Fire Your Inner Slave Driver

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Our capacity for guilt can vary. If your parents were hard to please, for instance, you may be more prone to guilt—trying harder to please the authority figures in your life in order to avoid loss of love, a prime motivator in the guilt response. Certain personality traits can also affect the tendency to feel guilt. If you find it hard to express anger, if you’re too security oriented, if you’re shy, have low self-esteem, are overly driven or too judgmental, you’re going to be more subject to guilt.

The inner feedback between what we want to do and what we believe we ought to do sets up a familiar pattern. Make the slightest move toward doing what you want—or even just think about doing it—and a voice in your head suddenly sounds the alarm. You’ve broken the code, disappointed those who reared or hired or married you, and on and on. Because we tend to take these flitting negative thoughts as gospel instead of as the random noise they usually are, we wind up feeling guilty even when we’ve done nothing wrong.

Psychologists call these pangs of anticipatory anxiety “unreal” guilt. Real guilt helps you to show up on time to work, keep your word, and strike a balance between your private desires and those of the larger group. Unreal, irrational guilt is the nagging inner slave driver that pushes you to stay at the office longer, skip vacations, and generally make your life miserable.

Overwork pushes all the guilt buttons and inevitably leads to a place where you can’t win. You’re bound to be denying your time to someone who wants it. “I feel guilty when I’m at home and not at work, and I feel guilty when I’m at work and not at home,” declares Maureen, an exasperated Washington attorney.

As if your own guilt were not enough, there are sure to be co-workers who want to unload their guilt on you. Martyr types are especially skilled at easing their own guilty delusions about not doing enough by getting you to believe you’re not doing enough.

As you’ve surely noticed, guilt often gets passed along as thinly veiled humor. When Los Angeles managed care caseworker Troy Overfield took a day off to be with her ill mother in Las Vegas, she returned to barbed questions about how much money she’d won at the casinos. We’ve all heard (if not used) such corrosive zingers as “Leaving already?” or “Where did you get that tan?” And this grating favorite: “Some of us work for a living.” Because the work ethic is so ingrained in most of us, so pivotal to our self-images, we are easy prey to these accusations. Soon enough you feel guilty if you don’t go along with them.

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