By Jill Giuliano, LCSW | Anxiety Therapy in Westfield, NJ
You say yes when you mean no. You apologize for things that aren’t your fault. You spend more mental energy managing everyone else’s feelings than you do your own. And when you do finally hold a boundary, or even just imagine holding one, your stomach ties itself in knots.
You might call yourself “easygoing” or “a people person.” Maybe others call you “so thoughtful” or “the nicest person.”
But here’s what I’ve noticed after twenty years of sitting with people in my Westfield, NJ therapy office: for a lot of us, people-pleasing isn’t really about being nice. It’s about managing anxiety. It’s about avoiding the discomfort, the fear, the guilt, the dread that comes with the possibility of letting someone down.
In other words? People-pleasing is often just anxiety in a very socially acceptable costume.
What’s Actually Going On
When we people-please, we’re not usually making a conscious choice to be generous. We’re making an unconscious move to feel safe.
Research backs this up. Studies have found that chronic people-pleasing is significantly linked to heightened anxiety, neuroticism, and emotional exhaustion, and that people with higher people-pleasing tendencies consistently report lower levels of mental well-being (Joiner, 2005; Trull & Widiger, 2013).
Think about what happens in your body when you consider saying no to someone. For a lot of people-pleasers, it’s not a neutral experience. There’s a spike of something, a flash of worry, a tightening in the chest, a mental movie of all the ways it could go wrong. What if they’re upset? What if they think I’m selfish? What if they don’t like me anymore?
That right there? That’s anxiety. And saying yes, going along, smoothing things over, keeping the peace, makes it go away. Temporarily.
This is why people-pleasing is so hard to stop on willpower alone. It’s not a personality flaw. It’s a coping strategy. And like most anxiety-driven coping strategies, it works in the short term and costs you in the long run.
Where It Usually Comes From
People-pleasing rarely appears out of nowhere. For most of the women and adults I work with, it started early, often in childhood, in families where love or approval felt conditional, or where conflict felt genuinely dangerous.
If you grew up in a home where keeping a parent calm meant keeping yourself safe, your nervous system learned something important: make others happy, and you’ll be okay. That was a smart adaptation for a child. But it’s an exhausting way to live as an adult.
Psychologists sometimes call this the “fawn” response, alongside fight, flight, and freeze, fawning is a trauma response where we appease others to avoid conflict or threat. According to PsychCentral, people-pleasing behaviors are especially common in individuals who fear abandonment or who learned early that their needs came last.
It also tends to run particularly deep for women. We’re socialized from a young age to be accommodating, to keep harmony, to not “rock the boat.” When you layer that cultural pressure on top of an anxious nervous system, saying no can start to feel genuinely impossible.
What It Costs You
On the surface, people-pleasing looks like kindness. Underneath, it’s a slow drain.
Constantly scanning for others’ reactions and suppressing your own needs keeps your nervous system in a state of hypervigilance. Research shows this ongoing activation floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline, which over time can lead to anxiety, fatigue, irritability, and burnout.
There’s also the relationship cost. People-pleasing feels like it protects relationships, but it often quietly damages them. When you can never say what you actually need, when you always agree and never push back, authentic connection becomes difficult. Resentment builds. And partners, friends, and colleagues often sense, even if they can’t name it, that they’re not getting the real you.
If anxiety is showing up in your relationship specifically, couples therapy can be a powerful place to start untangling these patterns together.
The Anxiety Loop
Here’s the cruel irony of people-pleasing as an anxiety strategy: it doesn’t actually reduce anxiety. It just delays it.
Every time you say yes to avoid the discomfort of no, you confirm to your brain: that situation was dangerous, and I needed to escape it. Your anxiety learns that people-pleasing is the solution — and it comes back, louder, the next time you’re faced with a similar choice.
A study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that people with high levels of sociotropy, an excessive concern with pleasing others, frequently experience significant distress around relationship conflict. The more they avoid conflict to manage anxiety, the more sensitive to conflict they become.
You can’t please your way out of anxiety. You have to go through it.
What Actually Helps
The goal isn’t to become someone who never considers other people’s feelings. Empathy and care are genuinely good things. The goal is to stop letting the fear of disapproval make your decisions for you.
A few things that help:
Notice the anxiety, not just the behavior. When you feel the pull to say yes against your better judgment, get curious about what’s underneath it. What are you afraid will happen if you say no? Naming the fear is the first step to having a different relationship with it.
Practice tolerating discomfort in small doses. You don’t have to start by setting a huge boundary with your most intimidating person. Start small. Let someone be mildly disappointed. Notice that you survived it.
Stop seeking reassurance. People-pleasers often loop back after saying no, apologizing, over-explaining, checking that everything is okay. This feels relieving but actually keeps the anxiety cycle going. Say what you need to say, and let it land.
Get support. People-pleasing patterns that are rooted in childhood or trauma don’t usually unravel on their own. Therapy, particularly approaches that address both the thoughts driving anxiety and the deeper patterns underneath, can make a real difference.
You’re Allowed to Take Up Space
If you’ve spent most of your life making yourself smaller so others would be comfortable, that’s not a character trait. It’s a learned response to anxiety and it can change.
You don’t have to earn your place in a room. You don’t have to manage everyone else’s feelings to be worthy of connection. And you don’t have to keep saying yes when everything inside you is saying no.
If this resonates and you’re ready to do something about it, I’d love to talk. I work with adults and women in Westfield, NJ who are done running themselves ragged trying to keep everyone else happy. Reach out here or call me at (908) 232-4044.
References
- Joiner, T. E. (2005). As cited in: Liu, Y. et al. (2025). The Mental Health Implications of People-Pleasing: Psychometric Properties and Latent Profiles of the Chinese People-Pleasing Questionnaire. PMC/National Library of Medicine. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Trull, T. J., & Widiger, T. A. (2013). As cited in Liu et al. (2025), ibid.
- Smith, L., & Riley, S. (2012). Understanding people-pleasing behavior and the need for approval. Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Studies, 4(1), 15–26. Via Psychology Today
- Exline, J. J. et al. (2012). People-Pleasing Through Eating: Sociotropy Predicts Greater Eating in Response to Perceived Social Pressure. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 31(2), 169–193. Via Heather Hayes & Associates
- PsychCentral. (2024). The Psychology Behind People-Pleasing. psychcentral.com
- Mission Connection Healthcare. (2025). People-Pleasing Behavior in Adults: Causes, Symptoms, and Recovery. missionconnectionhealthcare.com
Jill Giuliano, LCSW is a therapist in Westfield, NJ specializing in anxiety, infertility, grief, and couples therapy. She has been in private practice since 2004.
