People-Pleasing Is Killing Us. And We Keep Calling It "Being a Good Woman."
- Margaret Christian
- Jun 19
- 5 min read
By Margaret Christian | Peak Balance Coaching
I used to wear "she handles everything" like a badge. The woman who never said no, always showed up with the homemade thing, kept the whole calendar in her head. And I was proud of it.
Here's the thing nobody tells you. That version of "good" comes with a bill. And your body is the one that pays it.
I'm 51. I'm in menopause, I have ADHD, and I've spent most of my adult life reading a room to figure out what everyone else needed before I'd let myself consider what I needed. Half the time the expectations I was breaking my back to meet weren't even real. Nobody handed them to me. I made them up. I guessed at what people wanted and then treated my guess like a contract.
Let me be honest about where that leads. It leads to living for the weekend.
Living for the Weekend Is a Warning Light
You know the pattern. You white-knuckle Monday through Friday, giving everyone the best of you, and then you collapse into the weekend hoping to recover enough to do it all again. Except the weekend isn't really rest. It's catch-up. Groceries, laundry, the kid's tournament, the thing you promised your mom, the work you didn't finish. By Sunday night your shoulders are already up around your ears.
That's not a life. That's a recovery cycle. And we've normalized it so completely that we say "I just need to get to Friday" like it's a personality trait instead of a warning light.
I read Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski a while back, and one idea has stuck with me ever since: dealing with your stress and dealing with the thing that's stressing you are two different jobs. You can solve the problem in front of you and still be carrying the stress in your body, because you never actually finished the stress cycle. You just moved on to the next fire.
People-pleasers never finish the cycle. We can't. There's always another person to keep happy, so we never get to exhale.
What's Actually Happening Inside You
Here's the part that scared me enough to change.
When you live in a low, constant hum of stress, your body doesn't know it's "just" a packed inbox or a disappointed friend. It runs the same chemistry it would if you were being chased. Cortisol stays elevated. And over time that chronic stress drives something called oxidative stress, which is basically your cells under siege, taking damage faster than your body can repair it.
That damage doesn't stay quiet. It turns into chronic, low-grade inflammation, the kind that doesn't announce itself with a fever or a flare. It just smolders. And researchers have tied that smoldering inflammation to the heavy hitters: heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, even accelerated aging. There's research looking specifically at women, finding that high perceived stress lines up with more oxidation, more inflammation, and a faster aging rate.
Read that again. The stress of trying to keep everyone comfortable is literally aging us faster.
So when I say people-pleasing is killing us, I don't mean it as a clever line. I mean the pattern has a physiology. The over-functioning, the over-giving, the never-disappointing-anyone, it has a cost you can measure in your bloodwork.
And Then It Steals Your Sleep
Here's the cruelest part of the loop. The same stress that's wearing you down all day follows you to bed.
You finally lie down and your brain decides now is the time to review every conversation, every unanswered text from a friend, every thing you forgot to do, every person you might have let down. Cortisol is supposed to drop at night so you can sleep deep and actually repair. But when you're running hot all day, it stays up. So you fall asleep late, wake at 3 AM, and lie there running the list.
And poor sleep doesn't just make you tired. It cranks up inflammation, spikes cortisol the next day, and wrecks your ability to handle stress, which makes you even more reactive and even more likely to over-give just to keep the peace. So you do. And then you can't sleep again.
That's the cycle feeding itself. Stress steals your sleep, and stolen sleep makes you worse at handling stress. For those of us in menopause, throw hormones on top and it's a bonfire. You can't out-discipline your way through this one. You have to interrupt the loop.
The Part I Had to Sit With
I think a lot of us, especially women in midlife, were trained for this. Be agreeable. Be helpful. Don't be difficult. Anticipate what people need. Make it look easy. We got rewarded for it for decades, at work and at home, so of course we kept doing it.
But somewhere in my late 40s the math stopped working. The same patterns that made me successful were quietly draining the tank I needed to actually enjoy any of it. And I noticed something uncomfortable: I was meeting everyone's needs except the one person whose health the whole system depended on. Mine.
That's the thing about putting yourself last. It feels noble. It's actually a single point of failure. If you go down, none of it holds. Your kids, your team, your marriage, your friends, your business, the people you're so busy protecting, they don't benefit from a depleted, inflamed, running-on-fumes version of you. They benefit from a well one.
And I'll say the thing that took me years to believe: you are allowed to be the main character of your own life. Not the supporting role in everyone else's. Not the dependable extra who keeps the plot moving for the people you love. The main character. Your needs are part of the story, not a subplot you'll get to in the sequel. That's not ego. That's the only version of you that's actually sustainable.
Dr. Vonda Wright writes in Unbreakable about aging with power instead of just bracing for decline, and the throughline is that the strong, capable decades aren't an accident. You build them. On purpose. With how you treat your body now. You don't get to be powerful at 70 if you spend your 50s sacrificing your health to keep everyone else's expectations satisfied.
Putting Yourself First Isn't Selfish. It's the Foundation.
I want to be careful here, because "put yourself first" gets turned into a bumper sticker and loses its teeth. I don't mean stop caring about people. I care about my family more than anything. I mean stop treating your own health and peace as the thing you'll get to once everyone else is handled. Because that day never comes. There is always one more person who needs something.
Your health is not the reward at the end of the to-do list. It's the engine. Without it, there's no list, no business, no presence at the dinner table, no being there for the people you love. Everything else sits on top of it.
So where do we start? Not with a 14-step protocol. Not with another way to optimize ourselves into the ground, because that's just people-pleasing wearing a wellness costume.
We start with grace.
Grace to disappoint someone and survive it. Grace to let a text sit for an hour. Grace to say "that doesn't work for me" without writing a three-paragraph apology. Grace to rest before you've earned it by collapsing. Grace to admit the expectations you've been killing yourself to meet were never even spoken out loud, which means you're allowed to set them down.
The Bottom Line
I'm still learning this. Some weeks I'm great at it and some weeks I catch myself drafting the 11 PM email again. But I've stopped pretending the cost isn't real. And I've stopped calling my self-abandonment "being a good woman."
If you're reading this and your jaw just tightened a little because you recognized yourself, I'd love to know. What's one expectation you've been carrying that nobody actually gave you? Name it in the comments. Sometimes saying it out loud is the first crack in the armor.
You're allowed to matter to your own life.