What is the importance of maintaining boundaries? Having strong boundaries is all about knowing your needs and values. When you know what nourishes, nurtures, and sustains your needs and aligns with your values, you create strong boundaries. This is because you have better knowledge and clarity of what to allow and not to allow in your life.
As a result, this boosts your self-respect, trust, peace, ease, fun, generosity, and a great sense of self. You will have the capacity to know from your heart when to say yes and when to say no. From these boundaries, you can teach other people how to treat you.
The importance of maintaining boundaries
Strong, clear boundaries allow us to come from a place of balance, love, and peace. When our boundaries are weak or broken, we can come from a place of resentment, anger, tiredness, irritability, depression, and disrespect of ourselves. Ultimately, strong clear boundaries give you the capacity for clear truthful communication and an authentic expression of yourself.
There are many different types of boundaries for you to consider, let’s look at a few that are vital to consider in relationships with others and yourself.
1. Physical
Physical boundaries include your needs for personal space, your comfort with touch. It also includes your physical needs like needing to sleep, eat food, and drink water. Setting boundaries can come in many different forms, for example, healthy physical boundaries might sound like: “I am really tired. I need to sit down now.” It’s all about knowing when you’ve reached your personal limit and ensuring not to cross that boundary.
Sexual boundaries also fall under the physical category. Sex can be intense and there isn’t anything shameful about having an emotional response to sex. In fact, being intimate is a big step and can trigger a lot of emotions for people.
Communicating your needs and boundaries can feel sensitive in new relationships, but it’s in fact a crucial part of building and maintaining relationships. It’s also important to allow yourself to maintain the boundaries you need, as the relationship progresses.
2. Emotional and mental
Emotional and mental boundaries are often broken the most, for what reason is not clear. Perhaps because people can find it more difficult to communicate and put them into words.
Emotional boundaries mostly look at separating your feelings from another’s feelings. Violations include taking responsibility for someone else’s feelings, letting another’s feelings dictate the way that you feel, sacrificing your time to please others.
Strong boundaries protect your self-esteem and your identity as an individual. They also help us with respecting the boundaries others may have. For example, you may know that talking about something can trigger negative emotions for another. So, you avoid the topic altogether in respect of their emotional boundaries until the time they wish to talk about it.
3. Material possessions and property
Material boundaries refer to items and possessions like your property, what you would declare as being your own. It’s healthy and necessary to understand what you can and cannot share. Also, this includes how you expect your items and materials to be treated by the people you share them with.
Having limits on how your material items are treated is healthy and can help to prevent resentment over time.
4. Work and time boundaries
During the pandemic, people worked from home. A boundary was broken where people had previously kept work and home separate. This led to work becoming a prominent part of our home lives and brought a different element of pressure and stress into our homes.
However, now that work has returned to the office, it is more of an important time than ever to ensure to set livable boundaries of work time and home time. This can look like leaving non-emergency emails for when you’re on work time, or for allowing yourself to fully appreciate the time off you have on your lunch break.
Time is a concept that many forget to own. We should have the utmost responsibility in declaring what time we are comfortable spending working, in other people’s presence and even in terms of personal schedule. Allow yourself to leave the party early if you’re tired, allow yourself to ask your manager for the time off, and allow yourself to set yourself a bedtime if you need it!
Next steps to ensuring you have healthy boundaries in place
These are just a few of the boundaries that we set ourselves. Our basic needs are food, water, fresh air, movement, connection, and sleep. When we have strong boundaries around our basic needs, we are in a better position to create those important boundaries beyond our basic needs.
Ensuring to consider and maintain these boundaries is crucial for self-care and having healthy personal and professional relationships. Today, have a think about what your boundaries are.
Recognise that they need to be respected, not only by others but by yourself as well. Communicate them to the people around you. Those that love you will respect you and the boundaries that you have set.
If you need help putting healthy boundaries in place, get in touch with me today.
