Why people-pleasing might be at the root of your stress

The stress of pleasing other people – what it is, and what it does to us

A hidden kind of stress

We all know the stress of major events like the loss of a job, a break up, or the death of a loved one. Big, isolated events hit us hard. But there’s another kind of stress – the stress of ongoing, daily existence – that can build up and wear us down. 

Why is everyday life so stressful? In his book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Gabor Maté refers to the “hidden stress” that comes from our subconscious beliefs. 

On the surface, your life might look fine – good job, good partner, good health – but beneath the surface, you’re constantly treading water, needing to prove yourself and please other people, be on time, be polite, be successful. You can’t stop hustling.

You might be run by beliefs you don’t even know about or at least don’t consciously affirm when you stand in front of the mirror. Beliefs like: “If I say No I’m letting people down and that means I’m bad”, “I have to do a perfect job to be liked”, “Other people’s opinions about me matter more than my own”, “I mustn’t be angry because angry people aren’t lovable”.

These automatic beliefs explain why – even though we all stress – some of us stress more easily than others. 

A stressful childhood

Childhood trauma is at play, of course. If you didn’t get your needs consistently met as a child, which in turn consistently triggered your stress response, then as an adult you’ve got less capacity to cope.

Abelina Wolf, a therapist at Indigo who works with mindfulness and somatic approaches to stress, explains: “Say your boss yells at you – if you’ve had a lot of stress in your childhood, a time when you’re still developing the skills to deal with life, of course your capacity to deal with stress shrinks, so being yelled at might affect you much quicker and more intensely than someone who’s learned to be safe and secure in their nervous system.”

When your boss raises their voice, it might be especially stressful if you subconsciously believe: “This is happening to me because I’m not good enough”.

The effects of stress

We all need a little stress to motivate us and get things done, but an undercurrent of chronic stress can be debilitating. It can make it hard to eat, sleep, concentrate, get out of bed, go to work, see your friends, experience joy, or feel like a whole human being. You might have physical troubles with skin, digestion, fertility, and your immune response.

Anxiety and depression are common, Abelina explains: “I might see someone who’s chronically stressed in an anxious state for a long time, but because we can’t be in fight-or-flight forever, their nervous system might then go into freeze or shut down, which looks like depression”.

Life is unpredictable and we don’t choose our privileges; many external sources of stress are outside our control. But internal sources, those subconscious beliefs about how we need to show up in the world, and that cause relentless hustle and burn out – these are addressable. 

This is where psychotherapy and counselling come in. 

Handling the stress of pleasing other people – doing the work in therapy

Knowing yourself

What do you believe, deep down, about yourself, others, and the world? Your therapist will support you to gently uncover the parts of you lying in the shadows. 

Which situations trigger your stress response? Your therapist will ask you questions you might not ask yourself, and you might start to see patterns in your life emerge.

How do you usually respond to the stressful situation – fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop? “Each person is different,” Abelina says. In response to negative feedback, one client might “feel their heart racing, get sweaty, and want to say something to fight back”, and another might “shut down, feel quite ashamed, and struggle to stand up for themselves”. Knowing your personal response helps you know when to pause – so you can practise grounding or speaking up.

Feeling your feelings

When we’re stressed, we often repress our emotions. It can be way too much to feel terror, rejection, or shame. Dissociating emotions from our awareness is a useful coping mechanism. 

But, as Gabor Maté tells us, emotions – these chemical discharges of the human nervous system – are essential for the functioning of our major organs, immune defences, and our wholeness as human beings. 

The science is clear: To be healthy, we need to let ourselves feel. Therapy helps. “We’re not trying to get rid of the feeling,” Abelina says, “we’re building capacity to sit with it in a safe way”. 

In somatic-based approaches, you might deliberately invoke the stressful situation, and get in touch with the feelings associated with it. You might visualise, as Abelina does with her clients, the feeling “as a rubber ball, feeling very tight in your stomach”. Then after some time, “watch it turn into a soft, gooey texture”. You might then realise – Oh, wait, that was okay. Maybe when this feeling happens again, I won’t be so scared of it. 

Honouring what’s true for you

If you’re constantly proving yourself, Abelina says the most common survival response to a stressful situation is ‘fawn’ – in the sense of fawning over someone. 

If you think you’re in trouble with a friend, a partner, or a boss, you might flatter them when you don’t mean it, or comply when you don’t want to. Which can feel pretty icky.

But this can change – “With one of my clients it was always yes, yes, yes, I’ll do it,” Abelina tells me, “and so we worked a lot on helping her shift these chronic people-pleasing patterns”. 

If you’re afraid to say No out of fear you’ll ruin the relationship, then in your sessions, you might practise how you would set a boundary. You might visualise yourself with the other person and practise your tone, words, and body language. 

“The work I’m passionate about is helping clients understand they don’t have to be scared of their emotions,” Abelina says. “Their emotions are valid and okay. Then it’s about practicing communication skills and feeling empowered.”

Out of the jungle 

Back when we lived in the jungle, we needed our primal instincts to know when a tiger was around the corner. But in modern life, it’s not so necessary when you’re at work, speaking to your boss, for your body to feel like it’s running away from a wild animal. 

My advice? Go see a therapist. If you can. You might just get a handle on your stress, one boss-shaped tiger at a time.