How to Disappoint People

I​​​have spent my life making a concerted effort not to disappoint others, starting with my well-meaning worrywart mama. She passed away in 2023; that same year, I went through medical menopause thanks to breast cancer. Estrogen deprivation and grief handed me a valuable membership to the “we do not care” club; I finally felt like I had permission to prioritize self-care.

At first, I chalked it up to the clarity that arrives when you bury your fiercest champion and face your own mortality in a single brutal year. But there’s both a biology and a sociology to it.

Estrogen amplifies the brain’s bonding chemistry, which may be part of why many women spend their reproductive years finely tuned to others’ needs. As estrogen declines in midlife, the hold that chemistry has on us may loosen.

Midlife is also when the roles that demanded all that attunement start to change: kids leave the nest, parents pass away, and we’re much more free to focus on other things that bring us meaning. Our behavior shifts: one of the longest-running studies of women’s lives found that women exhibit rising social dominance, assertiveness, and self-confidence in midlife.

Declining estrogen also brings wrinkles, sagging skin, weight gain, and greying, thinning hair. All our lives, we’ve been appraised by how we look, and many of us have spent staggering amounts of time, money, and energy trying to measure up, whether or not we ever felt we did. In midlife, the spotlight shifts dramatically to younger women. Invisibility stings, but it’s also liberating. When nobody’s watching, we can stop performing. We can value ourselves for all the things that matter so much more than looking young, things we actually have by now: crystallized intelligence, self-compassion, relationships that have lasted decades, and a lifetime of experience.

A core theme in decades of interviews with women in their 40s and 50s was that menopause is a turning point when women describe finding their voices and giving themselves permission to take care of their own bodies and needs rather than everyone else’s. Margaret Mead is said to have had a name for it: “postmenopausal zest.” I’m telling you, I’m really feeling that.

Although I formally gave up people-pleasing the way some people give up addictive substances in 2016 (see this TEDx Talk about truth-telling), before I was diagnosed with cancer, I still found it challenging to put my own needs, especially those related to food, rest, and exercise, ahead of others. But now, the biological and sociological current is running in my favor.

Joining the “we do not care” club

For most of my life, I held an unconscious belief that I should be able to do it all, meeting my own needs and everyone else’s expectations. (I am a classic eldest daughter.) When someone didn’t get what they needed or wanted from me, I felt responsible for their disappointment. I’d scramble to fix it, smooth it over, and make both my discomfort and theirs go away.

What I see now is that disappointing people is simply what happens when a person tells the truth about their limits. The reality is that no matter how productive we are, how much we work smarter (and, let’s be real: longer and harder), or how fabulous our time management and prioritization are, time is a non-renewable resource. There are only ever 24 hours in a day. That’s just reality.

So when we disappoint people by not giving them everything they hoped for from us, it isn’t a failure of our generosity, character, or ability. It’s a feature of our honesty about the limits of time. When we skip sleep, exercise, or meaningful work just to check something off someone else’s list, something very real in us dies. Avoiding others’ disappointment is a costly effort paid for in resentment, anxiety, and exhaustion. I believe both my mother and I paid for it with our health: she with the ovarian cancer that killed her, and me with the breast cancer I developed while raising four kids and working full-time for a startup from my mom’s hospital room.

Not being able to do it all doesn’t mean that we should try to expand our capacity to do more. The core skill here is to give yourself permission to take care of yourself, even if it means disappointing others.

How to give yourself permission

There’s no single moment when we finally give ourselves permission to prioritize our own needs. It’s something we renew, quietly, over and over. Here’s how to start.

1. Take inventory. Ask yourself: Am I sleeping enough to be present with the people I love? Am I moving my body enough to stay in the game? Am I feeding myself well enough to think clearly? Am I doing the things that bring me joy and fulfillment? Do I have time to relax? To see my friends and the people I love? If the answer is no anywhere, identify your core unmet needs and start thinking about what will need to give—and who will be disappointed when it does—for you to meet them.

2. Recognize that feeling guilty for taking care of yourself is a trained response, not a moral failing. I know you know this, but self-care isn’t selfish. Self-care is what makes it possible to keep supporting others over the long run. When you feel guilty for going to bed instead of calling your mother-in-law, or careless for exercising instead of getting to work early, that feeling isn’t information about your character. It’s a learned emotional habit running quietly in the background. Once you label it an old alarm trained on the wrong danger, it no longer carries the same weight.

3. Practice self-compassion. When self-compassion increases, guilt about prioritizing self-care tends to decrease, and healthy behaviors follow. Higher self-compassion predicts better sleep, better eating, better exercise, better health behavior across the board.

4. Write yourself a permission slip. At Annosa Health, I help women get into new, healthy habits, and corny as it is, the first thing we do is fill out a permission slip: “I authorize myself to [fill in the blank], even if I feel like I “should” be doing something else.” It helps because it names the specific thing you keep almost doing — that you really intend to do, but never quite let yourself do. Spelling out the specific behavior AND the obstacle it will bypass — “I will do X, even when Y feels louder” — roughly doubles follow-through compared to good intentions alone.

5. Start small. Practice saying no to something relatively minor and naming someone’s disappointment without apologizing: “I can’t, and I know that’s not what you were hoping to hear.” Decline an optional coffee, leave a dinner party a little earlier than you feel you should, don’t respond to a text within the hour. Watch what actually happens. We tend to be wrong twice: we overestimate how disappointed other people will feel, and also how long they’ll feel it. People move on faster than we imagine.

When you tell someone you can’t do something, you’re trusting them to accept the truth that you are human, living in a material world where time is limited. Their disappointment is real. You can handle it, and they can too.

This is the practice. Consciously choose your own core needs and highest priorities first, rather than deferring to others’ requests or expectations. It’s what membership in the “we do not care” club actually looks like: not indifference to the people you love, but honesty about your priorities given the finite nature of time.

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