The "Have To" Trap: Why You're Exhausted, Resentful, and How to Get Out

Let me tell you something that took me three years, a lot of late nights, and one unexpectedly free week to figure out.

For the entire run of my podcast, I recorded an episode every single week. Through holidays. Through spring break. On my birthday. There were a weeks where I recorded at midnight because I was leaving for a family trip the next morning and I simply could not miss a week.

Why? Because I had been told that the algorithm requires weekly posting. Because I was paying for monthly services and didn’t want them to go to waste. Because somewhere along the way, “I should post weekly” had stopped being a strategy and become a rule I never thought to question.

Then one week, life got busy in the best possible way, with family things and good things, and I simply didn’t have time. I told my audio editor I was skipping a week. And something unexpected happened.

It felt amazing.

The Problem with “Have To”

As a psychologist trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, I know that our thoughts are not facts. CBT is built on a foundational premise: our circumstances are neutral. It’s the thoughts we attach to them that generate our feelings, and our feelings that drive our behavior.

When I say, “I have to post every week,” my brain hears that as a non-negotiable truth. It creates urgency, pressure, and stress even when the actual consequences of doing otherwise are minimal or entirely invented. I wasn’t going to lose my license. No one was going to be harmed. The algorithm was going to keep changing whether I posted weekly or not.

But I never stopped to examine the thought.

This is what I call “shoulding on yourself.” (Yes, it sounds a bit like something else, and that’s intentional. It’s meant to capture how messy it feels.) It’s the constant low-grade background noise of everything you believe you’re supposed to be doing that you’re not, or that you’re doing while also resenting it.

I should work after dinner. I have to be the one who manages the family schedule. I’m supposed to host these events. I should be further ahead by now.

Research in cognitive behavioral therapy consistently shows that these automatic thoughts, the ones we don’t consciously choose, are the primary drivers of emotional distress. They run in the background like an app you forgot to close, quietly draining your battery, affecting your mood, your patience, and your ability to enjoy your actual life.

Where Do These Rules Come From?

Most of the “shoulds” we carry weren’t chosen. They were absorbed.

We absorbed them from parents who had their own set of unexamined rules. From workplaces with cultures that equated busyness with worth. From social media experts telling us there’s one right way to grow a business. From gender norms that taught women, specifically, that self-sacrifice is a virtue and self-advocacy is selfish.

The rules feel true because we’ve been living by them for so long. But feeling true and being true are very different things.

Brené Brown’s research on shame and vulnerability is instructive here. Shame tells us that if we step out of line, if we don’t meet expectations, even the ones we invented for ourselves, we are somehow less worthy. That fear of being seen as lazy, irresponsible, or not enough is what keeps so many of us trapped in patterns that no longer serve us.

I stayed on the weekly podcast schedule in part because stepping off of it felt like proof that I wasn’t serious enough, disciplined enough, professional enough. The rule wasn’t really about algorithms. It was about worthiness.

What Changes When You Stop

The week I gave myself permission to skip, I noticed something almost immediately: I felt lighter. Ideas came more easily. When I did sit down to record the following week, I wasn’t grinding it out. I was genuinely engaged.

This is the paradox that so many high-achieving women in their 40s and 50s eventually discover: the things we do out of obligation rarely produce our best work. And the relentless pressure of all those unchecked “shoulds” doesn’t just affect our productivity. It affects how we show up for the people we love.

When you have a running tally of everything you’re not doing “right,” it colors everything. You’re snappier. More impatient. You have less tolerance for the normal chaos of family life because you’re already depleted by the weight of invisible obligations. And yet, because the source of that irritability isn’t obvious, it’s easy to blame the people in front of you instead of the thought pattern in the background.

A Framework for Rethinking Your Obligations

The good news is that this is addressable. CBT gives us a clear pathway: identify the automatic thought, examine it, and decide intentionally whether it deserves to keep its hold on you.

Here are the questions I now ask myself when I catch a “should” or “have to” running:

1. Is this actually a fact, or is it a belief?

"I have to post every week" sounds like a rule. But it’s not a law. It’s advice someone gave me, filtered through my own fear. Separating facts from beliefs is the first step to gaining real agency over your decisions.

2. Who am I actually disappointing here?

Often, the answer is no one. Or the person we’re afraid of disappointing would actually support us making a healthier choice if we told them the truth. We build imaginary audiences of critics to enforce rules that real people never handed us.

3. Is this thought helping me live the life I want to live?

This is the question I ask my clients all the time. Even if a belief were true, the question I would still have is: is it useful? If a thought is generating shame, resentment, or depletion, and is not producing results you value, why are you keeping it?

4. What would I choose if I weren’t afraid?

Fear of judgment, fear of failure, fear of letting someone down, these are the engines behind most “shoulds.” When I stripped away the fear, the answer to my podcast schedule question became obvious immediately.

This Is Not About Lowering Your Standards

I want to be clear about something, because this is a common misread: questioning your “shoulds” is not about doing less. It is not about giving up, slacking off, or abandoning excellence.

It is about doing things because you have chosen to, not because you are afraid of what happens if you don’t. That distinction, chosen versus compelled, changes the quality of everything you do.

When I moved to bi-weekly recording, my audio improved. My content was more thoughtful. I showed up with more energy and creativity. The algorithm didn’t tank. The work got better.

Intentional action, chosen freely, almost always outperforms obligatory action performed under duress.

Where to Start

You don’t have to overhaul your entire life this week. Start with one area where you notice friction, that low-grade sense of dread or resentment that signals you might be doing something because you think you have to, not because you’ve actually chosen to.

Ask yourself: If I weren’t afraid, and if I truly believed my own needs mattered, would I still be doing this the same way?

The answer might surprise you. And the freedom that comes from acting on it, even in one small area, tends to be exactly the permission slip you didn’t know you needed to start questioning the rest.

You are not broken. You’re just running a very old program. And unlike your devices, you don’t have to wait for someone else to push the update.