When Saying Yes Means Losing Yourself: How People-Pleasing Hides Anxiety (and Hurts Relationships!)
You said yes. Again.
Even though your plate is full. Even though you needed rest. Even though you didn’t want to. You are doing it because it felt easier than saying no. Maybe it felt like kindness. Maybe it felt like love. But what if that yes wasn’t about them at all? What if it was about keeping your own anxiety in check?
Kindness? Or Survival Strategy
We often see people-pleasers as generous, flexible, and easygoing. But people-pleasing isn’t about being easy, it’s about making everything else easier for everyone else, no matter the cost to you so you can manage their emotions. For many, saying yes is a way to manage our own discomfort since we don’t like how it feels when others are disappointed in us. Pleasing others usually helps YOU by avoiding conflict, earning approval, sidestepping guilt, and preventing rejection or criticism.
Sure, it works briefly. You get relief. You feel safe… for now. But every time you say yes at your own expense, a part of you gets smaller and your ability to have healthy conflict lessens. And that anxiety? It never actually goes away. It just shapeshifts into resentment, fatigue, or disconnection.
The System Knows…
From a relational systems perspective, your behavior doesn’t live in isolation. Every behavior you maintain becomes part of a larger emotional economy that shapes how others behave around you. How YOU engage with someone builds expectaions on how you will behave in the future and, in turn, how others will behave with you. An example can be a friend who constantly changes plans. You’re frustrated, but you don’t speak up. You say, “No worries” and allow them to change the plans, again. Over time, this friend learns they can inconvenience you and that your time doesn’t seem to matter since you do not raise any concerns.
Or let’s say you let your kids stay up past bedtime because you want to be the “fun parent.” But the next morning, they’re exhausted, you’re annoyed, and it has added a lot of stress to the day. And you’ve now created a precedent where short-term happiness overrides long-term wellbeing.
Or how about you always cover for your coworker when they drop the ball. You’ve become “the reliable one.” You are now the first call for getting something handled, your co-workers seems to skate by, and you are the one who is now asked to help out because your coworker will drop the ball. Yes, you are the reliable one, but inside, you’re bitter because you are doing more of the work, and they’ve stopped being accountable.
In each of these examples, people-pleasing isn’t just a personal preference. It’s an avoidance strategy you employ which then sends signals to others. It teaches them something about how they can operate and what you’ll tolerate. And when your “yes” becomes your default, others stop expecting you to have a real boundary at all!
Why It’s So Hard to Stop
If this hits a nerve, that means this is resonating for you. And you’re not alone. People-pleasing often forms early, especially if you grew up in a home where harmony was prized over honesty, or where it wasn’t safe to say no. Over time, you became fluent in emotional reading, conflict avoidance, and self-sacrifice. These patterns aren't character flaws they're survival skills. In trauma psychology, this is known as the fawn response, where appeasing others becomes a strategy to stay safe. In everyday life, it looks like being “the dependable one” while slowly unraveling inside.
But here’s the truth: your worth is not in how well you disappear for others.
When Pleasing Becomes Enabling
It’s not just about the toll on you. It’s about what people-pleasing does to others. By cushioning every consequence, smoothing over every ripple, and always accommodating, you end up undermining your own credibility, confusing the people around you, and encouraging others to take advantage (sometimes unknowingly)!
What starts as “being helpful” morphs into emotional enabling which is where others stop adjusting their behavior because you always do it for them. This creates fragile, imbalanced relationships where no one really trusts the yes (not even you). You end up resenting them not doing for you, they end up pushing your boundaries any time you try to stand up for yourself, and you end up increasing your anxiety rather than reducing it in pleasing others. And from a systems perspective, your emotional enabling stunts the ability of the people you please from becoming a fuller version of themselves. They begin to “expect” your behavior from others and can potentially reject (or hurt) those who don’t automatically comply with their requests (like you have).
What to Do?
If this speaks to you and you want to try something different, you don’t have to flip your life upside down overnight. It would be impossible to maintain! But you do need new scripts. New pauses. New practices that interrupt that “automatic” yes.
Tactics to Shift Your Behavior:
1. Pause before you answer. Give yourself space to think. Try: “Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”
2. Tune into your body. Do you feel tension in your stomach, jaw, or chest? That may be your nervous system screaming “No!” while your mouth says “Sure!”
3. Practice low-stakes no’s. Say no to things that don’t matter as much. You’ll build the muscle for when it does.
4. Break the silence with honesty. Try: “I’m working on not agreeing to things I can’t sustain. I want to show up when I mean it.”
5. Reconnect with what you want. Ask yourself: If I weren’t afraid of disappointing anyone, what would I say?
Mantras to Break the Reflex:
Need a few mantras to say to yourself when you are trying to practice small breaks? Try some of these:
🧠 “Peacekeeping isn’t the same as peace.”
🧠 “A fake yes becomes a quiet no later.”
🧠 “I’m allowed to disappoint people and still be good.”
🧠 “Love without boundaries isn’t love, it’s a performance.”
🧠 “If I say yes to everything, nothing I say yes to has meaning.”
You’re Allowed to Be Honest. You’re Allowed to Be Whole.
This isn’t about being selfish or cold. It’s about being real. When you start honoring your “no,” your “yes” becomes more trustworthy. When you stop pleasing out of fear, you create relationships built on clarity, not obligation. If this resonates, let’s talk. Whether it’s anxiety, boundaries, or unlearning these patterns, this is work we can do together.
Therapy or coaching can offer the support and insight you need to stop pleasing and start showing up for real. Reach out and let’s talk. We’ll start with where you are and work toward where you want to be.
References
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1995). Social anxiety.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry.