When Saying Yes Leaves You Numb: Desire, People-Pleasing, and Soul Discernment

You keep saying yes while something in you quietly goes numb.

You are tired in a way that sleep cannot touch, and when someone asks what you actually want, you feel a kind of blankness, or panic, or anger that has nowhere to land. This reflection sits right in that exhausted space, for the person who has spent a long time making other people more comfortable than themselves and is no longer sure what desire even means. If you recognize yourself here, you are not being analyzed or fixed. You are being invited to stay with what is already true.

You may notice it in small, ordinary moments.

Someone asks where you want to go for dinner, and you answer, “Oh, I’m good with whatever,” before you even look inside.

A coworker says, “Can you take this on? It would really help me out,” and your mouth says yes while your stomach rolls a little.

A family member hints, again, that they’re disappointed you are not more available, more responsive, more like the version of you they hold in their mind. You feel the familiar pull to rearrange your life to quiet their discomfort.

If you try to slow down enough to ask yourself, “What do I actually want here?” the answer does not come quickly. Sometimes it does not come at all.

That absence has a cost. Not just more work, more burnout, more resentment. A slow erosion of your sense that your life belongs to you.

You may have adapted so thoroughly to everyone else’s needs that the very word “desire” feels suspicious. Selfish. Dangerous. Or simply foreign.

Yet, underneath all the overextension and exhaustion, desire has not left you. It has gone quiet, or sideways, or underground. It might only show up as irritability, fantasy, or a dull ache that feels like meaninglessness.

You are not broken for feeling this. You are revealing where you have been living for a long time.

For many people who chronically people‑please, desire has been trained into a narrow shape.

On the surface, it can sound generous:

“I just want everyone to be okay.” 

“I’m happiest when everyone around me is happy.” 

“I don’t really need much for myself.”

Often, that is partly true. There is real love in you, real capacity to care.

But if you sit with it a little longer, you may start to hear another layer:

“I want everyone to be okay so they won’t be angry with me.” 

“I’m happiest when everyone is happy because then I can relax my guard.” 

“I don’t really need much because needing feels dangerous.”

Desire here is not absent. It is directing itself toward safety, approval, and the relief of not being in trouble. It is still a form of desire, but it uses you up in the process.

You could call this kind of wanting a “taking” desire. Not because you are greedy or cruel, but because the energy is bent toward securing something that feels scarce: acceptance, reassurance, a sense that you are allowed to exist.

You keep paying for that in ways you are no longer sure you can afford.

Underneath, another kind of desire waits. A different hunger that is not about possessing or appeasing, but about responding to what you deeply value.

The part of you that lights up when you get to be quietly competent without fanfare. 

The part of you that feels strangely alive when you are mentoring, or creating, or walking in the woods with your phone off. 

The part of you that aches when you watch someone else live with a kind of integrity you have only allowed yourself to taste in moments.

This kind of desire does not want to consume. It wants to give itself to something that matters. It wants to pour out, but not in order to disappear.

The trouble is, if you have lived a long time serving everyone else’s comfort, you may not trust that this deeper desire is allowed. Or you may not recognize it when it first speaks.

The conflict between these layers often shows up as confusion.

You say yes to the project, the visit, the favor. On the surface, you can list the reasons: it is “the right thing,” it will “really help them,” it is “not that big a deal.”

But in the car afterward, or awake at 2 a.m., another voice mutters, “I did not want that.”

You feel both righteous and resentful. 

Both generous and erased. 

Both proud of being dependable and crushed by being depended on.

This inner division can be so familiar you no longer notice it as division. It just feels like you.

Some people try to sort it out by getting stricter:

“I’ll just start saying no.” 

“I’ll set hard boundaries with everyone.” 

“I’ll stop caring so much.”

But if you have never really been allowed to want, even your no can become another performance. Another way to prove something, or stay safe, rather than a true expression of desire.

Discernment in this tangle is not neat. It asks you to admit that you are not of one mind. That parts of you are fighting for different things, and all of them have their reasons.

It is deeply uncomfortable to sit still in that divided place without rushing to a quick answer. Yet that is often where something real first becomes visible.

It might happen like this:

You are standing in your kitchen, scrolling through your email on a Tuesday night. A message pops up: “Could you please help with…?” It is kind, framed as a request, but you receive it as expectation.

Your chest tightens. Shoulders creep up toward your ears. Your thumb hovers over “Sure, happy to!” because that is what you usually write without thinking.

You set the phone down on the counter instead.

The refrigerator hums. There is a spoon in the sink with a smear of peanut butter still on it. You can hear the muffled sound of a television from another room.

You realize your jaw is clenched.

For ten seconds, you do not respond.

Nothing mystical happens. No thunderbolt of clarity. Just the stark awareness: “I do not know if I want to do this. But I know I am very used to not asking.”

That ten-second pause is the size of a crack in a wall. Small enough to ignore. Large enough that, if you keep returning to it, something in you may start to grow through.

Listening for desire in a life shaped by people‑pleasing can feel like trying to hear a whisper in a crowded room.

One way to begin is to look back, gently, at recent choices and notice whose desires actually ran the show.

Think of the last few big yeses and noes: 

The commitment you took on at work. 

The family decision you stayed silent about. 

The social plan you agreed to even though you were exhausted.

If you let yourself replay those moments, not to judge, but to observe, what do you notice?

Did you picture someone’s disappointment more vividly than your own depletion? 

Did you imagine conflict so sharply that your own longing never even stepped onto the stage? 

Did the phrase, “It’s just easier if I…” become a kind of spell that erased your own presence?

You may discover that many of your choices have been shaped by other people’s imagined reactions rather than your own true desire. That is painful to see. It is also honest.

From there, you can start to ask quieter, even more beneficial questions:

What did I actually want in that situation, even if I could not have it? 

What part of me got overridden? 

What did I hope my yes or no would buy me?

This is not about defending every preference or turning inward in self-absorption. It is about learning to locate yourself in the story at all.

Desire will often show itself first in your body before it forms a sentence.

Tightness in your chest when you imagine another year of saying yes to everything. 

A heaviness in your limbs when you picture a certain relationship you keep rescuing. 

A buzzing, restless energy when you think of a possibility you have not even said aloud.

You may have learned to dismiss these signals: “I’m just being dramatic,” “I’m overreacting,” “I’m too sensitive.”

What if, instead, you treated them as messengers?

“I notice my stomach knot when I think about that request. What is that knot wanting for me?” 

“I feel a little lighter when I imagine saying no. What does that lightness know?” 

“I feel unexpected warmth when I remember that old dream. What is this warmth pointing toward?”

You do not have to trust every feeling blindly. But exiling them all erases you from your own life.

Sometimes imagination can help you separate the voices.

If you picture yourself a year from now, having continued exactly as you are, what is that future life like for you? Where is there more life? Where has something in you gone dim?

Then picture a small change. Not a dramatic overhaul, just one consistent shift: saying no to one kind of request, or giving one hour a week to something that makes you feel surprisingly alive.

How does that image sit in your body? Fearful? Relieved? Both?

You are not looking for an instant, total blueprint. You are learning the flavor of your own truest yes, and the ache of your necessary no.

Some desires are small and immediate. A nap. A day off. A conversation you have been avoiding.

Others feel larger, more like a direction than a specific outcome. A desire to live with more integrity. To be less scattered. To be more available to the people and work that matter most to you.

You might call these “greater” desires. Not because they are grand or heroic, but because they stretch beyond appeasing today’s anxiety. They lean toward a life that is more coherent, more deeply aligned with what you sense to be worthy of your soul.

Such desires often require sacrifice. Not the self-erasure you are used to, but letting go of roles, expectations, and patterns that kept you safe, but not whole.

To follow them, even a little, is to accept that choice is not only a burden. It is a form of freedom.

You may resist this fiercely. Freedom means you cannot blame everyone else for how tired you are. It means acknowledging that some of your sacrifices were not pure generosity, but also attempts to manage how loved you felt.

That is not a verdict against you. It is the kind of truth that can open a door.

The journey from people‑pleasing toward a more authentic life will not be linear. You will say yes when you mean no. You will overcorrect and say no where love invited you to show up.

You may not get clear answers as quickly as you want.

But slowly, as you keep noticing, keep asking, keep imagining, you may start to feel an inner compass take shape. Not as a rigid rulebook, but as a growing sense of, “This is more me,” and, “This costs me in ways I cannot afford anymore.”

If you want a place to begin, it may be as gentle as three questions you return to over time:

1. Where am I most consistently tired of myself? 

   Not just physically exhausted, but weary of the way I keep showing up. Those patterns often reveal where you have been outsourcing your worth.

2. When in the last month did I feel a quiet sense of rightness? 

   Not excitement or admiration, but a simple, grounded “this fits.” What were you doing? Who were you with? How did your body feel?

3. What small act of honesty about my desire could I risk next? 

   Not a massive life change. Perhaps telling one person, “I actually don’t want to do that,” or admitting to yourself, “I really long for more time alone,” without immediately talking yourself out of it.

You are not trying to become someone else. You are trying to become less divided within.

Over time, desire can shift from something you fear or suppress into something that helps you navigate. Not a tyrant demanding its way, but a compass pointing you toward a life where your giving is real because you are actually there to give it.

Your people do not need the hollowed‑out, endlessly accommodating version of you as much as you have been taught. They need the you who is rooted enough to say, “This is what I can offer freely,” and, “This is where I cannot go.”

You may not yet believe that such a you is possible. You may not trust that the Divine, or the universe, or life itself, would welcome that version of you rather than punish it.

That uncertainty is part of the path.

You do not have to solve it today. You might only need to stay long enough at the kitchen counter with your jaw unclenching, your hand not yet answering that email, and your own quiet question rising:

“What do I actually want, and what would it mean to honor that, even a little?”

If you’d like company as you keep exploring questions like these, you can subscribe to receive future reflections. They will not tell you what to choose, but they may help you hear what is already moving in you.

Live and Lead with Soul,

     Ben Shoup