Why It Doesn’t Pay to be a
People-Pleaser
Christine Carter always tried to meet other people’s
expectations—until she realized how out of sync with her own wants and needs
she’d become.
People ask me all the time what the secret to
happiness is. “If you had to pick just one thing,” they wonder, “what would be
the most important thing for leading a happy life?”
Ten years ago, I would have told you a
regular gratitude practice was the most important thing—and while that is
still my favorite instant happiness booster, my answer has changed.
I believe the most important thing for happiness is living truthfully. Here’s
the specific advice I recently gave my kids:
Live with total
integrity. Be transparent, honest, and authentic.
Do not ever waiver from this; white lies and false smiles quickly snowball into
a life lived out of alignment. It is better to be yourself and risk having
people not like you than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from
pretending to be someone you’re not, or professing to like something that you
don’t. I promise you: Pretending will rob you of joy.
I’ve spent the better part of my life as a
people-pleaser, trying to meet other people’s expectations, trying to keep
everyone happy and liking me. But when we are trying to please others, we are
usually out of sync with our own wants and needs. It’s not that it’s bad to be
thinking of others. It’s thatpleasing others is not the same
as helping others.
People pleasing, in my extensive personal
experience, is a process of guessing what other people want, or what will make
them think favorably of us, and then acting accordingly. It’s an often subtle
and usually unconscious attempt at manipulating other people’s perceptions of
us. Anytime we pretend to be or feel something that we aren’t, we’re out of
integrity with ourselves.
And anytime we’re doing something that is
more about influencing what others think of us than it is about authentically
expressing ourselves—even something as simple as a Facebook post that makes it
seem like we are having a better day than we actually are—we end up out of
integrity with ourselves.
Being out of integrity has pretty serious
consequences for our happiness, and for our relationships. Here’s what happens
when we aren’t being authentic.
1. We don’t actually fool anyone
Say you are at work, and you’re doing your
best to put on a happy face even though your home life is feeling shaky. You
may not want to reveal to your work friends that you and your significant other
had a major fight over the weekend, but if you pretend that you are okay—and
you’re not—you’ll probably make the people around you feel worse, too. Why?
We humans aren’t actually very good at hiding
how we are feeling. We exhibit micro-expressions that the people we are with
might not know they are registering but that trigger mirror neurons—so a little
part of their brain thinks that they are feeling our negative feelings. So
trying to suppress negative emotions when we are talking with someone—like when
we don’t want to trouble someone else with our own distress—actually increases
stress levels of both people more than if we had shared our distress in the
first place. (It also reduces rapport and inhibits the connection between two
people.)
2. We find it harder to focus
Pretending takes a huge conscious effort—it’s
an act of self-control that drains your brain of its power to focus and do deep
work. That’s because performing or pretending to be or feel something you’re
not requires tremendous willpower.
Tons of research suggests that our ability to repeatedly exert our
self-control is actually quite limited. Like a muscle that tires and can no
longer perform at its peak strength after a workout, our self-control is diminished
by previous efforts at control, even if those efforts take place in a totally
different realm.
So that little fib at the water cooler you
told in order to make yourself seem happier than you are is going to make it
hard for you to focus later in the afternoon. A performance or any attempt to
hide who you really are, or pretend to be something you aren’t, is going to
make it harder later to control your attention and your thoughts, and to
regulate your emotions. It’ll increase the odds that you react more
aggressively to a provocation, eat more tempting snacks, engage in riskier
behaviors, and—this one is pretty compelling to me—perform more poorly on tasks
that require executive function, like managing your time, planning, or
organizing.
3. You’ll become more stressed and anxious
Let’s just call it like it is: Pretending to
be or feel something that you don’t—even if it is a small thing, and even if it
is relatively meaningless, and even if it is meant to protect someone else—is a
lie.
And lying, even if we do it a lot, or are
good at it, is very stressful to our brains and our bodies. The polygraph test
depends on this: “Lie Detectors” don’t actually detect lies, but rather they
detect the subconscious stress and fear that lying causes. These tests sense
changes in our skin electricity, pulse rate, and breathing. They also detect
when someone’s vocal pitch has changed in a nearly imperceptible way, a
consequence of tension in the body that tightens vocal chords.
The physiological changes that lie detectors
sense are caused by glucocorticoids, hormones that are released during a stress
response. And as you well know, stress hormones are bad news for your health
and happiness over the long run.
Research shows that people who are given
instructions for how to lie less in their day-to-day lives are actually able to
lie less, and when they do, their physical health improves. For example, they
report less trouble sleeping, less tension, fewer headaches, and fewer sore
throats. These improvements in health are likely caused by the relative absence
of a stress response.
And that’s not all: When the people in the
above study lied less, they also reported improvements in their relationships
and less anxiety.
We don’t lie or pretend or perform all the
time, of course. But when we do, it’s important to see the consequences:
increased stress, decreased willpower, impaired relationships. Although we
might actually be trying to feel better by putting on a happy face for others,
pretending always backfires in the end. Living inauthentically makes life hard
and cuts us off from our sweet spot—that place where we have both ease and
power.
By Christine Carter |
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_it_doesnt_pay_to_be_a_people_pleaser?utm_source=GG+Newsletter+August+10%2C+2016&utm_campaign=GG+Newsletter+Aug+10+2016+&utm_medium=email
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