Newsrooms are rarely not full of tension, and sometimes, these tensions boil over, as tensions are wont to do. Which is why, in 2014, I found myself swearing at my boss, a woman I liked and utterly respected. I can’t remember what the problem was, only that my response – “I don’t give a f**k what you think” – probably wasn’t the solution. And that’s when I realised I wasn’t a people-pleaser.
Did the phrase exist 12 years ago? Probably – but it wasn’t bandied about with the same casual, crashingly misused alacrity as it is now; the ultimate example of misused therapy speak. In 2026, everyone’s a people-pleaser, just as everyone has OCD. I hate to break it to you, but gaining satisfaction from lining your cans up neatly in your kitchen cupboard doesn’t mean you have OCD (though it might: I’m not a doctor). Likewise, holding the door open for a colleague, letting your housemate borrow your top or agreeing to go to a pub you don’t like as much as the pub round the corner with the better beer garden doesn’t make you a people-pleaser.
Although it doesn’t not make you a people-pleaser either. So conditioned are we to “Conditionitis” that even the mildest behavioural issues will have us slapping labels on them and elevating them to a syndrome. When it comes to the trend of medicalising our often perfectly normal personalities, I blame TikTok, a platform as rife with misinformation about mental health as it is dreary unboxing videos of influencers in ill-advised leopard-print flares.
Too often, it’s misused as a get-out clause for bad behaviour. “I’ve stopped being a people-pleaser,” your friend will say after cancelling dinner at the eleventh hour, causing you to lose your £50 deposit. Speaking on the debut episode of her podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, last year, Meghan Markle commented, “I’m not a people-pleaser any more”. Any more? The Royal Family no doubt lolled at that one.
Although I’m not sure who is worse: the person who thinks they’re a people-pleaser, or the person who is a genuine, bona fide, fully paid-up member of the doormat club. “I can’t help it – I’m a people-pleaser” is one of the former group’s favourite ripostes. The real ones, meanwhile, are too wrung out by their incessant people pleasing to feel proud of it.
People-pleasing – defined by The Royal College of Psychiatrists as a compulsive pattern of consistently sacrificing your own needs, boundaries, and opinions to secure the approval, validation, or comfort of others – is, at its worst, far more self-destructive than those mild acquiescences we must occasionally make to keep the peace. At its heart lies a fear of saying “no”, and of consequences such as conflict or rejection. Chronic people-pleasing can be linked to stress, anxiety and emotional burn-out, as well as resentment and even loss of identity as personal desires are perpetually suppressed.
Like most conditions, the roots of people-pleasing can be traced to early childhood. If you felt your parents only loved you when you were a good little girl or boy, you may have internalised the belief that love is strictly conditional. This can lead to a lifetime of pleasing as a psychological defence that’s sometimes referred to as “fawning”. The fourth and lesser-known “f” after fight, flight or freeze, as its name suggests, fawning involves making yourself as agreeable as possible to avoid rejection or harm.
There are worse creatures to emulate than Bambi, of course – though perhaps not for your mental health. I prefer to channel Moto Moto, the hippopotamus in Madagascar 2 who said “the answer is always yes – unless a no is required”. If your answer to everything is “yes”, your life is likely to become a tsunami of over-commitment, every moment given over to someone else’s needs while your own quietly wither and die.
Sometimes, you only realise you’re not a people-pleaser when you’re confronted with a person who actually is one. I have a friend who seems to spend his life doing things he doesn’t really like doing, as though his own desires aren’t as important as capitulating to the group. He went from having a dominant mother to marrying a dominant wife, raising two dominant children along the way. “Where are we going on holiday? Greece. Some island. I can’t remember,” he’ll say, with a level of detachment that belies the fact that he funded the entire trip. Granted, this friend has a good job – of course he does; he’s a people-pleaser – but the hours he works would send most people into an early grave.
People-pleasers make excellent employees, particularly in large corporate structures that can be remiss in tending to the individual needs of their staff. People-pleasers rarely ask for pay rises, comfier chairs, extended leave or a decrease in workload, making them the perfect personality type for the modern workplace and its 24/7 demands. For a people-pleaser, it will always be exponentially less painful to reply to a 10pm email than to chastise the sender. “Boundaries” isn’t really in their lexicon.
I’ve thought a lot about why I’m not a people-pleaser, and concluded that it’s because I was bullied as a child – briefly, but it left a lasting mark. The worst part of the bullying was not knowing what I’d done to deserve it. While the humiliation faded, the irrationality remained. It taught me that however carefully you conduct yourself, and however kind and decent you try to be, there will always be someone who doesn’t like you, or even hates you, and tries to cause you pain. When you figure this out aged 12, life changes for ever. It teaches you that trying to please people is pointless, because the strange alchemy that makes one person popular and another disliked is far less formulaic than the sum total of meting out a life’s worth of altruistic actions. So really, you may as well be a c**t.
I’m kidding, of course. It’s nice to be nice, always. Please people by all means. Just don’t forget to please yourself.
X: @LauraCraik, Instagram: @lauracraik
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