Rachel Gardner has a bad habit, shared by many young adults: She says "yes" when she ought to say "no."

A friend might ask to do lunch on Wednesday.

"I say, 'Of course,'" Rachel recounted, "and in my head, I can see my totally squashed schedule."

The friend asks if noon works.

"I say, 'Sounds great,' knowing I have something at 1:30 p.m.," Rachel confessed.

Then comes the moment she knows she should leave their lunch, but she hesitates to cut the time short — "time I didn't have in the first place."

So she stays 10 minutes longer, which means, fast as she may drive, she can't make up that time and now she is 10 minutes late to her next commitment. All the while her chest is constricting, stuck in that torture chamber between the odometer and the clock — left, right, left, right, tick, tock, tick tock.

"I've been in that place a million times," said Rachel, a Catholic young adult from Austin, Texas. That feeling of mounting pressure is so familiar that it compelled her to blog about it earlier this month.

The truth emerged: "I'm not staying with my friend because I'm being really loving. I'm staying because I'm anxious about saying, 'Hey, I have to go.'"

The behavior, she determined, stems from a faulty belief that her friend can't handle a no, that Rachel is that important. "It's taken me a while to learn that no one benefits when you overbook yourself," she said.

The crux of her blog post was Matthew 5:37, a Scripture verse she turned into an Instagram doodle with Sharpies and pretty cursive, punctuated with arrows and underlines: "Let your 'yes' mean 'yes,' and your 'no' mean 'no.' Anything more is from the evil one."

"We're up against a lot right now as young adults," Rachel said. It's not just the number of invitations and expectations; it's the pace at which they arrive. "In our now-generation, everyone expects an answer immediately."

Giving herself time to respond helps. Sometimes that means ignoring the ever-urgent ping of a text. For important decisions, she waits it out "one day and one Mass."

Rachel was on a retreat in college when she first heard this truism: "When you say yes to one thing, you say no to another." She says her mind was blown.

Now she tries to pause and consider what no will result from a yes she is planning to extend. "My mission is not to say yes all the time. It's to say, 'What is God's will for today?'"

One semester in college, that meant dropping out of a comparative literature class called "The Mirror & The Self" that covered all the great autobiographies, starting with "Confessions" by St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rosseau. The class was fascinating, but Rachel simply didn't have the free hours that semester to keep up with the reading.

"It was a great decision. Not only did I then have a realistic workload, but that semester became a huge turning point in my faith life. Who knows how much time I would have lost reading really worthy autobiographies while my own living autobiography laid idle?"

Today that mature faith informs her work as a therapist, helping others own up to the consequences of their commitments. Rachel is able to address the challenge because she's worked "tenaciously" to be honest with herself about her grievances, to be honest before God.

The outcome is powerful: avoiding an uncomfortable "yes," accepting a difficult "no" and respecting others. She wrote, "This path not only leads to a more generous love but also to true freedom."

Capecchi is a freelance writer from Inver Grove Heights, Minn., and the editor of SisterStory.org.