It’s Amazing How Much Anxiety Quietly Drives Our Lives

Noticing the Why behind your actions and choices helps you recognise anxiety and connect with the real you.

A few years back, post people-pleasing hangover, I retraced my steps to get a sense of how I’d found myself in a situation. Despite it being an innocuous ask that I’d happily, and possibly a little too quickly, said yes to, hindsight and the people-pleaser feelings (e.g. resentment, anxiety, overwhelm, frustration, overloaded, etc.) revealed I hadn’t considered myself enough.

What was underneath my decision, my almost default response of saying yes? The answer: anxiety.

“Anxiety” didn’t enter my emotional vocabulary until my late twenties. Even then, my understanding of it really only deepened in my forties. I’d associated anxiety with obvious signs of nervousness about temporary, ‘nuisance’ things that you were supposed to “buck up”, “cop on”, “get a grip”, and “get over yourself”.

In what proved to be a life-changing realisation, it hit me that people pleasing is a manifestation of anxiety that, ironically, is also a learned anxiety-management response.

When you people-please (or consider doing it), it’s because you are or were anxious about something.

For instance, maybe you were anxious about not being liked, being out of control or having too much of it, being judged, getting into trouble, endangering getting something you need(ed) or want(ed), experiencing rejection or abandonment, not being perceived the way you want to be. The list goes on.

As time goes on and I recall bits of my childhood, observe my own children, and learn more about my emotions, I can see how anxious Little Nat was. For instance, I went through an extended period from around age three/four of experiencing what I called “the shudders”—waves and surges of rolling sensations in my tummy that left me terrified and incapacitated. School, while it was an escape, could also be overwhelming and overstimulating. Home, while sometimes calm and fun, was loaded with emotional eggshells and landmines.

Anxiety was the emotional backing track to my life, and I became practised at tuning it out.

Making the connection between people pleasing and anxiety changed some of what I thought I knew about myself. I stopped mislabelling stuff as “good deeds” and “who I am” and seeing them for what they are.

Here’s a small sample of things I hadn’t realised were manifestations of anxiety:

• Perfectionism, including labouring on stuff I’m doing “just one more thing” and overattention to detail.

• Overthinking

• Over-responsibility

• Overgiving

• Getting very stressy about deadlines, punctuality, and keeping people waiting.

• Being super intense at the beginning of romantic involvements.

• The “butterflies” I used experience when I fancied someone, which turned out to be my body letting me know that I was engaging with someone that reflected my pattern of emotional unavailability and shady relationships

• Overapologising

• Repeatedly asking people if they’re “ok”. The Fishes episode in season two of The Bear is superb. I winced in recognition of not only the family dynamics but Sugar’s relentless temperature checks of her volatile mother.

• Procrastination. Nope, it isn’t laziness.

• Sometimes acting like Homer Simpson disappearing into the bush when I see someone I know but am unsure of how they are around me and/or they’re one of the “cool girls” so might blank me for someone “better”.

Recognising the anxiety that lurked behind my everyday habits opened me up to gaining a better knowledge and understanding of myself.

It’s a work in progress—that’s life, innit?—but I’ve learned to take a closer look at my defaults, the things I assume to be the Way, and consider not just whether I want to continue doing something but what works better for me. Even if it doesn’t look how everyone else does it.

One of the reasons I decided to do a hard reset with work this year and slow down is because it became increasingly clear to me over these last few years, particularly with the pandemic, that my work habits are anxiety-driven. It’s not that I’ve invested my bandwith—time, energy, efforts and emotions—in things I didn’t want to. However my approach to work, much of what I’ve learned about what it is to be a Good Worker and then, later, a Good Business Owner, is rooted in people pleasing, including perfectionism, overgiving, overthinking, and over-responsibility.

It’s the question of the underlying Why that turns what, for all intents and purposes, might be a “good” thing into people pleasing because we’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

As I explain in The Joy of Saying No, plenty of humans work hard, do things for friends and family, sometimes put others first, but they don’t do it due to underlying feelings of low self-worth or fear of what will happen if they don’t. They’re aware of their boundaries and themselves and so when they realise something is too much or too little, not a fit, and whatnot, they respond to this information.

Because people pleasing, and so, in turn, anxiety, can be a way of life where we don’t know any different, we can actually find ourselves engaging in people-pleasing behaviours by default even though the person and the situation doesn’t require it. We think people pleasing is who we are and normalise anxiety because it’s intertwined with our good qualities and it can seem noble and caring to feel like shit every time we so much as consider ourselves.

Check in with yourself about the characteristics, qualities and habits you pride yourself on being.

Start paying attention to the why behind your actions, decisions and choices.

If any lead to…

• routinely experiencing the people-pleaser feelings

• neglecting your needs

• struggling to create healthy boundaries

• overextending yourself, burnout, or illness

• being in repeats of painful, unfulfilling and unhealthy situations and relationships

• feeling as though you need to numb out

• anxiety that you tend to blame on something else or even on your being “too sensitive”, etc.,

… you need to reframe what you think you know about yourself.

If the Why behind your actions and choices is about getting or avoiding something, particularly when it’s effectively going to involve attempting to influence and control other people’s feelings and behaviour, that’s where you veer away from yourself and breach yours (and other people’s) boundaries.

My realisations meant I could not only stop giving myself a hard time about where I’d failed to live up to mine and other people’s unrealistic expectations, but I could break the cycle of anxiety in my life that I hadn’t even realised I was in the grip of.

Find a healthier Why so that you connect with and get to be a more authentic, happier, fulfilled you.

Coming soon… October 4th, my first masterclass for Substack subscribers: How To Connect with Your Real Self. A practical session on how to connect with and own what you need, desire and value so that you enjoy more fulfilling choices, relationships, and experiences. Free to paid subscribers.

Also coming up How To Be More Emotionally Available and Was/Is This the Relationship/Job/Opportunity for Me? (current working title!)