I’m as guilty of this as anyone: living by self-imposed rules. Life is absolutely full of freedom, but we constrain ourselves by a thousand little personal traditions and requirements. We make ourselves jump through hoops which nobody else even cares about. Part of becoming a more effective, enlightened person, is the identification and acknowledgment of these repressive trappings.
EXAMPLES
* “I can’t call in sick.” For most jobs, this is untrue. Going in to work when we’re sick endangers everyone around us, and it cheats our employers. A respectful job, one with dignity, will respect sick days. A really good job might even respect I-just-don’t-wanna-come-in-today days. Unless you work for Ebenezer Scrooge, you’re allowed to call in sick. You’re also allowed to claim your vacation time and your lunch break. Many people feel like they shouldn’t take sick days or vacation time, that it’ll make them a “bad worker”. That rule is self-imposed and self-limiting.
* “I have to simplify this math expression.” I teach calculus at university, and the single most common question is: “Can we leave it like that on the test?” “Don’t we need to simplify the answer?” No, if you needed to simplify it, then it wouldn’t be “the answer”, by definition. In mathematics, we simplify expressions to make later work easier, or, very rarely, for aesthetic value. It’s not an end in itself. Rather, it’s a great way to give yourself extra opportunity to make an algebra mistake and lose some points. If the instructions don’t say “simplify”, then simplifying is a self-constraining law!
* “I can’t kiss/get physically intimate on the first date!” To constrain love and emotions by such “old wives’ rules” is to cheapen them– as if Cupid cared whether or not the courting rituals du jour have been followed to the letter.
* “I can’t publish a blog article less than 500 words long!” This is one I always struggle with myself. Somehow I have trouble bringing myself to publish anything short. I guess this is a specific type of Search Engine Superstition. Or maybe it’s because some of the bloggers who influence me the most tend to write huge thousands-of-words articles. In any case, this is a self-inflicted handicap and I ought to try to break it.
* “Everything I write has to be original!” There’s nothing non-cliche original under the sun. I strive to write original content, but that just means content that I haven’t personally seen. I broke this rule a few times with Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Buddhist koans. I didn’t get arrested by the Internet Police. In fact, those three “articles” perform pretty well! The point is, true originality isn’t something you can easily put on tap, so if you want to update regularly, don’t be afraid to steal now and then 
* “I can’t use the ‘goto’ command in C” Once upon a time, some Very Serious Person ™ wrote an essay against using goto in the C programming language. Ever since then, the command has suffered a scarlet letter, even though the original reasoning was debunked. This is one of the most resilient remains of the old “push the wrong key and the computer will blow up” mentality from the late 80′s/early 90′s. Have fun escaping from nested loops!
WHY DO WE INVENT THESE RULES?
Left on autopilot, we tend to follow autopilot behaviors. That means extra rules and constraints and bounds which aren’t based on reality. With this blog, for example, in the past I’ve tended to write articles which are >500 words (usually significantly more in fact). After writing hundreds of those essays, the behavior has become normal and ordinary. If I’d written hundreds of short little 300-word updates, then I’d flinch away from publishing anything larger. In other words, a lot of it is behavioral momentum. Another cause of self-constraining behavior– as in the “goto” example or the “first date” example– is bandwagon mentality.
The best way to break these established patterns is to shine the spotlight of presence on them. Presence is that state of mind (or rather non-mind) where we simply observe passively, suspending judgment and analysis. This state automatically shuts down the autopilot. See the “further reading” below for three ways to be more present.
FURTHER READING
Three Ways to Be More Present
The Pain Body
Reality Escapes