 Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won't accept, says Anna Taylor. Have you ever been in a situation when someone asks for your help and you want to say no, knowing you don't have enough of the needed resources? But because you don't want to disappoint the other person, you say yes. If yes, then this is for you. You are about to learn why you should say no more often if you want to live a happy and fulfilled life. There is an innate tendency for many people to help or please others. We want people to like us. We want to feel useful, relevant and valuable. So much so that we often stretch ourselves very thin. Instead of feeling good after altruism, we feel stressed, used and resentful because we get drained by too many things we have to do. We are always running against the clock with our schedules, often filled with things we don't have to do. Learning how to say no is a skill which promotes efficiency in both our careers and everyday lives as the benefits are many. When you learn to say no to requests and some opportunities you should say no to, you get to sustain your creativity, promote your general well-being and have an overall balance. These outcomes directly translate to a truly successful life. The difference between just being successful and being outstandingly successful might be the ability to say no when you have to. According to Warren Buffett, the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything. If you want to be happy and successful, you need to learn how to say no when you should. The following is a list of 8 reasons why happy people say no more often. In this list could be something to spur you to learn the skill. 1. You have limitations. While you want to be all you can be to everyone, the truth remains that there is only so much you can do with your limited resources. You are not all powerful and you don't have the whole time in the world as we all get 24 hours daily. You need to consider this if you want to have a healthy and balanced life. If you don't do this, you risk pushing yourself too hard and pushing yourself too hard will lead to the next reason you should learn to say no. 2. The stress factor. When you only say yes to everyone, you get too much to do on your plate and this leaves you no time to rest, you may not even realize that you need it. What this does is that it leads to you getting stressed out. Stress has serious consequences which include illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure. Saying no could mean you care for your health. Instead of getting stressed out, save yourself the unnecessary stress and say no. 3. Allows hand picking of friends and acquaintances. They exist those people who want to take advantage of anyone and everyone who enables them. They demand and demand and never give. They always need your help and can make you feel bad if you don't offer it. Such people are toxic. Saying no allows you to get rid of them from your life. Since they are usually selfish and tend to leech, when you no longer indulge their many demands and don't support their selfish nature, they will most likely withdraw. It would be plain to them that there is no reason to continue in the relationship with you. Saying no allows you to weed out the not-so-useful people in your life. Use it. 4. Saves time. As implied earlier, you are not and do not have unlimited resources. And so you have to manage your limited resources of which time is one. For each second spent, a part of your life is also consumed as time is the unit of life. Saying no helps to save your time for only what is beneficial and useful to you. When you say yes to everything, there's the probability to major in the minor things and this means that you end up being too tired or too late to do the important stuff. By saying no, you are honoring your priorities and so the essentials are done. Say no and save time for those things that make your life better. 5. Preserve energy. Another limited resource is your energy. With fewer items on your to-do list, you can use your available strength to accomplish excellent results on whatever you have to do. Having too much to do gets you too tired to pay attention to details and you might end up doing sloppy work. When you say no, you are taking the opportunity to cut back on your energy expenditure and saving it for those crucial things of life. When there is a need or request made, you should ask yourself if it's vital for you to spend and commit your energy to the activity. If the answer is not an emphatic yes, maybe you should say a definite no. 6. Get focused. If you would attain greatness, there is a need for intentional focus, the focus of time, energy, finances and whatever else you need to achieve the necessary goals. Having too many things to do on your to-do list means sparing each item a mere glance instead of the required focus which would have been the case with few necessary items. When you say no, you get reminded of the things you already have to do and you focus on them and get them done. Saying yes to new ideas may serve as a distraction from the goal. Learning to say no means allowing yourself to focus on what needs to be done, when it needs to be done and how it needs to be done. 7. Get stronger. At the beginning, saying no might seem and feel like a weakness. But as time goes on and as you stick to your priorities, you get stronger as you have become better at taking charge of your life and sticking to your needs. As you get stronger and feel more in charge, you become more confident as you are deliberate and intentional about your day-to-day living. The knowledge of the fact that you're putting up and honouring your boundaries will build self-respect within you. Not only will you earn your respect, but you will also gain the respect of others. They may not like you very much for saying no to them, but they will respect you for your decisiveness. 8. Abundant living Many times, abundant living is synonymous with an uncomplicated life. Saying no means that you will have fewer activities to juggle, fewer responsibilities to worry about, and fewer things to strike off on the would-have-been-burgeoning list. These changes lead to a simple life which will be full of achieved goals, breathing space and rest. For every yes you say, you burden yourself with a responsibility which takes another part of your life, increasing the complicatedness. Saying no helps you avoid life being complicated and helps you live fully. Aside from the need to create a balance and live fully, saying no means you are actively honouring your truth. Saying yes when you want to say no is you denying or obscuring your truth, and for each time you do this you lose a part of yourself, and before long you'll be living for everyone and everything but for yourself and your life's purpose. You need to realise that the onus is on you to build the boundaries of your life and stick to them. That is how you gain respect. While saying no is usually uncomfortable the first few times, you need to choose between being temporarily uncomfortable and being resentful when the activities choke you. You have to choose between being uncomfortable and overcommitting your time, energy and finance. The interesting thing about saying no is that no is a complete sentence, and merely saying you can't do something serves and you don't need to explain. Finally, in the words of Stephanie Lahart, let today mark a new beginning for you. Permit yourself to say no without feeling guilty, mean or selfish. Anybody who gets upset or expects you to say yes all the time clearly doesn't have your best interest at heart. Always remember, you have a right to say no without having to explain yourself. Be at peace with your decisions.