Have you ever been slogging your way through a work project you took on to help someone out or been checking your phone during an event you wish you’d RSVP-ed “no” to or found yourself up late cooking food for a gathering you probably could have just gotten catering for, wondering, “Okay, why did I commit to this, again?”
If you’ve got an almost-full punch card from Cafe Never Enough you are certainly not alone. It’s hardly news that burnout if a huge public health problem, and yet so many of continue to suffer on, brainwashing ourselves to think that maybe if we just download another productivity tool or do more yoga or drink more electrolytes we’ll magically feel more balanced, but the truth is, in order to experience a shift, we need to make a shift, especially when it comes to our mindset. A huge part of this work is training ourselves to set boundaries and say “no” to things we’ve been conditioned to automatically say “yes” to.
Here are just a few signs you need to say “no” more often:
- You feel overwhelmed and like you have too much to do in not enough time
- When one appointment or event time changes or someone is late, it throws off your whole day or even your whole week
- You have no idea how to relax and feel anxious when you try to do so
- You keep moving on to the next milestone instead of taking time to celebrate your wins
- You bring work on vacation or feel guilty for taking time off
- You put others’ needs before your own and struggle to make time for things like health appointments, exercise, sleep, or preparing healthy foods
- People automatically give you extra things to do because they’re so used to you saying “yes”
- You rarely see your family and friends
- You’re just burnt the heck out and feel like a shell of a person
Why we struggle to do less
We often become so used to doing too much that we start to hold ourselves to impossible standards or find it incredibly hard to slow down. Being driven to compare ourselves to what others are accomplishing (thanks, social media) can also make it challenging to maintain a self-compassionate viewpoint.
Israa Nasir, MHC-LP, is a New York City-based psychotherapist, writer, and the founder of WellGuide—a digital community for mental health awareness. She is the author of Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time And Emotional Energy In A World That Always Demands More. “Toxic productivity,” she explains, “is when our relationship to productivity becomes connected to the way we view ourselves. Productivity is an outcome of the habits that we do, but it shouldn’t be the thing that defines you.”
When you’re caught up on a toxic productivity cycle, Nasir says, “three dynamics are taking place. One is you are extremely driven by outcomes only, so you are pursuing for the sake of pursuit and you don’t stop to question why you’re pursuing the outcome, you’re just pursuing it. The second is the pursuit is priority. So your wellness, your health, your relationships, whether you are having fun, those things don’t matter. The third is how good you feel about yourself and how comfortable you feel with other people about your self perception is tied to your outcomes. When those three things come together, we develop an unhealthy relationship with productivity and achievement.”
She adds that being constantly available makes us more busy, causing us to try to get a lot of things done at the same time and driving overwhelm. “I think the changes in work, culture, technology and our own understanding of what we should be doing have all contributed to being busy, but not necessarily being productive. We also feel a lot of pressure to do a lot more things because we have access to more comparison points than ever before in human history and start to feel behind when we see what others are doing.”
Sometimes we turn to “doing” as a means of coping when faced with uncertainty, a sensation we are conditioned to escape. “When we have a lot of uncertainty in our life,” says Nasir, ”it is easier to do than be and feel because if you stop doing, then your feelings are going to come up and nobody wants to sit with their feelings. Productivity has become a coping tool for us, for avoidance, for repressing your feelings, for clawing back a sense of control in an extremely uncertain world.”
Why saying “no” is so hard
Sunita Sah, an award-winning professor at Cornell University and an expert in organizational psychology, is the author of the upcoming Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, can relate to those who grew up feeling like they had to follow all the rules. “I believe so many of us comply more than we actually think we do because we become socialized, we become wired to comply. We start equating compliance with being good and defiance with being bad because that’s what we were told so often growing up and we were rewarded for being compliant and not rewarded for being defiant.”
Dr. Sah, who has spent decades researching influence and advice and authority, points out that this can become a serious problem not just in our personal lives but also in life-or-death situations such as in the medical field or on commercial airplanes. “When I started to look at this in more depth, I found that, for example, only one in ten healthcare workers, most of them nurses, find it comfortable to speak up when they see their colleagues making an error. And there was a similar survey of over 1700 crew members of commercial airlines, and nearly half of them did not speak up when they saw their superiors making a mistake. Just going along with others and not speaking up when we know something is wrong can leave us quite drained and muted really. And it got me thinking, is it sometimes bad to be good? And what do we sacrifice when we put aside our values so often?”
Nasir agrees that the connection between self-worth and productivity and always saying “yes” or going with the flow, doing what you believe is expected of you often sets in very early in life. “If you are raised in a home where achievement equals acceptance, good grades means you’ll be loved, right? You are praised. We learn very early on that we can barter achievement for acceptance and belonging. And so it starts developing very early and then it continues.” You come to expect too much from yourself, regardless of whether others truly expect that much of you.
Scared to set boundaries? Do this.
“Shifting out of a paradigm that you have existed in forever is very challenging,” Nasir acknowledges.She recommends doing an audit of how you spend your time for a few weeks and how each of those items and events make you feel so that you can see what patterns and themes emerge and identify some small changes you can make and build your confidence.
For example, outsourcing tasks you don’t need to do that suck up your time can be an effective way to reduce overwhelm. Saying “no” to an invitation or request that feels like a “hell no” in your gut even though you usually say “yes” by default can feel awkward (or okay, terrifying) at first, but it can get easier as you step into your power to make decisions that are best for your own wellbeing. You’ve probably heard it before, but here it is again: taking care of yourself is not selfish—it helps you show up as your best self for others.
Your mindset needs to shift as well. Dr Sah was inspired through her work to create a new definition for “defiance” that we can employ to make better decisions. “The old definition is that to defy is to challenge the power of another person to resist boldly and openly. And my new definition is that to defy is to simply act in accordance with your true values when there’s pressure to do otherwise.” That pressure may be external, or it may be coming from within yourself, but it needs to be examined and pushed back against.
However, getting a handle on your relationship to productivity and people-pleasing tendencies is not necessarily a one-and-done deal, says Nasir. “It’s not something you’re going to check off a list and arrive at this moment of enlightenment and just stay there. This is life’s work. We continue to do it. And I think that that’s a very empowering and beautiful thing.”