Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel · LinkedIn

How to Say No: The Psychology of Defiance with Dr. Sunita Sah

December 1, 2025·34 min·3 clips

Dr. Sunita Sah names the hidden psychological force that makes you tip a bad hairdresser and eat overcooked steak.

The question is simple and uneasy. What happens when the thing you want to refuse is tangled up with being good, being nice, or respecting someone with more power? Hempel starts with her own history. She remembers childhood lessons about pleasing others, including a hug she did not really want to give and a book she did not really want to read. That memory earns its place. It turns saying no from a handy tactic into an adult problem learned early and carried into authority dynamics. The stakes stay real. Hempel says refusal can have consequences, and those consequences fall harder on some people. Then Sunita lays out a path for refusing. The excerpt catches the uneven middle: questioning, practicing, slipping back into compliance, and slowly learning how to move toward clearer defiance. Practice matters more than attitude. In Sunita's account, stage five sounds less like one brave speech and more like a skill built by repetition, including the times it goes badly. The strongest turn is consent. Sunita separates consent from compliance by taking the idea of informed consent from medicine and bringing it into everyday and serious decisions. Compliance comes from outside pressure. Peers, authority figures, expectations, or the situation itself can shape it, even when the person appears to agree. Consent asks more. Capacity, knowledge, understanding, freedom to say no, and authorization all need to be present before a yes or no is informed. Freedom is the hinge. Without a real ability to refuse, the choice shrinks into compliance, and defiance starts to look less like opposition than quiet authority.

As heard by us

A measured case for making no count.

This Hello Monday episode treats saying no as a skill people often have to unlearn. Jessi Hempel starts with the habits that reward being good, nice, and agreeable, then follows that logic into adulthood, where refusal can still feel loaded when the other person has more power.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Say no when yes feels automatic.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel