Have you just tried saying no?
People like to say “Have you just tried saying no?” as if it is the most straightforward instruction in the world. It sounds simple. Harmless. Rational. But for me, and for many ADHD and autistic adults I know, saying no is one of the most complicated things we ever learn to do. It is not a matter of preference or politeness. It is a matter of survival, identity and years of conditioning that shaped how we see ourselves.
For most of my life, my first reaction to any request has been yes. I do not even think of no as an option. It does not occur to me. My brain is wired to agree, to take things on, to step in, to fill the gap. I can hear the yes forming before the question is even finished. I often want to say no, but I say yes almost automatically. The realisation that no even exists is something that has only started to surface for me recently.
For a long time, I assumed this was just my helpful nature. But I have come to understand something deeper about myself. This pattern was shaped by the belief that being useful was the only way to have worth. It informed how I behaved at school, at work and in relationships. I learned that if I was helpful, capable and reliable, people would value me. If I was calm in a crisis or able to carry more than others, I would be seen. I became the person who stepped in when others stepped back, the one who could always be counted on, the one people called when things went wrong. It worked. I was rewarded for it. But it also taught me that my usefulness was my currency.
When your worth is tied to usefulness, “no” becomes dangerous. Saying yes feels safe because it maintains the role you believe keeps you accepted. Saying no feels like exposing something you do not want anyone to see. It feels like admitting limits. It feels like disappointing people. It feels like rejecting the identity you have built around competence. In my case, it often feels like risking belonging entirely.
I have spent years responding to requests from a place of reflex and fear, not choice. If someone asks me to take on something extra, my first thought is that I should, and my second thought is that I have already failed by even considering saying no. I immediately imagine being seen as unreliable or uncaring. I imagine letting people down. I imagine losing respect. My mind floods with internal pressure long before I have considered whether I actually have the time or energy to do the thing being asked.
There is another part of this that I have only recently started to recognise, and it explains why my yes arrives so quickly. Impulsivity plays a bigger role in this pattern than I ever understood. I leap before I think. I agree before I have processed anything. Something can sound like a good idea in the moment and within seconds I have committed to it. Often I am already imagining the best version of how it could go. I say yes to that imagined outcome, not the practical reality. Then the details catch up with me, and by that point it feels too late to pull back. The guilt arrives. The responsibility lands. And I am left wondering how I ended up in the same place again. This is classic impulsivity as experienced by so many ADHD’ers and one of the reasons that ADHD is classed as a disability.
This is made more complicated by the way my nervous system works. My interoception is unreliable and my sense of what I can handle is often delayed or muted. I do not always notice I am overwhelmed until I am far past my limits. I don’t always recognise that I am tired, or unfocused, or emotionally stretched until something collapses. This is common in ADHD and autism. Our internal signals can be faint or confusing. Our emotional states can be hard to name. Alexithymia, the difficulty identifying internal feelings, is part of this picture. If I cannot always tell what I am feeling, it becomes even harder to judge whether a request is manageable.
Time blindness, another common feature of ADHD, makes all of this harder. The way I describe ADHD time blindness is that most people experience time as a line stretching out in front of them. They can see tasks arranged along that line, with a sense of what comes first, how long things will take and how they fit together. For me, time seems more like a wall. All possible tasks sit on it at the same distance and the same apparent size. There is no natural order or sense of duration. Choosing what to do next becomes a matter of which task gives my brain the strongest pull in the moment. So when someone asks me to do something, it feels like adding just one more square to the wall. It does not look big or costly until much later, and by then the yes is already out of my mouth.
On top of this, I have a strong justice sensitivity that pulls me towards stepping in even when I don’t have capacity. If something feels unfair or someone is struggling, my instinct is to help. I have a heightened sense of responsibility, shaped by years of being the reliable one. It can feel almost impossible to tolerate the discomfort of seeing a gap and not filling it. This makes saying no feel not only uncomfortable but morally wrong, even when it costs me.
There is also something that psychologists call demand anxiety. Some ND adults experience any expectation as a form of pressure, even internal expectations. When I am asked for something, the sense of demand lands in my nervous system before I have thought through what it means. My mind races to the fastest way to reduce the pressure, which is often yes. The impulse offers relief, but only temporarily. Later, the emotional and practical cost returns.
All of this sits on top of years of internalised ableism. I spent years believing that having needs, limits or fatigue was unacceptable. I held myself to standards that were unrealistic and harsh. If I struggled or needed rest, I saw it as weakness. So I overcompensated by doing more. If I felt overwhelmed, I pushed harder. If I was exhausted, I told myself to keep going. Saying no felt like admitting I was incapable. Saying yes helped maintain the illusion that I was fine.
The last few years have shown me the cost of that illusion. My energy has dropped. My capacity has shifted. The consequences of always saying yes have become clearer and harder to deny. I have started to see how much I gave up to maintain an identity built on usefulness. I can look back now and recognise the patterns of burnout, the ways I disappeared into responsibility, the toll it took on my mental and physical health and how much I lost by refusing to acknowledge my own limits. All through my life I have had periods where “every now and then I fall apart” in the words of the great Bonnie Tyler. This was my body finally having to cash all the cheques that saying yes had written.
It is not lost on me that ADHD and workaholism are closely linked in the research. Large population studies have found that adults with ADHD are significantly more likely to become workaholic, often because we feel we have to work twice as hard to keep up or to compensate for the places our executive function makes life harder. That pattern felt uncomfortably familiar when I first read it. I have always pushed through exhaustion, believing that effort could paper over every crack. It worked for a long time, until it didn’t. Eventually my body started sending the bill for every year I had spent running on pressure and responsibility.
Perfectionism is another pattern that shows up far more often in ADHD than people realise, not as vanity or high standards but as a kind of overcorrection for years of being told we should try harder or be more consistent. Many adults with ADHD swing between being told they are careless or underperforming and then trying to become the most reliable person in the room. High standards, fear of mistakes and harsh self criticism grow out of that experience. Over time, that perfectionism does not actually protect us. It feeds self doubt, avoidance, burnout and the belief that anything less than overworking is failure. Seeing this described in research was unsettling, but also strangely relieving. It reminded me that this was not a personal flaw. It was a pattern many of us fall into when our brains and our environments are out of sync.
The hardest part of learning to say no has been confronting the belief that if I am not useful, I am nothing. This belief is old and deep. It shaped my behaviour long before I understood anything about neurodiversity or trauma. It shaped how I saw myself at work and in my relationships. It shaped my boundaries, or lack of them. It shaped my entire view of what it means to be good, responsible and worthy. Letting go of that belief feels like dismantling the foundation of my identity.
But something else has been emerging beneath the fear. I have started to imagine a version of me who is not built around usefulness. A version who does not carry everything. A version who does not need to earn his place in the world by over functioning. A version who has needs and honours them. A version who can rest without guilt. A version who can say no because his worth is not conditional.
This version of me feels unfamiliar, but not impossible. He feels like someone who is allowed to exist. Someone who is not constantly braced for the next demand. Someone who is present with the people he loves. Someone who can build a life with structure that works for him, not against him. Someone who works in a way that aligns with his energy. Someone who chooses what matters instead of reacting to everything that arrives. Someone who has hobbies, interests, curiosity and space. Someone who is more than the sum of what he can do for others.
Learning to say no is teaching me to see myself differently. It is teaching me that my worth was never meant to come from usefulness, or indeed from others. It is teaching me that I do not need to be exceptional to be valued. It is teaching me that I am allowed to have limits. It is teaching me that capacity changes and that this is not failure. It is teaching me that my nervous system is not lying to me when it asks for rest or boundaries. It is teaching me that the world does not collapse when I cannot carry everything. It is teaching me that I need to be kind to myself first. To put on my own oxygen mask before helping others.
If I were coaching someone on this, I would not start with the word no at all. I would start with the pause before the answer, because the pause is where the truth lives. I would ask them to notice the moment before their automatic yes arrives, the moment that is usually skipped over. I would ask what they are trying to protect when they agree so quickly. What they imagine would happen if they gave themselves thirty seconds before responding.
I would ask them to think of a moment when they said yes and later regretted it, and what their body had tried to tell them at the time. What boundaries already exist in their life, even in small ways, and how those boundaries feel compared to the ones they avoid. I would invite them to pick one tiny thing they can say no to without consequence and to observe what happens inside them when they try. The aim is not to become someone who refuses things, but to find one place where their worth does not rise or fall on usefulness and to build from there.
The goal is not confidence, but clarity. Not rejection, but self respect.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, I would be interested to hear your experience. These patterns can feel private and shameful, but many of us learned the same lessons about usefulness, belonging and the cost of limits. Saying no is not the end of who you are. It is the beginning of meeting the person underneath the responsibility. None of this changes overnight. It arrives slowly, through pauses, through noticing, through choosing differently one small moment at a time. And while I am still learning, still uncomfortable, still catching myself falling into old patterns, there is a quiet shift beginning to take shape. A version of me that feels less like a reaction and more like a life.
Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Sinha, R., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2016). The Relationships between Workaholism and Symptoms of Psychiatric Disorders: A Large-Scale Cross-Sectional Study. _PloS one_, _11_(5), e0152978. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152978
When ADHD And Perfectionism Collide: How To Manage High Expectations With ADHD - https://add.org/adhd-and-perfectionism/
Counselling Directory. (2025). Adult ADHD, self compassion and relationships - https://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/articles/adult-adhd-self-compassion-and-relationships
