This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, party people. How we doing? Here's a question. How often do you say yes to things, only to regret it later? Why do we do that? Social pressure, power dynamics, eagerness to please, guilt, habit.

Today I'm talking to a Cornell professor who is attempting to rebrand the concept of defiance.

Many of us think of that term as negative, but my guest argues that the pressure to comply is a

pervasive, corrosive force in our culture and that we all need to do a better job of learning when and how to say no.

Dr. Sunita Saa started her career as a physician, but then she switched over to organizational

psychology, and at Cornell she conducts research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance.

She's out with a book now called Defy,

the power of know in a world that demands yes. And in this conversation, we talk about how she defines defiance, the costs of compliance, the five stages of defiance, how to make

defiance a practice in your life, the upside of tension, even though many of us want to avoid it, the importance of knowing your values.

This is a theme that keeps coming up here on the show that I find very interesting.

She's going to talk about how to articulate your values and how this relates to your biology,

specifically your hormones.

And we talk about the gender components of defiance and much more.

Just to say, before we dive in here, it can be very tricky to figure out whether you should say yes or no in a given situation.

It often involves tuning into your body, which is an overused and cliched notion, but a powerful one nonetheless.

So if you want to get better at this skill, and it really is a skill, we've got a guided

meditation for you, which is specifically tailored to this episode.

And it comes from our teacher of the month, Kyra Jule Lingo, who will be crafting bespoke

meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes during the month of August.

We think of this as the kind of lecture lab model.

The pod is the lecture where you're learning interesting stuff, and the lab is where you practice applying it in your own mind.

...