How to Stop People Pleasing (When It's the Only Way You've Ever Felt Safe)

You say yes when you mean no.

You take on things you don't have bandwidth for because someone needed help and you couldn't stop yourself. You smooth things over, anticipate what people need before they ask, and manage everyone else's emotions with a kind of quiet competence that would be impressive if it wasn't completely draining you.

And, frankly, you HAVE tried to stop. You've read all the articles. Liked and saved (and even shared) all the social media posts on boundaries and self-care. Told yourself you'd say “no!” more. Sometimes you even manage to do it — and then you feel so guilty afterward, you find some way to make it up to the person anyway. So, any real change? It feels impossible.

But, here’s what you need to know: your people pleasing isn't a habit to break. It's a survival strategy you can understand. And that distinction changes everything.

Your Nervous System Is Just Doing Its Job

People pleasing — sometimes called the fawn response in trauma literature — is what happens when your nervous system learned early on that keeping other people happy was the safest way to move through your world.

Maybe conflict in your house felt genuinely scary. Maybe love felt conditional (available when you were easy, withdrawn when you were difficult). Maybe your emotional needs were often neglected or treated as a burden, so you learned to need as little as possible and give as much as you could.

Whatever the dynamic, your brain got the message that other people's comfort matters more than your own and that you should navigate life accordingly. And it filed that away as a strategy that worked — one that earned connection, kept the peace, and maintained safety (this might resonate especially with Enneagram types 2, 6, and 9).

The problem today? Your brain doesn't automatically retire strategies that no longer serve you. It just keeps running them. So here you are, in a different life with different people, and your nervous system is still doing what it learned to do — scanning, adjusting, keeping your own needs quietly out of the way.

Why "Just Say No" Doesn't Work

Because this isn't a decision problem. It's a nervous system problem.

Saying no feels physically uncomfortable for chronic people pleasers. Your heart races, guilt floods in, and you experience an almost compulsive urge to take it back or soften it immediately. That's not weakness. That's a nervous system responding to perceived threat.

Willpower doesn't have enough power here. Your internal logic has to change first. And that requires going somewhere most people would rather avoid: back to where the pattern started, and what it was actually protecting.

What Were You Afraid Would Happen If You Stopped?

That's the question I find most useful in this work.

For most people pleasers, the answer involves some version of abandonment, rejection, conflict, or loss of love. The people pleasing was keeping something at bay — something that felt genuinely dangerous at the age the pattern formed.

Understanding that genesis can change your relationship to the people pleasing pattern. Instead of being frustrated with yourself for doing it, you can get curious and compassionate with yourself. This made sense once. It was protecting something real. It just doesn't fit the life you're trying to live now.

That shift — from shame to curiosity — is where the actual change begins.

What Actually Helps

The goal isn't to become someone who doesn't care about others. That's not healing, that's just swinging the pendulum to the other side. The goal is to develop an internal life that's at least as real to you as everyone else's.

A few things to start practicing:

Notice the yes before you say it. Pause — even briefly — and notice what's happening inside you. Are you saying yes because you want to, or because you're afraid of what happens if you don't? You don't have to say “no” yet. Just notice.

Get curious about your resentment. Resentment is usually a sign that a yes was really a no. When you feel that slow simmer of annoyance at someone you’re helping — get curious instead of critical. What did I actually want? What would I have said if I'd trusted it was okay to say it?

Work on the original logic, not just the behavior. This is where therapy is genuinely useful. Interventions like EMDR can be particularly effective because they work at the level of the nervous system — not just building insight about the pattern (which is incredibly helpful), but actually changing how it lives in your body.

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People pleasing is exhausting in a very specific way — the exhaustion of never quite being off duty. It’s depleting to constantly be scanning, adjusting, managing, smoothing, and giving in.

You don't have to keep living that way.

If you're ready to look at this, a free Clarity Call is a good place to start.

Rest Is Not a Reward — It's a Requirement

My kids are clamoring for the end of school. But before they can get there, they have testing and presentations to do. And it would be SO easy for me to keep them focused on doing the hard work of today by encouraging them to remember the reward they’ll get at the end: “Summer is coming. Rest is just around the corner!”

But I can’t do that to them. I want them to believe differently about rest than I do.

See, I’ve found that somewhere along the way, most of us (myself, included) got a really unhelpful message about rest. We learned that it has to be earned. That it's what you get AFTER everything on your list is done. That if you're resting while things are undone, then you are lazy, selfish, indulgent, and probably letting someone down.

Can you relate? (I know my Enneagram 3’s can!)

If you're nodding, I need you to hear this: believing those shitty messages is costing you. It’s costing you joy, peace … and potential.

For high-functioning women — the ones who show up, handle it all, and make sure everyone around them is okay (hello Enneagram 2’s) — rest often feels like the one thing they haven't figured out how to do yet. And the irony is that the more you need it, the harder it can feel to let yourself have it.

But your body screams for rest. Your nervous system doesn't care about your to-do list. It doesn't know that you'll rest "after this project" or “when vacation gets here” or “when the kids are older." It just knows whether it feels safe enough to downshift or if it needs to stay on high alert. Fact is, if you've been running on stress hormones for months (or, like for many of my clients, YEARS), your body has essentially forgotten what it feels like to actually rest.

But it needs to rest. Desperately.

Here's where to start:

1) Distinguish between rest and avoidance/numbing. Scrolling on your phone IS NOT rest — it's actually just providing even more stimulation to the nervous system. True rest involves some form of disengagement from input: a walk without headphones, sitting outside, gentle stretching, or even just lying down in a quiet room for 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be long. It just has to be chill.

2) Schedule rest before you "need" it. Most of us wait until we're running on empty to rest — which means we're already in debt. Instead, try building one 10-15 minute "nothing" window into your day. Put it in your calendar. Protect it like you'd protect any other appointment.

3) Notice and challenge the story you tell yourself about resting. When you sit down to rest and that internal voice pipes up with a "You should be doing something productive right now,” pause and ask: “Says who?”

You’re an adult. YOU get to decide what productivity means for you.

Often, rest is the most life-giving thing you can do. A regulated (contented and chilled out) nervous system is what makes everything else easier. Change your perspective: Rest is a requirement, not the reward.

The Science Behind "Mom Brain"

This blog is for my fellow moms out there — those of you in the delightful trenches of life with littles! I want to talk about “mom brain,” and more specifically, the body chemistry behind it.

Cortisol is the stress hormone that's always on overdrive when you're juggling a million things at once. Sure, being supermom is all well and good, but those high cortisol levels? Not so much. They mess with your body and mind, leaving you feeling drained, irritable, forgetful and just not yourself … for long, extended periods of time.

Think about it: doing life with little ones is like a never-ending rollercoaster ride, and your body and mind are stuck in the car with no end or slow down in sight. Cortisol enters the picture to help us handle it all, but like most anything else in life, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The constant stress and resulting flood of cortisol to our nervous system isn’t doing us any favors. It messes with your sleep, messes with your mood, messes with your head, and messes with your ability to be the awesome mom you are.

So, here's the deal: it's time to push the pause button, take a breather, and show yourself some love. Self-care isn't selfish; it's survival. And, frankly, it’s the ONLY way you can get to enjoying the ebbs and flows of this crazy life.

Let me remind you (in case you’ve forgotten, HA!): when you're feeling good, you're amazing – and that's the kind of mom your family deserves.

Not sure where to start? I’m going to blunt — it’s not with a bubble bath, it’s with making an appointment with a coach, consultant or therapist. Reach out and I’ll help point you in the right direction!