Overcoming People-Pleasing Tendencies During Perimenopause
Perimenopause is when many women begin saying no for the first time. Learn how to recognise people-pleasing patterns and start prioritising your own needs.
The People-Pleasing Pattern
People-pleasing is a pattern of behaviour in which a person consistently prioritises the needs, comfort, and approval of others over their own. It can look like agreeableness, helpfulness, or even warmth. From the outside, a people-pleaser is often described as kind, easygoing, and generous. From the inside, it frequently involves ongoing self-suppression, a constant monitoring of other people's emotional states, and a deep fear of conflict or disapproval. Most women who identify as people-pleasers did not choose this pattern deliberately. It developed as a strategy, often in childhood, for navigating environments where their own needs were unwelcome or where keeping others happy was the price of feeling safe. By the time perimenopause arrives, the pattern is usually so automatic it barely registers as a choice.
Why Perimenopause Challenges It
Perimenopause has a way of making old strategies feel exhausting in ways they did not before. The combination of physical depletion, hormonal shifts that affect emotional regulation, and the psychological momentum of midlife reassessment tends to surface questions that had been quietly shelved. Why am I doing this if it costs me so much? Whose life am I actually living? Many women report that their tolerance for situations that drain them without giving back drops significantly during perimenopause. This is not pathology. It is often described, in retrospect, as a kind of growing up: a belated and necessary adjustment in how care and energy are distributed. The difficulty is that people around you have adapted to the old pattern, and changing it disrupts a system that others benefit from.
Recognising People-Pleasing in Daily Life
People-pleasing shows up in ways that are easy to miss because they are so normalised. Saying yes to obligations you resent and then feeling quietly resentful. Apologising when you have done nothing wrong. Struggling to express a preference, even about something trivial like where to eat. Feeling responsible for other people's emotional states. Working yourself to exhaustion because you cannot bring yourself to ask for help or delegate. Changing your opinion when you sense someone disagrees. Each of these individually may seem minor. Together, they describe a life organised around keeping others comfortable at your own expense. Noticing these moments without judging yourself for them is important. They are not weaknesses. They are learned responses that made sense at some point.
The Role of Anger
People-pleasers often have a complicated relationship with anger. Many have suppressed it so thoroughly that they barely recognise it when it arrives. But perimenopause, with its reduced hormonal smoothing of emotional signals, tends to let anger surface more readily. For many women, this is the first time they have felt their own resentment clearly enough to take it seriously. Anger, in this context, is not a problem to be managed. It is information. It points toward places where your needs are not being met, where your boundaries have been repeatedly overridden, where the cost of accommodation has become too high. Learning to listen to anger, rather than immediately suppressing or pathologising it, is one of the more useful things you can do during this transition.
Learning to Say No
Learning to say no after a lifetime of saying yes is not a comfortable process. The first few times, it will likely feel wrong, even frightening. People may react with surprise, disappointment, or irritation. It helps to start small: declining an optional commitment that carries a low social risk. Practising in lower-stakes situations builds the tolerance for discomfort that you will need when the stakes are higher. It also helps to remember that saying no to one thing is always saying yes to something else: to your own energy, your time, your priorities. A no is not a rejection of the person asking. It is an assertion of what you need. Most relationships that are worth keeping can accommodate that.
Building New Relational Habits
Changing a people-pleasing pattern requires not just individual acts of boundary-setting but a gradual rewiring of how you relate. This takes time. You will slide back into the old pattern under stress, particularly when you are tired or experiencing difficult symptoms. The goal is not perfection but direction: a consistent, gentle movement toward relationships where your needs are visible and your contributions are chosen rather than compelled. Tracking your symptoms and energy over time with PeriPlan can help you understand which days and times you have the most capacity for the effort that change requires. On high-symptom days, maintaining new patterns is harder, and knowing that in advance allows for realistic self-management.
What Becomes Possible
Women who work through people-pleasing tendencies during perimenopause often describe the outcome in strikingly positive terms, even though the process is uncomfortable. Relationships tend to become more honest. The exhaustion of constant self-monitoring lifts, at least partially. There is more energy available for things that are genuinely meaningful rather than merely obligatory. And there is often a sense of finally arriving at a version of yourself that feels more real, more grounded, and considerably less afraid of other people's disappointment. Perimenopause demands a lot. But it also offers an occasion to put down things that were never actually serving you, and that is a significant opportunity.
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