’s pointed — and check the feeling against Burns’ split. Inward and guilty, or outward and angry? That tells you which sentence to go looking for.
Rewrite it as a preference. “I’d like to be further along, and here’s what’s actually in the way.” You lose nothing real. What you lose is the judge.
What to do once you’ve caught one
Replace the rule with a want and a reason. “I want to do this well because it matters to me” does the motivating that should was pretending to do, without the guilt attached. For outward shoulds, swap the demand for a decision: “They didn’t tell me. What do I do about that?” — which is a question with an answer, unlike a complaint about how people ought to behave.
How aMind helps with should statements
Shoulds are rewriting problems, and aMind’s flow ends in a rewrite. After you’ve written the thought, marked whether it describes a real situation, weighed the evidence and tapped the patterns that fit, the transform step asks you to put the thought into fairer words yourself. That’s the step where “I should be further along” has to become something you’d actually say to a person you respected — and rigid rules rarely survive being restated in plain language by the person carrying them.
The “Who’s thought is this?” step is unusually well aimed at this pattern too, because so many shoulds are borrowed. Being asked directly whether a rule is yours or something you absorbed is a question most people have never put to their own standards.
And on the not-real path the reflection finishes with a habit — what you’ll practice, on which days — which is the honest replacement for a should. A rule you repeat at yourself produces guilt. A small thing you actually do on Tuesdays produces the change the rule was demanding.
The other nine patterns are in the guide to cognitive distortions. Shoulds travel closely with all-or-nothing thinking, which supplies the impossible standard, and with labeling, which is what happens when you fail to meet it.
