Welcome back to savvy psychologist. I'm your interim host, Dr. Ellen Hendrickson. For the next few

weeks, I'll help you face life's challenges with evidence-based approaches, a sympathetic ear,

and zero judgment. Boundaries, like wide-leg sweatpants and quarter-zips, are trending. But for those of

us wired to be a little anxious, setting a boundary with a demanding friend, inappropriate

stranger, or clueless partner can feel as hard to pull off as wearing one-piece animal pajamas

to the office. But I'm getting ahead of

myself. First, what is a boundary? In geography, a boundary marks the limits of an area. It's the same

idea for relationships. Boundaries describe your limits in each relationship. Your limits include what you can take on successfully,

what you can give wholeheartedly, or what you can do without violating your personal integrity.

Boundaries are about your own willingness, and importantly, they don't try to control or threaten

others. I like to think about boundaries as personal policies,

much like a business might have a policy in place to protect the business, like all sales final

after 30 days, or we do not provide customer support through social media DMs.

Why can it be hard for those of us on the anxious side to set boundaries? A study in

frontiers in human neuroscience found that people who rarely disagree show increased activity in brain

areas linked to cognitive dissonance when they do speak up, suggesting that disagreement can feel

neurologically stressful for them.

In other words, those with less inclination to disagree experienced a heightened state of mental

distress and discomfort when it came time to do just that. If you're wired to be socially anxious,

a people-pleaser, a peacekeeper, or anything of the sort,

setting boundaries can feel wildly stressful and burdensome.

It feels somewhere between annoying and criminal.

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