Are You Sacrificing Your Health to Keep Others Happy?

Break free from people-pleasing and reclaim your well-being by learning to set boundaries and put your needs first.

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Have you ever wondered why it feels so hard to stand up for yourself, even when you know you should? If setting boundaries feels uncomfortable — or even impossible — you are not alone. Like so many, you were probably never allowed the grace as a child to discern your own needs. If you had to stay vigilant because of a parent’s mood shifts or fits of anger, cater to the emotional needs of a dysregulated parent, or perform in a certain way to be loved, you never got the chance to learn how to discern whether the way others treated you was okay. You were doing what you had to do to try to touch love.

This is how trauma and boundaries intersect: setting boundaries can dredge up fear of not being loved, of being labeled dramatic or hysterical, of being abandoned, mocked, or gaslit. In other words, it can dredge up fear of being told we are the problem. This fear stokes our impulse to over-give, to not say no, and to avoid standing up for ourselves.

People Pleasing Could Be Making You Sick

That inability to say no, over-pleasing, and over-explaining to try to prove our worthiness — to feel we are, at last, loveable — is, in study after study, tied to poorer lifelong health. In one stark finding, women who are people pleasers, who fear speaking up for themselves, are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases and even die prematurely. The body seems to sense our struggle to create boundaries and that we will sacrifice ourselves for the needs of others, carry their stress, fix their woes, absorb their moods, and soothe their dysregulation rather than voice and tend to our own. Eventually, our bodies stop protecting us, just as we have stopped protecting ourselves.

We may tolerate a lot for far too long because we don’t want to lose people. But one day, we finally wake up and begin to ask ourselves, if the choice is between silent comfort and the courage of the voiced self, which do we really want to choose?

Our peace of mind – and our health – may depend on listening to that voice that whispers to us that it’s time to draw new lines in the sand. So, where do you begin?

Start With These 9 Steps to Break Free From People Pleasing

1. Stop overexplaining. You don’t need to explain yourself when you don’t want to go somewhere or do something or engage with someone – or when you want to do something to take care of you instead. A simple “no” or “I can’t” or “I’m not available right now” or “I need to do X right now” will suffice.
2. Allow yourself to disappoint people. It’s not your job to keep everyone on track or keep everyone happy. If people feel let down or are surprised when you don’t jump in to help with issues large and small, remind yourself that you’re giving them an opportunity to learn how to grow and tend to their own needs.
3. Begin with the peripheral relationships in your life. Consider micro changes with just one person – the neighbor who leaves their dog poop in your yard, the in-law who walks in your house without knocking and turns on the TV, the friend who always shows up forty-five minutes late, the co-worker who empties the coffee pot without starting a new brew. The less complicated a history you have with someone, the easier it is to speak up and say, “I don’t want to be talked to that way,” or “Next time, call ahead,” or leave a Post-it note: “If you empty the coffee pot, refill!”
4. Stop saying “Sorry”. Instead of saying, “I’m sorry, I …” for all situations, try phrases like “I have to hope you’ll understand…” Or, simply, “Thank you for understanding…” Try it. This simple replacement can create powerful changes in tricky relationships.
5. Work your way up to bigger shifts in complex relationships. When your relationship history is more complicated and emotions are more charged, the things a parent, partner, or sibling says or asks for can be far more emotionally triggering. You know who these people are in your life because when you’re around them, you find yourself walking on proverbial eggshells, half-waiting for them to toss out some comment or critique that leaves you feeling diminished. Remind yourself that when people repeatedly treat you this way, they are showing you who they are, and it is your job to show them you are someone who does not allow that behavior.
6. Notice what you feel in your body. If the thought of voicing yourself with a particular person makes your whole body feel tense, charged, or anxious, there is probably something very deep and old you need to pay closer attention to within. Physician Gabor Mate, a leader in trauma and mental health, says “no trigger can do that unless you’re carrying the explosive charge” from the past. “No one is more triggering to you than the people to whom you are looking for love and support, and on whom you rely,” says Mate, “because that brings back all the stuff that’s not resolved; feelings from childhood.”
7. Go within to examine the connection between your present and your past. When you are trying to please people who don’t show you respect, it is probably because that dynamic recreates similar situations in which you wanted to find love but couldn’t as a child. Perhaps you had a parent who diminished or raged at you, and when you showed emotion, or tried to stand up for yourself – longing to be loved in the way a child needs to be loved – they told you you were the problem, you were too needy, too sensitive, too selfish, too something. When this happens as a child, we go back and recreate similar situations, hoping to at last bring a new self to rewrite an old dynamic. But we don’t know how. We haven’t built that emotional muscle. We never got the chance.
8. Set and hold your boundaries. Boundaries are your road to your new self. Here are some phrases to help you take small steps toward expressing yourself and your needs.
   1. Rather than respond to an underhanded comment right away, pause, and let a little silence linger, then say, “That’s below my standard for a response.”
   2. “That didn’t feel good. Was that your intention?”
   3. “I don’t like what you just said. Could you share that another way?”
   4. “I love you and this relationship is important to me. Let’s revisit this when you can find a more respectful way to communicate with me.”
9. Graduate into the courage to be disliked. Let people say, feel, and think what they want about you, knowing that their projections of you have nothing to do with who you really are.

Having new boundaries is often the first sign that we are deepening our healing. As you begin, keep your goals small and realistic. And always keep coming home to yourself, with compassion for you, for all the selves you have ever been. It takes bravery to become the self you long to be.