You are exhausted. Your day to day routine has been you trying to figure out how to put a smile on everyone’s face around you, you haven’t even been able to put a smile on your own.

You don’t want to say “no” to a friend or family member or offend anyone, even if you have a valid excuse. This is you choosing their happiness over your own. Stop it, right now.

It’s hard to realize sometimes, but you weren’t put on this earth to make everyone else around you happy. I mean yeah you are always supposed to be there for your friends and family when they need you, but when you start to deteriorate that’s when it starts to cause problems.

You start feeling so tired all the time and feel like you can’t prioritize your own life because you’re always too busy making sure everyone else’s is fine and dandy. You would never let them know that though because again, you don’t want to make anyone sad or mad at you.

Your friends ask you to go out one night, but you have so much homework that’s due the next day. They beg you to go out and try to encourage you. You say “yes,” because you don’t want to miss out on anything, and more importantly, you don’t want to upset anyone by saying “no.”

So, you go out, and you then have work the next day. You wake up and is insanely hungover because you said “yes,” to the seventh shot of the night, and you are now also broke. Your boss is walking towards you and asks if you would like to pick up a few more assignments if you aren’t too busy already. You are running off a couple hours of sleep and already have a packed full planner. You don’t even hesitate and accept the challenge. You worry that if you say “no,” that your boss will be upset with you, or even worse, fire you.

You are now just in a constant cycle of saying “yes,” and people taking constant advantage of you.

STOP IT.

Master the word “no,” and use it when you start to feel overwhelmed. You are in full control of what happens in your life, and what you do with it. Worry about yourself, and what is happening in YOUR life, and stop trying to please everyone because that is actually impossible. Someone will always not like you, so stop putting forth so much energy towards perfecting everyone around you and work on the most important thing, which is you.