Enforcing healthy boundaries is the first and last defense protecting your mental and physical health. They are the only way to prevent being emotionally hijacked by a person, situation, or your own complacency.

They protect your mental health by allowing you to control, or at least greatly influence, what you do with your time, who you do it with, and how you are treated by other people.

Boundaries are not optional. They can be renegotiated, but they must always be there with calm assertiveness ready to back them up. This is healthy. This is martial arts of the mind.

Boundaries are the blueprint for interacting with others in a calm, constructive, emotionally healthy way. Nobody is perfect, and no boundary is perfect. Learning what works best for you, your health, and your values, is what meeting better people and growing into a better person is all about.

There are two kinds of boundaries—internal and external—and they protect you from two things: that which you don’t want to do, and that which you don’t want to have done to you.

Life is a continual process of negotiating boundaries, which usually follows 4 steps. 1. Identify a boundary. 2. Know what it protects you from. 3. Have a tactful way of communicating it. 4. Do not take the violation of these boundaries lightly.

Boundaries are self-advocacy.

Advocacy, more than anything, is about rights. Nobody has the right to hit you, shout at you in a terrifying way, or use psychological violence to influence your interactions with them. You advocate for yourself in these situations, hopefully, by leaving.

If they are part of a relationship in your permanent universe, like a child or mother, then you advocate for yourself with boundaries. I defy you to find me something more difficult in life than enforcing boundaries with the people you love. But it can be accomplished, and your friends, family, therapist, or coach will be in your corner.