The Labour of Saying No: What Neuroscience Tells Us About People-Pleasing and Self-Advocacy
Unpacking the people-pleasing master mix
As both Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata explain, when you are a people-pleaser, you will always be the first person to say yes when all you really want to say is no. You are hyper-aware of other people's facial expressions and body language, and are always on the lookout for signs of positive or negative reactions (1).
In their Disordered: Anxiety Help podcast episode, Anxiety, People Pleasing, and Self-Esteem, the two therapists explore the interconnections and overlaps between people-pleasing and self-esteem, and unveil how personal value in a people-pleaser is heavily tied to how helpful, successful, clever, funny or pleasing they are, through the eyes of others. Self-prioritisation becomes somehow morally wrong or selfish (2). The big risk is to fall into a vicious cycle of constantly suppressing one’s own needs to accommodate others, loading more weight onto one’s personal “stress scale", worsening anxiety and mental health in a surprisingly inconspicuous way.
Women in neuroscience and wider academia are often facing high-stakes environments, where personal value is quite often implicitly linked to productivity, emotional labour, and perpetual availability, and setting boundaries might feel like a professional liability rather than basic self-care.
Addressing threats to survival: how the brain tricks us into longing for external approval
The podcast also points out that people-pleasing proved advantageous to our ancestors. From an evolutionary perspective, natural selection favoured cooperative individuals who learned how to maintain group cohesion. Being integrated within your tribe significantly boosted survival chances (3, 4). This is why our biology facilitates cooperative behaviours. The amygdala is responsible for encoding and storing memories of threat, treating social risks, such as rejection, damage to self-esteem, or loss of belonging, with the same urgency as physical danger such as a wild hungry lion running after you.
“(...) if you go all the way back to our ancestors, you know, we've got to people-please the leader of this tribe, even though he's [a bit of an idiot], because it's better to be safe and alive in the tribe than stand there and be like, I'm not appreciating your microaggressions. No, you have to kind of do it.“ - Josh Fletcher
However, we are not born people-pleasers: the behaviour is learned and conditioned over time, and this is why the social environment that you experience during your childhood can play a big role. If you grew up in a volatile, unpredictable, or hyper-critical environment, your amygdala will learn to interpret others' anger or emotional instability as a direct threat to personal safety. Consequently, keeping others calm, happy, and pleased becomes an automatic survival response to mitigate perceived threat, leading the brain to routinely suppress personal needs. To feed into this tricky loop, and making matters worse, the temporary, illusory feeling of relief and peaceful safety that results from people-pleasing will immediately activate the dopaminergic reward pathway, giving us, almost paradoxically, a sense of pleasure. This can easily evolve into a habit-forming, “addictive” behaviour, leaving us trapped and making breaking the cycle even harder (5).
Unlearning everything: boundaries and self-compassion
Often rooted in early conditioning - where keeping others happy was the safest way to mitigate perceived threat - we become driven by hidden fears of abandonment, rejection, or simply being seen as a "bother" when being our truest selves. Consequently, we remain hyper-vigilant to others' moods and compulsively agree to any demand for the sake of avoiding conflict. In the podcast, Josh and Drew stress how this directly obstructs anxiety recovery, which requires prioritising oneself, leaning into uncertainty, and allowing oneself to appear vulnerable, sub-optimal, or "broken", without seeing emotional distress as a personal failure or a heavy inconvenience to others.
Changing these automatic responses requires active neuroplasticity achieved through targeted behavioural exposure. By practising embracing minor moments of disagreement, advocating for ourselves, or saying 'no,' we engage prefrontal, purposeful control to regulate our amygdala’s hyper-reactivity (6). This process facilitates inhibitory learning, demonstrating to the central nervous system that setting boundaries is safe and that social discord, when ingrained in mutual honesty and respect, does not result in catastrophe.
My opinion: What I particularly enjoyed about this episode was how clearly it framed people-pleasing as an evolutionary double-edged sword: survival mechanisms designed for ancient collaboration can cross the line into a quiet violation of our own boundaries. I also loved how the two hosts provided such an accessible overview of the underlying neuroscience, paired with practical tips to help break the cycle.
Some practical tips to unlearn people-pleasing
Buy yourself some time before saying yes: "Let me check my schedule and get back to you" to give your brain time to evaluate if you actually want to do it.
Start with low-stakes "nos": Practice setting boundaries in low-risk situations first, such as declining an optional coffee invite to help you build confidence
Switch from external checking to internal checking: When evaluating an interaction, stop asking yourself "Are they happy with me?" and start asking "Was I honest with myself and respectful of my own capacity?"
Reframe "no" as self-respect and not selfishness: Saying "no" isn't a moral failure or a sign that you are a "bad" collaborator; it is a declaration that your time, well-being, and priorities matter just as much as anyone else's.
References:
Fletcher, J., & Linsalata, D. (Hosts). (2026, August 27). Anxiety, people pleasing, and self-esteem (No. 170) [Audio podcast episode]. In Disordered: Anxiety Help. https://www.disordered.fm/anxiety-people-pleasing-and-self-esteem-episode-170/
Syawa, A. L., Erik Saut H. Hutahaean, & Ferdy Muzzamil. (2026). The Relationship Between Assertiveness and Self-Esteem Among Students Who Experience People Pleasing Behavior. Socrates: Journal of Education, Philosophy and Psychology, 2(3), 69–74. https://doi.org/10.63217/socrates.v2i3.310
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
Buss, D.M. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, 6th ed.; Routledge: London, UK, 2019
Ehman, K. (2021). When making others happy is making you miserable: How to break the pattern of people-pleasing and confidently live your life.
Fitzgerald, J. M., Phan, K. L., Kennedy, A. E., Shankman, S. A., Langenecker, S. A., & Klumpp, H. (2017). Prefrontal and amygdala engagement during emotional reactivity and regulation in generalized anxiety disorder. Journal of affective disorders, 218, 398–406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2017.05.013
This article was written by Alice Zanella and edited by Rebecca Pope, with graphics produced by Ishika Joshi. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.
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