Help Yourself - Wellness on FlyWestair

Help yourself

You will have heard on this flight that in an emergency situation, before trying to help anyone else, you need to first put on your own oxygen mask. This is a principle of airplane safety and of our emotional lives. If we try to help others without helping ourselves first, nobody might get oxygen. Which is why we’ll be taking a moment now to contemplate people pleasing, also known as fawning.

At a basic level, people pleasing is having difficulty establishing healthy personal boundaries, it’s also the excessive relinquishing of personal power, driven by fear and a desire for validation. While we may have been conditioned to consider what others think about us, it’s not healthy and often leads to us being taken advantage of.

We are not responsible for how other people feel, nor do we have the power to make someone else happy. In truth, we can’t reach our true potential if we are trying to be all things to all people.

Studies have confirmed that people-pleasing has a negative effect on our health and that it is slightly more prevalent in women. Some studies showed how people-pleasing manifested itself as overeating, as it can drive us to ignore our own needs including the needs of our own bodies. Other studies showed a pattern between people-pleasing and unhealthy or even abusive relationships.

While we might be cognitively aware of how people-pleasing may be dangerous to our wellbeing, it’s a really hard behavioural pattern to change, and that is because it’s not a behaviour.

You’ve heard about fight, flight and freeze? But do you know about fawning? If we feel threatened, our bodies immediately respond with the underlying goal of minimising, ending or avoiding danger. We do this by either springing into fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode. This happens because our nervous system is feeling overwhelmed or threatened and wants to get back to a state of calm. It’s an unconscious defence mechanism in reaction to feeling unsafe and overwhelmed. To fawn is to people-please. It’s a technique we unconsciously use to feel more secure by earning the approval of others, and it is driven by fear.

Armed with this knowledge we realise that at some point we didn’t feel safe to be our authentic selves and therefore adopted this defence mechanism. The question now is: is it working for you? If your catchphrase is ‘it’s no trouble at all’, yet inside you’re panicking about how you’re going to get it all done, maybe it’s time to get real about people pleasing. The alternative is not being selfish, it’s about being a responsible human being.

Awareness of what’s really happening is your first step to freedom from people pleasing. From here, tiny action steps are required. You have to recognise that trauma responses aren’t changed overnight, and sometimes we need professional help. Have patience with, and compassion for, yourself. Start today, stand up for yourself and your needs. Before you know it, your small steps will have added up to big change. Awareness of what’s really happening is your first step to freedom from people pleasing.

Kirsty Watermeyer

Kirsty is a Yoga and Meditation Coach, a Transformation Facilitator and Writer. Contact her at kirsty@seednamibia.com