How often do you musterbate? What about the people you know? Some of them might musterbate a lot, maybe even daily. Now before you assume where this conversation is going, be sure you read that word correctly – MUSTerbate.
While I wish I could take credit for creating this word, it was Albert Ellis, a behavioral psychologist, who coined the term. Musterbation is the experience of telling ourselves we “must” do things. It extends to additional words – “should”, “have to”, “need to”, and “ought to”.
The Weight of "Should"
These aren’t just words. They are the starting point in the creation of emotions that are detrimental to our growth and mental wellness. Words like these create shame, guilt, self-doubt, stress, and pressure.
They typically have the authoritative tone of parents, teachers, bosses, or embody the norms dictated by society or culture.
Breaking the Habit Through Coaching
At a mild or moderate level, musterbation stops our creative thinking, inhibits problem solving, and builds limitations on our dreams and goals. This is when working with a coach trained and educated in cognitive behavioral approaches can help.
Through executive, life or couples coaching, individuals learn strategies to stop musterbating. They strengthen these practices and apply them in their daily lives, replacing guilt, shame, and self-doubt with functional control, confidence, and abundant thinking.
The coach acts as an objective, outside perspective to help clients identify the cognitive roadblocks and change their habits, resulting in improvements in their present and successes in their future.
When "Must" Becomes a Burden
At a severe level, musterbation contributes to the development of anxiety and depression. The tendency to use these words feeds the anxiety or depression, maintaining or building the dysfunctional emotions and experiences.
This is when working with a therapist can help. Through therapy, individuals can explore where the source of the words came from to explore what experiences from their past are affecting their present.
Particularly when working with a cognitive behavioral therapist, patients will then learn strategies to manage the words and thoughts contributing to the anxiety and depression.
A New Way to Talk to Yourself
Ultimately, whether through coaching or therapy, the goal is the same: clarity and compassion. By identifying these rigid internal demands, individuals learn to stop “rubbing themselves the wrong way” and break the self-defeating pattern of musterbating.
When we swap “I must” for “I choose,” we trade the heavy weight of obligation for the freedom of personal agency.
