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Justin's Digital Garden

Boundaries and Mental Health

Source: My personal notes from:

Benefits of Boundary Setting

Section titled “Benefits of Boundary Setting”

Boundaries will give you energy to support others. Through rest, it preserves your life and work ability and protect against burn out.

“Deep Rest” supports

  • Restorative biology
  • Cellular and energy restoration
  • DNA repair
  • Mitochondrial function increased, ATP production increase
  • Cell waste cleaned out

Source: Elissa Epel, PhD, “How psychological stress can speed or slow cellular aging processes”, Herbert Benson MD Course in Mind-Body Medicine, November 2022, Harvard Medical School.

Setting Boundaries in Personal and Work Life

Section titled “Setting Boundaries in Personal and Work Life”

Your brain has limits

Section titled “Your brain has limits”
  • 3: average number of hours per day of mental focus
    • Deep Work by Cal Newport
  • 150: number of relationships that brain can handle tracking
    • Social by Matthew Lieberming

Questions to Ask Yourself

Section titled “Questions to Ask Yourself”
  • What do you want to remove from your tasks?
    • Remove or delegate items to focus on others
  • What barriers are you putting on yourself?
    • Role requirements (work, parent)
    • Demands from others
    • Your thoughts:
      • Assertiveness
      • Confidence
      • Compassion
      • Guilt
      • Perfectionism
      • Control
  • What would you want to take on?

Acting on Boundaries

Section titled “Acting on Boundaries”
  • Assess your workload and abilities
  • Check the list against your values, urgency, priority
  • Set boundaries on yourself and with others

Set limits

Section titled “Set limits”
  • Be honest, assertive
  • Say no without other conditions, still be compassionate with people asking
  • Let people react and be ok with it
  • Set expectations
  • Set physical, time boundaries around work and other life to separate them - can be healthier for mind

  1. Examples

    • Set do not disturb times
    • Do not check things like digital notifications until a certain scheduled time
    • Talk about workload with those involved

Benefits on Boundaries

Section titled “Benefits on Boundaries”
  • Focus on your values
  • Balance
  • Avoid fatigue, burnout, stress
  • Can empower others that may be depending on you too much

Delegation

Section titled “Delegation”

What are good to delegate tasks?

  • Repetitive

  • Require skills you don’t have completely

  • No specific due dates

  • Others would like to do it or prepare them for future

  • Approach: prepare with person, plan, discuss, check and appreciate the person

    • Be patient with delegate and accept some failure

See Also

Section titled “See Also”