How to Stay in Integrity and Live a Meaningful Life: more on boundaries
- Nina Clouse
- Dec 31, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 6
Last post, we explored how self-love and self-respect are the real heart of boundaries. I wanted to expand on this subject to apply it to daily life with ourselves because boundaries really are all about us.
What are we available for and what are we not available for? What do we want to have in our lives and what do we not want to have in our lives? What do we want to engage in and what do we not want to engage in?
Common ways we cross our own boundaries can look like:
Not taking care of our bodies:
not eating/over eating, not exercising/over exercising
not getting necessary sun or not taking necessary supplements/meds
not going to the bathroom when needed or not sleeping/resting when needed
using substances/alcohol in excess
engaging in sex without discernment
Not using our time in a way we actually want to:
allowing addictive behaviors/distractions to consume our time
not developing goals and therefore not pursuing goals
allowing others to dictate our time
over-extending ourselves and therefore not prioritizing our time
Allowing ourselves to be with others who don't fit us:
having relationships with others who make us feel disempowered, belittled, unimportant, unhealthy, disrespected or devalued
trying to change ourselves to gain the acceptance of others who cannot accept our authentic selves
Allowing our material lives to be accessed by others without discernment:
giving away more than we can afford
allowing others to use our possessions at the expense of our own wellbeing
Boundaries give us a sense of control over our own thoughts, behaviors, bodies, belongings and use of time. In our own lives, boundaries are the guidelines of conduct and standards of expectations we develop for ourselves and our personal worlds. Having guidelines for ourselves can feel limiting, encroaching, or rigid for some individuals. What I want to emphasize here is how understanding and abiding our boundaries actually gives us more freedom, empowerment and fulfillment in life because they are bridges to connect our authentic selves to our outer worlds. These guidelines and standards can also be fluid because we change as people over time. Our goals, values and emotions are some of the most important tools for knowing what our boundaries are.
How Do Goals Help Identify Personal Boundaries?
Goals help us identify what we want to do in life. We can have different levels of goals, but all should work together to help us obtain an eventual larger fulfillment. Daily goals will feed into mid-level goals, which then feed into a greater life purpose, dubbed the "ultimate concern" by Grit author, Angela Duckworth.
By keeping in mind our own ultimate concern, we can develop guidelines for how we want our daily life to look and know what we want to accomplish.
Here's an example of applying Duckworth's model for goal development:
I want to help people live happier, fuller lives through empowering them with education and supporting them along their healing journeys. This individual work is motivated by a desire to contribute to improving the holistic wellbeing of future generations. This is my life purpose. In order to accomplish this greater goal, I need to break down some mid-level goals for myself, such as taking care of myself, developing educational materials, and being the best counselor I can be. My daily goals then look like: engaging in research/training as-needed, developing material for clients, showing up for sessions (physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually), doing my notes, creating educational content through worksheets, blogs, outreach and collaboration, eating a healthy diet, exercising, getting adequate sleep, maintaining a healthy home, connecting with others socially, writing daily, working in fun and having rest time...
By understanding what is important to us, we can develop boundaries to limit the things in our lives which are not important to us.
What about values?
Values tie into goals because they are the why behind those larger level goals. Why is it important for me to empower others to be healthier through educating and supporting them? Because I value choice, growth, self-actualization, human experience, truth, connection, helping, education, holistic health, and I feel a responsibility to improving life for future generations. My ultimate concern is inseparable from my values.
Values also help us to decide what we are available and what we are not available for. If we value health, but choose to eat a poor diet, not get enough sleep, forget to exercise, and engage excessively in substances/alcohol use, then we are living outside of our value and are therefore in a constant state of crossing our own boundaries. Aligning our actions with our values doesn't mean we have to live rigidly, either though.
We can have flexibility within acknowledging our circumstances and means. For example, maybe we value health but can't afford to invest in the type of diet we idealize. This doesn't mean we're failing, it just means we have to do the best we can within our circumstances and our means. We can then shift the focus from what we can't do within our value system, to what we can do. Values are guiding principles which contribute to the larger schema of boundaries through helping us to understand what is important to us.
Again, to know our own boundaries, we have to ask ourselves: What are we available for and what are we not available for? What do we want to have in our lives and what do we not want to have in our lives? What do we want to engage with and what do we not want to engage with?
Sometimes, these questions are difficult to answer because we have been trained out of considering our own thoughts, feelings, beliefs and needs. If we have trouble knowing the answers, bodily sensations can help us to identify what is aligned with us because they help to tell us what feels good to us and what doesn't feel so good.
Using our bodies as a guide
When we look at bodily sensations, we can't ignore how they are signals to us, directly from the brain and they are meant to protect us. Uncomfortable emotions generate in the midbrain but create signaling to the sympathetic nervous system which creates sensations throughout the body. Emotions therefore manifest in physical sensations which allow us to label them and then understand what we need to feel safe, secure and content.
As humans, we have a pretty unique ability to imagine how a scenario might play out and we will actually release chemicals in the brain which can help us to feel in our bodies how that scenario may impact us.
When we can slow down experiences and identify our emotions, we can increase our curiosity about what actions we can take to resolve uncomfortable emotions. By consistently and honestly checking-in with our feelings, we can understand patterns around our needs and what is within our integrity. Bodily sensations therefore, help guide us to answer the questions around what we are available for, what we want in our life and what we want to engage with.
Let's Apply It
If when someone asks us to do something, we feel a heavy drop in our stomach, it's probably something where we need to pause and weigh out the risks, rewards, regrets and resentments associated with this choice. The same principle applies however to the choices we make with ourselves throughout the day.
Let's consider going through a day and slowing down each decision-making process. We can wake up in the morning and want to drink coffee because that's what we do without thinking every day. We may also have the goal of increasing water intake and the value of good health. We can check-in with our bodies to feel out options around our first choice of the day. How does it feel in our body when we really imagine going straight for the coffee? What about if we drink some water first? What about if we opt for tea today?
Rather than acting out of habits and impulses, we can train our brains to weigh out options and empower ourselves to actively make decisions around our actions.
Moving through the day, we can create pauses to honor what feels good for us, and assess what aligns with our values and goals. Again, this is the work of respecting our own boundaries through knowing what is important to us and under which guidelines we want to conduct our own lives. Let's consider another example.
During free time, how does it feel if we really imagine spending the next hour scrolling on the phone? What if it was only 20 minutes scrolling and then 40 minutes of going for a walk? What if it was 40 minutes of walking and then 20 minutes of scrolling? How do these choices feel our body when we really project ourselves into imagining them playing out?
There is no "right," answer. Maybe when we consider scrolling for an hour, it feels aligned with a goal of giving ourself rest time, which is part of keeping our brain and body healthy. When we slow things down, however, we're empowering ourself to actively make that decision. We're not at the whim of habit or impulse and we're able to control our time in a way which falls into our own personal boundaries.
Slowing down and paying attention to your body can therefore empower you to make decisions which honor your boundaries with yourself, instead of allowing your decisions to be made for you by circumstances or habits.
Gently increasing our curiosity around bodily sensations and emotions can help us to better understand our own patterns of responses to specific experiences and events as well. If we can check-in after drinking coffee in the morning, we might notice feeling jittery or crashing later, or we might feel really good. If we check-in after scrolling, we might feel anxious, sad, annoyed or inspired. These sensations and emotions are information for us to consider when making decisions going forward. For more on what common emotions can be motivating us to do, check out this post.
The goal here is progress, not perfection. If we make progress towards our goals and living within our own integrity, we have something to be proud of. We are definitely not going to meet our goals, however, if we spend time living in shame of what we aren't doing, so remember to focus on the positives and allow yourself some grace in growing as a person.
What am I available for, what am I not available for?What do I want in my life, what do I not want in my life? What do I want to engage with, what do I not want to engage with?
I wanted to include a section here on how to better structure our days to create boundaries around how we want to spend our time, but I'm feeling like that is an expansive topic of its own, so looks for a post soon on time management and creating boundaries with time.
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