By saying “pleasing everyone around you,” I don’t mean always being there for other people and selflessly giving them your support and help. Rather, I am referring to the point in life when you begin caring about what would make other people feel happy and fulfilled more than about what would make you feel in exactly this way.
When you prioritize the feelings, thoughts, and needs of others over your own, you begin feeling empty, numb, and lifeless. You stop taking care of yourself. You stop respecting and loving yourself.
Indeed, trying to help and please everyone around you can be really tiring and stressful. And this is not surprising because when you’re extremely kind, compassionate, and caring, your energy levels decrease and you end up feeling mentally and physically exhausted as a result.
Here are 5 reasons why you need to stop pleasing others and begin prioritizing yourself instead:
1. You’ll lose yourself.
Trying too hard to agree with and please everyone around you will make others see you as a pushover. And trust me – some people will be easily tempted to walk all over you. Therefore, stop.
Stop trying to please everyone since the more you try to help and make others feel happy and satisfied, the more you’ll lose yourself and your integrity.
2. You’ll create co-dependent relationships.
Codependency is not being clingy or dependent on someone else. It’s planning your entire life around pleasing and making other people happy.
When you’re constantly pleasing others, you can easily, and even unconsciously, make them depend on you since they’ll get accustomed to you always being there for them, helping them, and doing so many wonderful things for them.
This is undoubtedly considerable pressure to carry on your shoulders since when you fail to help them, their plans can fail and their lives could suffer on both personal and professional level as well.
3. You’ll become more vulnerable.
Giving your best to make happy and please everyone around you will gradually make you more vulnerable to criticism since you’ll begin to depend too much on other people’s opinions of you. What others think of you will start affecting the way you see yourself and it might even make you feel self-conscious about your appearance and actions.
4. You’ll harm your health.
When you spend a great amount of time and effort prioritizing other people, you can easily forget to take care of your overall health.
By focusing on other people’s feelings, needs, desires, and problems, you stress and wear yourself out. And living in a constant state of stress will inevitably damage your mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
5. You’ll feel unappreciated and unloved.
The irony of being a people-pleaser is that when it’s YOU that needs help and support, there’s no one around to help you. The reason for this is that most people don’t think you ever need help. And, of course, there are those who don’t appreciate your kindness and help and who only want to take advantage of you.
All this can really hurt your feelings and even cause you to feel unappreciated, unloved, and rejected.
