Every Yes Costs Something
A yes never exists in isolation. It takes time, attention or energy from somewhere else, and for women accustomed to caring, organising and accommodating, the person quietly paying the bill is often themselves.
Most of us know the sort of yes that leaves our mouth before the rest of us has had time to vote.
Yes, I can pick that up. Yes, I’ll cover it. Yes, come over. Yes, I can squeeze that in. Yes, of course I’ll help.
Often, it really is fine. We say yes because we love somebody, because the task matters, because we want to contribute or because helping another person is one of the things that makes life worthwhile. The problem is not generosity.
The more interesting problem is that a yes never arrives alone.
Susanne Ridolfi poses a deceptively simple question: “Whenever you say yes to something, what are you saying no to?”
Once you begin answering that properly, boundaries start to look rather different.
The extra meeting might be a no to the walk you had planned. The favour you agree to could take the only unstructured hour left in the weekend. A social commitment may cost sleep. Saying yes to keeping the peace may mean saying no to expressing what you actually think. None of these trades is necessarily wrong, but they are still trades.
As Susanne points out, the person who receives the hidden no is often ourselves.
Boundaries have a branding problem
Boundaries have acquired an oddly combative reputation. The language around them can make ordinary human relationships sound like disputed territory: drawing lines, cutting people off, protecting your peace, refusing access. Sometimes a hard boundary is exactly what is required, but that is not the only way to understand what a boundary does.
Steph heard something more useful in Susanne’s framing. To her, the conversation transformed boundaries into a form of wealth management.
The wealth in question is energy.
Thinking about boundaries this way shifts the emphasis away from whether you are justified in refusing somebody else and towards a more practical question: where do you want a finite resource to go?
That is particularly relevant in the messy middle, when the number of simultaneous claims on one person can become slightly absurd. Children may be older without necessarily requiring less emotional attention. Parents may need increasing support. Careers shift or intensify. Bodies become less predictable. Relationships need tending. Friendships matter. Life admin breeds quietly when nobody is looking.
Even a good life can become an energetically crowded one.
The difficulty is that many forms of expenditure do not look dramatic while they are happening. It is rarely one enormous request that empties the tank. More often it is the accumulation of small, reasonable yeses, each one defensible on its own.
An audit for something we rarely measure
One of Susanne’s most practical suggestions is what she calls an energy audit. Rather than beginning with rules about what you should stop doing, it starts with observation.
What depletes you? What energises you? Who leaves you feeling more alive? Which people, commitments or environments consistently leave you drained?
The exercise is useful precisely because it is so ordinary. It asks us to pay attention to information many of us already have but rarely treat as information.
There are people after whose company we feel lighter, more interested in life or somehow more ourselves. There are tasks that demand considerable effort but leave behind a satisfying kind of tiredness. Then there are interactions that seem to require an invisible recovery period. There are recurring commitments we dread for days beforehand and feel flattened by afterwards. There are places, conversations and habits that consume more than we register in the moment.
An energy audit does not require us to turn those reactions into moral judgements. A draining person is not automatically a bad person. An exhausting responsibility is not necessarily one we should abandon. The point is simply to stop pretending that cost does not exist because the thing itself is worthwhile.
Caring for somebody can be exhausting and meaningful. Parenting can take an enormous amount of energy without becoming something we wish to avoid. A career transition may feel destabilising while still being exactly the change we want. Grief, advocacy, learning and creative work can all be costly.
The useful distinction is not between easy and hard. It is between cost and value.
Is this expenditure worth what it gives back, now or later? Is it something I actively choose? If it is unavoidable, what else needs to change because this is currently consuming more of me?
Those are far more realistic questions than simply asking whether something “drains your energy”.
The competence trap
Susanne also raises a broader question: why do women so often put themselves at the bottom of the list when it comes to caring?
There is obviously no single answer. Family structures, social expectations, economics, personality and circumstance all play a role, and reducing the issue to “women need to choose themselves” would be both simplistic and irritating.
Still, there is a recognisable pattern worth examining.
Many women become extremely skilled at anticipation. They see what needs doing before another person has noticed there is a problem. They remember appointments, monitor emotional weather, organise logistics and absorb the small disruptions that keep households, workplaces and families functioning.
That competence can be a source of pride and a genuine expression of care. It can also become so normal that the person doing it stops recognising how much energy it consumes.
This is where Susanne’s question about every yes becomes less like a boundary slogan and more like an accounting tool. Saying “yes, I’ll handle it” may mean saying no to rest. Saying yes to avoiding conflict may mean no to honesty. Saying yes to another commitment may mean no to the piece of work, friendship or quiet time you keep insisting you will get around to eventually.
Once the trade becomes visible, you can decide whether you still want to make it.
That is different from being told to practise more self-care, a phrase now broad enough to cover everything from adequate sleep to buying something expensive that smells faintly of eucalyptus.
“Me time” does not have to compete with “we time”
Another part of Susanne’s definition of wealth helps prevent this from becoming a celebration of individualism. She talks about the relationship between “me time” and “we time”, and about her experience that honouring time for herself can leave her with more to give to other people.
The two are not necessarily opposing categories.
Time alone does not automatically come at the expense of connection. Sometimes it improves the quality of that connection. A little quiet, rest or mental space can help us distinguish between the things we genuinely want to give and the things we agree to simply because our automatic yes arrived first.
Susanne’s morning practices are deliberately modest: hydration, breathing, gratitude, quiet. There is no grand optimisation regime. The value seems to lie less in the specific sequence than in creating enough silence to notice what is going on internally before the demands of the day begin making decisions on our behalf.
Of course, five quiet minutes cannot compensate for a structurally impossible life. A morning ritual will not provide childcare, solve an unmanageable workload or make caring responsibilities disappear. It would be insulting to pretend otherwise.
What a small pause can provide is information.
And sometimes information is the beginning of a different decision.
Listening is not the same as changing
This is where Gry’s response to the conversation adds an important complication. We can become quite accomplished at noticing our own needs while remaining equally accomplished at overriding them.
You can know that a situation drains you and keep volunteering for it. You can recognise that you are tired and decide that the sensible response is to become even more efficient. You can feel the reluctance in your body, understand exactly what it means and still hear yourself saying yes.
Listening, in other words, is not the same as acting.
Gry’s position is useful because she is not arguing that energy should always be conserved. She likes momentum and activity. Her question is about direction. Where is the energy going, and does that destination deserve it?
That distinction matters. The objective is not to construct a life in which nothing is difficult, inconvenient or draining. It is to become more conscious of which expenditures are chosen, which are unavoidable and which continue largely because nobody — including us — has stopped to question them.
Before the next automatic yes
The next time a request arrives and you feel the reflexive yes forming, it may be worth creating a little space before answering.
Ask yourself: If I say yes to this, what am I also saying no to?
Sometimes the answer will make the decision easy. You may be perfectly happy to exchange an hour of television for helping a friend, or a free Saturday morning for something you care deeply about.
Sometimes the cost will be considerable but still worthwhile.
And occasionally, you may notice that the no hidden underneath your yes is one you have been making far too often: no to sleep, no to your health, no to your work, no to time alone, no to a relationship that needs attention, or simply no to being a person with preferences rather than permanent availability.
None of this makes the answer automatically no.
It simply makes the yes more honest.
Perhaps that is a more useful way to think about boundaries. They are not walls around a carefully protected life. They are decisions about what we are willing to spend in order to participate fully in it.
Podcast invitation
In Vitalify Unplugged’s conversation with Susanne Ridolfi, Steph, Gry and Susanne explore the idea of energy as wealth, Susanne’s practical energy audit, why “me time” can strengthen rather than undermine “we time”, and the gap between noticing what our bodies and energy are telling us and actually changing anything in response.
Listen for one deceptively simple question that may make your next automatic yes rather harder to give: what am I saying no to when I say yes to this?
