Sadly I see people struggling with overwork, afraid to push back way too often. What I learnt from my personal experience is this: when you push back, people respect you more, not less.

I started my career in a small shop reporting to a toxic and abusive manager. Due to a combination of factors (my own upbringing, being a naive new grad, a bad economy) I didn't know how to handle the situation so I just took it silently. Those were some of the lowest points in my life. When I finally left, I decided I wouldn't allow myself to fall in the same situation again.

Then I realized something amazing. Contrary to my fears, when I pushed back against unreasonable requests, for the most part people respected me more rather than less. Of course there is always people who retaliate, and the secret is you want to be far away from those people.

This is my hypothesis of what is happening: most abusive managers are low confidence cowards which use their formal authority to bully others. Because they are cowards, if you stand up to them, most often they will be afraid of losing face, and will choose to bully someone weaker instead.

Of course it isn't easy to start doing this out of the blue. Once you trained your manager to assume that you'll work 12 hour days and always say yes, it's very hard to make them change their mind, and you'll face retaliation. If you are in such a situation, I don't have great advice, other than you should look for another place to work, and start asserting yourself, even if in small ways at first.

Unfortunately I know many people will ignore my advice. They'll say I'm being idealistic, or that it worked only for me, or that they can't afford to lose their job. But I hope that at least some people will follow this advice and we'll give less food to the toxic managers of the world.