Just as she was falling asleep, she was abruptly brought back with a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach. At that moment she realized that she had forgotten to send the email to her boss, letting him know what work had been completed and what was still left to do.
She knew her boss both appreciated and expected emails with these updates. She worked so hard not to forget anything, but today it happened.
As she lay there, now fully awake, the panic starts to set in. She imagines how upset her boss will be. She really doesn’t know how to manage when people are upset with her. That’s why she works so hard to make sure this doesn’t happen.
She wonders if she might get fired. She wonders if her boss will yell at her. She wonders if her boss will ignore her.
The anticipation of what might happen keeps her awake.
She decides the only way to solve this is to email her boss and apologize for forgetting to update him. She pulls out her laptop and spends the next hour crafting an email explaining in great detail just how sorry she is and how she will try her best for this not to happen again.
But she can’t press send on the email. Now she is paralyzed with fear.
What if this upsets her boss even more? What if he decides she is incompetent and lets her go? She imagines not having a job, and the shame of having to tell her partner, her parents, her friends.
She can’t decide if she should send the email so goes back to bed and waits for sleep, sleep that never comes.
To look at this behavior from a therapeutic lens, she is trying to get everything right in order to avoid feeling anxious. The most common label for this is people pleasing.
What is People Pleasing?
People pleasing is when we focus only on the needs of others and ignore what we need. This often means saying yes if your help is requested and also offering help if you see someone needs it.
People pleasers often are so disconnected from themselves that they struggle to know what they want. So instead, they focus their energy on doing what other people want.
In the workplace this can look like doing other people’s work, taking on extra assignments that no one else wants to do, and putting in more hours and not being paid adequately.
Positive Consequences of People Pleasing
The positive consequences of people pleasing are that people really like us. We are often described as kind, giving, dependable, and reliable. Our bosses tend to like us, and most of our co-workers. In our family we are often the one that no one is mad at.
People will seek us out to share their problems with.
All of this can feel good. It can feel good until it’s too much.
The Negative Consequences of People Pleasing
For those of us that are people pleasers, we tend to avoid thinking about the negative side until we are side-swiped by it.
We avoid it because then we start to see the truth of how we are being treated by others. And this hurts.
We start to see the friend that only reaches out when he or she needs something but is never available when we reach out. We start to feel resentment when others forget our birthday, don’t ask how the job search is going, don’t seem to see how tired we are as they ask for more.
On the resentment, we shut down, maybe even become passive-aggressive. Or we forget that we said we would do something. Or we lose it and become really angry.
With any of these behaviors, we can feel so much shame that it pushes back into people pleasing, and the cycle continues.
How to Stop People Pleasing
- Look at the reasons why you do it to gain a deeper understanding of yourself. Many of us learned that keeping others happy meant that we were more likely to be safe from harm, or at least it reduced the harm.
- Write out the reasons why you are ready to change this behavior. The more conscious you are of the reason you want to change the more this can anchor you when you start to roll back into old behaviors.
- Remind yourself that it’s going to be super uncomfortable to slow down on people pleasing. Part of your brain is going to go into alarm and will do its very best job to talk you out of saying no. Your job is to tolerate how uncomfortable it is. Over time this feeling will get less.
One last word on this: often we focus on others because we have a belief that we don’t really matter. I’m here to say that you do matter. Your sadness, joy, resentment, being tired… all of this matters.
