Give Yourself a Mental Break

W07: Culture and Psychology

Cultures provide many functions. They’re a way of being connected socially with others, which is a positive thing for survival. We unite over commonalities and communicate our needs in ways others can understand. We collaborate and strengthen each other. They give us purpose in our lives through constructed roles. There’s a bit of a catch, though. We tend to develop cultural ideals that don’t necessarily fit the people in the culture. Brother Ivers, who I’ve mentioned before is a professor at BYU-I, called the ideal person our culture says we should be striving to be our “ought selves”.

These ideals are constructs. They’re based on what a society has decided is an optimal person, and that varies from culture to culture. We tend to experience psychological distress when our more natural “real selves”, a term Brother Ivers used, fall short from our culture’s “ought selves”. I grew up in and am still a member of a conservative religion with “traditional” family values. A fairly standard “ought self” for women from that culture is a stay at home mom who devotes everything to her children and husband and has a large family. New moms outside of that culture also struggle with “ought selves”. I remember being heartbroken because I had a c-section instead of an idealized medication-less natural birth. Moms regularly feel bad because they feed their kids convenience foods and let them watch TV shows so they can catch a break. Are those really things they need to feel bad over? No, but we’re socially conditioned that those are short of the ideal so we feel negatively about ourselves when we make these choices.

Delali Bright gives a great example of culturally-inflicted psychological distress in her TED talk about beauty. I linked to it in a previous post, but here it is again. It’s definitely worth watching. In her first country, she had intense mental distress because of her weight. Her culture’s “ought self” for her was supposed to have more fat on her body. She was skinny no matter what treatments she underwent. There was no changing her size. She had awful psychological distress because she could never get near that “ought self”. American culture was different, though. The “ought self” for beauty for women in the US is skinny. She matched that easily. She gets complimented and praised for her size. She no longer has that conflict between culture’s expectations and her reality and has far greater self-esteem as a result.

Several lessons ago, Brother Ivers said, “Culture creates false needs and false problems.” It’s held true time and again as I’ve looked at various paradigms and social dynamics. We should all take some time to mentally set aside our ingrained cultural expectations and give ourselves a break from psychological distress over constructed problems and shortcomings.