Drifting

"I am able to say 'no' when someone has a big ask of me. Let's say they asked me to attend a party tonight but I have other plans, I can say 'no' easily. What I struggle with is saying 'no' to many small asks that eventually build up to something big. By the time I am ready to say 'no', I feel guilty. How do I prevent this?"This was a question from a student during the 'boundaries and difficult conversations' class of my undergrad relationships course. It was a profound observation. And the very next day, I experienced it personally. A friend asked if I'd like to join her to visit a store. I wanted to independently go there anyway, so I said 'yes'. It was close to home, and I had an hour to spare, so I thought 'why not'. But that one visit quietly expanded into a quick bite at a cafe nearby, and then another store next door. I had not planned for any of these additional stops. With each new ask, I kept thinking 'well, it's only another 10 minutes, I don't want to be difficult, let's do it'. What I didn't notice was the growing resistance inside of me with each new ask 'hey, this is not what you agreed to'. I kept overriding this to preserve social harmony, while letting the cost of personal inconvenience accumulate slowly. By the time I finally said no, two hours had passed and the cost of saying 'no' had now grown much larger than it needed to be. In retrospect, I realised that I was evaluating each ask incrementally, in isolation, rather than cumulatively. Had I treated it as a fresh decision to be made, "Will you join me for a visit to the temple and a cafe after?", my response would've been wildly different from the one I gave earlier for "Will you join me for a visit to the temple?"Turns out, my body was tracking the cumulative trade-offs implicitly even when my mind wasn't. The discomfort was the signal, but I just wasn't listening to it soon enough.In class, my response to the student was to build awareness of one's personal boundaries to begin with, so it be