The Goblin That Stays After You Say No.

I’ve noticed that I’ve started saying no more often. I’ve said no many times in the last weeks: to meetups, friends’ dates and coffee dates. And if I’m being deeply honest with myself, the resulting quiet time, me time, or writing time is very much needed.

Like many women, I often stretch myself to my limit in many directions: mentally, physically and emotionally, and I have been learning how to be better at compartmentalizing my time so that what matters most gets my attention first and the rest can wait. In my rational mind, I know that protection of my time and energy is an act of self-care. Yet, alongside this awareness and the overwhelming relief of knowing how to say no (“not this time” or “no, thank you”, or “not now”), there is still a niggling sense of guilt.

The guilt didn’t come because of anyone else. No one said out loud that I had let them down. No one cut off our friendship, became angry or felt insulted. These are the kinds of reactions that a younger, more people-pleasing version of me might have expected, preempted or even experienced. But now, I have enough of a sense of self to know that I need also to please me. But still, that guilt is there, like a little goblin with sharp, bony fingers, poking at my face and accusing me of not being quite enough. And I can’t quite block out the incessant chatter.

Is the goblin of guilt there because I sense I’m letting people down even though there is no evidence that this is true, or that I might be missing out on fun? I am still not sure. Because I am sure that no one who I said no to loves me or cares about me less because I chose myself. And, let’s face it, the party girl I may have been many years ago truly understands that now, fun can be a quiet night alone writing, a hot shower, a good podcast or getting lost in a book. So, why am I even letting this little goblin matter?

And this is why I am here.

I’m Monique Zahavi, a London-born writer and coach, with a background in positive psychology. I’m also a midlife woman who has over-functioned for my whole life and is still learning how to do less of that. I am writing because I am curious about why capable women, especially women in midlife, hold on to behaviors, beliefs and habits that may have been useful earlier in our lives, but are not useful anymore.

I am wondering why it is that, as we manage to juggle partners, families, demanding jobs, caring for parents and more, we might overextend ourselves rather than find a way to lessen the load. We can know in our rational minds that we have agency and can make choices that protect us from this kind of ongoing treadmill, yet so often we continue to live in frenzied doing, long after some of the doing needs to be done.

What the goblin might be telling us.

Maybe we genuinely think we can do more than we can, because we have always done more than we planned, or maybe we simply overestimate what’s possible. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called this behavior the planning fallacy in their 1979 study. In 1994, researcher Roger Buehler and his colleagues found that people continue to underestimate how long a task will take, even with previous evidence that it will take longer. These ideas might explain how we overcommit, but they don’t explain why saying no, where there is no real cost, can still leave us managing the goblin of guilt.

That made me wonder: what if, when we do say no, or we step back from doing so much, that there is a tangible cost to that decision? And maybe that cost is not about what we might miss, or whether we let someone down, or even what someone else might feel about our actions. Maybe it’s about whether the decision to do less alters how we feel about ourselves.

In 2001, psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe suggested that our levels of self-esteem are not only variable, but they can depend on domains that are central to our feelings of self-worth. This might suggest that the goblin of guilt appears not only because we are concerned about what others think of us, but also because our sense of self-worth might depend on perceiving ourselves as being capable enough. Perhaps saying no can make us feel like we’re not enough, even when there is no truth in that feeling.

The quiet after saying no.

Now, as I write, with a cup of green tea and no distractions, I notice that my goblin is quieter, maybe because I have chosen not to obey the chatter. And I am still questioning: is the goal for the goblin chatter to fade until it becomes silent and irrelevant? Can we replace it with simple acceptance that knowing when it’s too much is OK?

I don’t have these answers yet, and would love you to think along with me while I learn and develop these ideas.

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What I Read.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. In S. Makridakis & S. C. Wheelwright (Eds.), Forecasting (TIMS Studies in the Management Sciences, Vol. 12, pp. 313–327). North-Holland.

Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366

Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.593