After spending 36 years on this planet, I realized that I was a “people pleaser”. It was not born of a sturdy regimen of surya namaskars but, like any important insight these days, via Instagram. Six months earlier, I had been given a new role at my workplace. It was exciting, but it meant additional responsibilities on top of, not instead of, my existing ones. It was presented as the right career move, but there was no pay raise, even though I made two (admittedly feeble) attempts at negotiation. I caved after a very short discussion. Deep down, I knew I was always going to, and maybe my team manager did too. As congratulatory messages poured in, I felt validated. I felt important. No one, I had often thought to myself smugly, works as hard as I do in this team. I deserved this. Three months later, I was working 14-hour shifts. My skin was breaking out in hives. My beloved peace lily screamed for attention on the window sill. But at work, I was efficiency pro max. I presented, talked, monitored, managed, strategized. By midnight, I’d be exhausted. Unable to sleep, I’d self-soothe late into the night with whiskey, potato chips, and Ghibli movies. The health crisis and the burnout that followed were inevitable. It’s why I was at this yoga retreat, distracted from my thoughts by the sight of monsoon clouds rubbing gently up against the Garhwal mountains. I opened Instagram to post a story and there it was, atop my feed, a post from someone I did not follow. “People-pleasing is based on an unspoken transaction: I do things for you, so you will like me and not abandon me.” I froze. Bingo!, hissed a voice in my head, as it unspooled a reel of all the people that I held grudges against because they had made me feel unimportant, dispensable, unlovable—despite me trying so hard. But it was Hailey Paige Magee’s (now a coach and author with over 300K followers on IG) next few lines that hit harder. “When others don’t hold up their end of the bargain, we become resentful. The thing is, they never signed up for this transaction in the first place.” All those people in my head—friends, former colleagues, my supervisor—shrugged. It has felt like a mass awakening of sorts. Celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Ananya Pandey, Deepika Padukone, and Kusha Kapila have publicly talked about the experience of being people pleasers. They all talk about that all-too-familiar need for external validation, which they learned to shrug off with age, success, and therapy. They’ve all struck a chord. As the term has percolated down to bar room chatter, I saw friends—people who’ve always demonstrated a much healthier sense of self-worth than me—begin to refer to themselves as people pleasers. It was puzzling. Sure, it’s common sense that we all try to get along—indeed it’s part of the glue that keeps the social fabric intact. But how do you tell if you’re a People Pleaser with a problem—or just really nice? “People pleasing is being nice to the point that it harms you,” says Delhi-based counseling psychologist and content creator Divija Bhasin. “Being nice and compromising is normal, but it is not healthy to do it to the extent that you always sacrifice what you want.” People pleasers demonstrate a pattern of self-sacrifice and self-effacement that is, in the end, unhealthy and utterly defeating. We’ll laugh at your stupidest jokes. We’ll do your work for you. We’ll reserve our contrarian opinions—if we have them. We’ll say yes to that expensive SoBO bar hop, even if we can’t afford it. We don’t have opinions, because we often have no idea what our true character is. We walk through life like blank canvases, often confusing our actions with kindness. Our souls roil hoping for acceptance —and when it isn’t forthcoming, we feel used, discarded, betrayed. This spells inevitable disaster for relationships, personal, romantic, and professional. We are martyrs of our own making. “People pleasers cannot handle other people’s displeasure or discomfort,” says London-based honorary psychodynamic psychotherapist Garima Seth, “because it triggers our own anxiety that comes from not having our needs met. People pleasing is basically managing that anxiety externally, a coping mechanism to feel more in control or at peace.” Generational legacies like the “Good Girl” syndrome are, of course, the product of a patriarchal society. “From childhood, women are taught to be agreeable and “adjust” more than men,” says Bhasin. “Women are usually caregivers and brought up to be more passive as people. This ends up in an imbalanced dynamic in most relationships—personal and professional—leading to women being more vulnerable to abuse.” Women might be more at risk of being people pleasers, but they certainly aren’t the only ones. Patriarchal setups also insist on the idea of “proper men”, which enforces its own ideas of things like masculinity, growth, and achievement. Seth ties the very notion of “black sheep” to a larger trend in Indian or South Asian societies. “India is a collectivistic culture, where community is essential to survival,” she explains. “We are taught from a very early age to treat our parents, teachers, and even guests as Godlike figures. Community is important for survival, but it leaves no place for any individual sense of identity. The community must thrive, and everyone’s beliefs must be maintained. If you deviate by demonstrating your own ideas or opinions, you risk being shunned.” The good news is that with a little course correction, it is possible to learn how to set boundaries. But Instagram and TikTok alone will not fix you, says Seth. Depending on what you want to achieve, there’s a range of therapeutic routes to try: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for relatively short-term treatment; psychodynamic therapy to dig deeper into the roots of the problem; movement or drama therapy to find connections between mind and body. If you’re not yet ready for any of the above, begin with listening to podcasts and reading more. Active journalling can help; practicing mindfulness worked for me. My first therapist prescribed a simple exercise to control anxiety: to lie down on the ground with arms and legs splayed out, for five minutes, four times a day. To register the cold tile under my fingers, and exhale while saying out loud: “I am enough.” I did it sheepishly at first, but within two weeks, I’d quit my job. Letting go of the resentment is harder to do. Unlearning is a process, but I am slowly becoming comfortable with the power of “no”. And that’s as good a place to start as any.
Unveiling the Hidden Trap: The Curse of People-Pleasing
