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How to Say No—And Feel Good about It
IN THE LEAD-UP to Christmas 2025, Elise Moser was all set to deck the halls. Also buy the gifts, do the grocery shopping, cook the meals (etc., etc., ETC!!!). These tasks, her holiday traditions really, didn’t feel like chores so much as goals—mostly things she enjoyed doing. She never considered otherwise until she got sick. So sick that she had to spend the night at the hospital. When her family suggested they skip the turkey dinner, she was hesitant. But then they offered to handle everything (the food, the fun, the cleaning up). In her weakened state, she accepted the offer.
Back home on Boxing Day, from her resting-couch position, she could hear her family coming together to get the job done: laughing toddlers, delicious aromas, and music—all of the things she loved, only she wasn’t carrying them on her back like Santa getting crushed under a bulging sack of Christmas booty. By the time her guests were leaving, Moser had reached a decision, telling them: “I’m planning to be sick again next year.”
Moser saw her unexpected Xmas illness as cosmic intervention: maybe she didn’t need to accept every task that tried to elbow its way onto her to-do list. The low-stress season was the final push she needed to change her mindset. Against her natural tendencies, she was going to say no.
MOST OF US appreciate that it should not take a serious illness to set appropriate boundaries. Research has linked the inability to say no to increased burnout and decreased productivity. TED Talks on the subject abound, while Etsy is awash in motivational throw pillows that read “No is a complete sentence!” In a world obsessed with improvement and optimization, “no” is empowerment, it’s feminism, it’s self-care—the new bubble bath that might leave you with time to have an actual bubble bath. But it’s one thing to understand, quite another to execute.
“People today have a better understanding of the why,” says Vanessa Patrick, whose 2023 book The Power of Saying No preaches the gospel of gonna take a pass. “But they still struggle with the more practical aspects like how and when.” It’s a skill that has become that much more urgent in our era of uber-connectivity. There was a time when you actually had to be at work to get another unreasonable request from your boss. Your neighbour had to pick up the phone to ask if you would water their plants while they’re away. Today, the pings come in round the clock via multiple platforms, and in this avalanche of “Would you mind ________?” a default “yes” takes less energy than a more considered calculation.
Patrick breaks down our struggle to say no into three main buckets: the first is concern for relationships (you don’t want to offend people), the second is concern for reputation (you don’t want to be thought of as uncooperative or—worse—incompetent), and finally, “no” just doesn’t come naturally. “We are socialized to say yes and to view that in itself as success,” she explains. I think of my four-year-old who has already come to view the parental “no” as the only thing standing between her and endless hours of Bluey, candy for dinner, and a life spent in the same princess dress. Later, “no” will be the crush who didn’t like her back, the school that didn’t let her in, and the dream job that became someone else’s reality. In our formative years, “no” is rejection.
“Yes,” on the other hand, is not just positive but brave (Yes! I’ll try that new thing!), selfless (Yes! I’ll pick you up from the airport), devoted (Yes! I’ll be there), and ambitious (Yes! I will take on the extra work project even though I am already extremely overburdened at the office and have vowed to spend more time at home). Here the folly of a “yes” mindset starts to come into focus.
To be more intentional, Patrick recommends considering your options along a continuum, from “pass the salt” to “bake your famous lasagna.” The first indicates low-effort/high-reward requests (imagine the person asking for the salt sitting in front of a giant plate of fries), whereas baking your famous lasagna involves a huge amount of effort. It may be flattering and even heartwarming to field a request that is a compliment to your signature dish. But fast-forward to the neighbourhood potluck, and there’s your hard-won, eight-layer masterpiece on the table, surrounded by frozen apps and store-bought pastries.
REMEMBER WHEN Michelle Obama’s absence at Jimmy Carter’s funeral last year became an international incident? Surely this meant her marriage was in trouble, went some of the internet chatter, while others speculated that she took a pass to avoid sharing oxygen with Donald Trump. Either way, the vibe was collective outrage, which Obama eventually addressed on her podcast, IMO. Not attending, she explained, was an example of forgoing the thing that was “perceived as right” in favour of the thing that was “right for [her].” To get there, she had to triumph over hard-wired tendencies, and rather than trust herself to follow through, she stacked the deck in her favour, even instructing her team to make sure she had nothing to wear.
Which may sound silly, but for a self-professed people pleaser and globally recognized fashion icon, it was the right roadblock to ensure victory: a custom-tailored version of what is more broadly known as the friction principle, and is often used to break bad habits. Want to say no to ordering via Uber Eats? Remove the app from your phone. Want to say no to saying yes? Consider implementing an “I’ll get back to you” policy to build in some breathing room. And maybe also that standing your ground isn’t the massive faux pas you think it is.
A recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that more than three out of four respondents have accepted invitations or said yes to requests that they would rather decline based on the fear of social repercussions. If you are a former first lady, those fears are probably well founded, but for everyone else, the same study proves a tendency to overestimate the negative consequences of a “no.”
Still concerned about social repercussions? Patrick recommends creating hard-and-fast personal policies to fall back on: “I don’t take meetings over my lunch hour,” “I don’t take on volunteering roles during the workday.” Having pre-established guidelines means that you aren’t evaluating every request, while the use of empowered language—“don’t” versus “can’t”—can cushion a potential blow. Sort of like that old breakup cliché—it’s not you, it’s me—framing a “no” as reflecting your own values rather than the value of the request means whoever you’re saying no to is less likely to take personal offence.
OVER THE HOLIDAYS, around the same time that Elise Moser was starting to feel unwell, I was making my annual vow to spend Christmas on a beach: no tree-trimming parties, no gift exchanges, no forcing my preteen nephews to visit Santa at the mall, no baking the cherry chews that were my grandma’s favourite recipe—a three-layered tradition that honours a legacy and takes a crap load of effort. Every year, I am excited, then tired, then three-eggnogs-deep crying because nobody wants to do a group reading of The Night Before Christmas. This time around, I even wrote myself a reminder on my iCal for October 2026: Book a trip!! Go away.
In his book The Happiness Files, social scientist Arthur C. Brooks chalks up the inability to say no to “hyperbolic discounting,” which is basically just our tendency to value short-term rewards and accomplishments over more important long-term goals. We want to decorate for holidays, join book clubs, volunteer for pizza lunch, and take on that extra work project to look good in front of our boss. The problem is that our days fill up and our big-picture priorities don’t get the attention they deserve.
In part, I blame hustle culture. “I’m busy” is an inescapable reality but also, let’s be honest, a bit of a humble brag. I often think of the internet’s favourite motivational slogan: “Beyoncé has the same 24 hours in a day that we do.” Of course, this is not true. (It feels unnecessary to point out that a billionaire might have more opportunities to outsource certain mundane time sucks.) It’s also ironic since Beyoncé herself has attributed her success not to drive or hustle or talent but to the ability to protect her time. “I learned how to say no,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in a 2021 interview while discussing how she was able to establish her legacy.
Is she just like us? Maybe not, but her revelation distills the importance of “no” to its most essential truth. “Life is a trade-off,” Patrick says. “When we say an active yes to one thing, we are saying no to something else.” This reframing alone was enough to knock Valentine’s decorating off my February to-do list and to decline a lunch offer from a colleague (“I don’t go for lunch during the workweek”). Still, I can’t quite imagine I’ll spend next Christmas on the beach. It’s barely springtime, and already I’m starting to see the holiday chaos through maraschino-tinted glasses.
The post How to Say No—And Feel Good about It first appeared on The Walrus.
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