Psychologist: The 1 Phrase Highly Confident People Use To Protect Their Energy

The most self-assured people I study rarely over-explain themselves. One steady sentence lets them decline without the emotional hangover.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Reviewed by Jourdan Travers, LCSW | May 29, 2026 · 10:11am EDT05/29/26 10:11am  | Updated: 05/29/26 10:13am  Upd: 05/29/26 10:13am

In my work studying personality and well-being, I have found that the people who seem least depleted by everyday life are not necessarily the ones doing the least. Often, they are doing plenty. What sets them apart is how cleanly they decline the things they do not want to do. Highly confident people tend to protect their energy not through elaborate self-care rituals, but through something much smaller and far more repeatable — a single, well-practiced phrase.

The phrase is deceptively plain: “That doesn’t work for me.”

Five words. No apology, no lengthy backstory, no request for permission. And yet, in my reading of the research, it does more to preserve a person’s mental and emotional resources than almost any wellness habit you could name.

Why Five Words Can Do So Much

Most of us do not lose our energy to big confrontations. We lose it in the small moments where we say yes when we mean no, and then spend the next hour quietly resenting it. Researchers who study interpersonal communication often describe three broad styles: passive, aggressive and assertive. Passive responses bury our own needs to keep the peace. Aggressive ones run the other person over. Assertive communication — the style most consistently linked to healthier relationships and lower stress — sits in between: it states a position clearly while still respecting the other person.

“That doesn’t work for me” is assertiveness distilled. It names a limit without attacking anyone. Crucially, it also sidesteps a trap that drains confident and unconfident people alike: over-explaining. In the literature on boundaries, there is a useful shorthand — sometimes called JADE — for the four things we reach for when we feel we owe someone a reason to decline: we Justify, Argue, Defend and Explain. The moment we begin justifying, we hand the other person a list of points to negotiate against. A clean phrase ends the negotiation before it can start.

What It Means To Protect Your Energy

“Energy” can sound vague, but it points at something measurable. When I talk about protecting it, I am describing the very real cost of managing our emotions and attention across a day. Sociological work on emotional labor captures this well: it is the effort required to regulate how we feel and how we present ourselves for someone else’s benefit. Every time we agree to something we would rather decline and then perform an enthusiasm we do not feel, we pay that tax twice — once in the doing, and again in the suppressing.

Self-determination theory, one of the most influential frameworks in motivation research, helps explain why this lands so hard. It holds that autonomy — the sense that our actions are genuinely our own — is a basic psychological need, as fundamental as our need to feel competent and connected to others. When we routinely override our own preferences to accommodate everyone around us, we chip away at that sense of autonomy. The predictable result is exactly the flatness and fatigue people describe as feeling “low on energy.”

Why Confident People Don’t Over-Explain

This is where confidence enters the picture. What I find striking about genuinely self-assured people isn't that they say no more often — it is that they do not treat their own preferences as something requiring outside approval. A less secure person experiences a request as a quiet test: will I still be liked if I decline? So they soften, hedge and explain, hoping the other person will validate the no on their behalf. Confident people skip that step. They treat a preference as sufficient on its own. “That doesn’t work for me” carries an unspoken assumption — my reasons are mine, and they do not need to survive someone else’s cross-examination.

That does not make confident people cold. If anything, the opposite is true. Because they are not burning resources on internal debate and after-the-fact resentment, they tend to have more warmth left over for the people and commitments they do say yes to.

How To Make The Phrase Your Own

You do not have to adopt those exact five words. The mechanism matters more than the script. A few principles, drawn from how assertive communication tends to work, make almost any version of this phrase effective:

• Keep it short. The longer the decline, the more openings you create for negotiation.
• Lead with the boundary, not the apology. “That doesn’t work for me” lands very differently from “I’m so sorry, but maybe I possibly can’t…”
• Let silence do some of the work. After you decline, resist the urge to rush in and fill the pause. A moment of discomfort is not an emergency.
• Offer an alternative only if you genuinely want to. “That doesn’t work, but I could do X” is generous — it is not required.

None of this is about becoming a person who says no to everything. It is about noticing where your energy actually goes — and recognizing how much of it quietly leaks out through the small, automatic yeses we never really meant. A confident person is not superhuman. They have simply learned that protecting their energy can be as straightforward as one steady sentence, delivered without apology.

Curious how you handle these moments yourself? Understanding your instinctive approach to boundaries is the first step toward setting them with less friction. Take this science-backed test to find out where you stand: The Boundary-Setting Style Quiz.

About the Author

Mark Travers, Ph.D., is the founder of Therapytips.org, where he helps match new clients with the right therapist on the team — request a session or get matched here. Mark received his B.A. in psychology, magna cum laude, from Cornell University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder. His academic research has been published in leading psychology journals and featured in major outlets including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is a regular contributor for Forbes, CNBC, and Psychology Today.