#334 How People-Pleasing Is Ruining Your Health and Hormones

You probably have a very full life in so many ways, and still a very empty feeling. You're competent. You're reliable. You're the person that everyone calls. And somewhere underneath all of that, all the planning, the executing, the managing, the performing, you've lost yourself.

You've lost your spark, your desire, your turn-on. You don't know what makes you feel sexy, what makes you feel turned on. You've probably forgotten how to have fun.

When I sit across from a woman and ask what she does for fun, what turns her on, and what she desires, she often hasn't thought about those things in years. Maybe ever. Ask her about the next quarter in her business, and she's got that down. Planning and controlling, check. Desiring and receiving need some work. 

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This Is Not a Character Flaw

What I want you to understand about high-achieving women and control is that this is not a character flaw. It is a learned strategy. At some point in our lives, probably early on, we figured out that if we anticipate, manage, and plan enough, we will feel safe. If we give enough, people won't leave. And that equation works to an extent, and it gets us far.

Clinically, we call this hypervigilance. The lived experience of hypervigilance over a number of years is exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, and depression. The relational experience, although we're doing it to seek safety, is actually the opposite. It's actually isolation.

Because we cannot be in control of an experience and simultaneously be in it. We're either managing the room, or we are present in the experience. Most high achievers are chronically managing. And it keeps us from having the love, connection, and desire that we want.

Our super traits, our loyalty, our tolerance, our hard work, our ability to be the glue, these are not weaknesses. They are adaptations to childhood trauma that are actually assets in life and career. But when our body has been running on this stress response for years, we can't relax. We can't sit still. We hit our pleasure ceiling, the amount of good that we allow ourselves to tolerate, and we sabotage it.

What Chronic Hypervigilance Does to the Body

The cost is real. When we are in that persistent state of putting out fires, what's next, let's go, waiting for the other shoe to drop, we're constantly activated. We see cortisol dysfunction, HPA axis dysregulation, sleep disruption, abdominal weight gain, brain fog, hormonal dysregulation, irregular or absent periods, and fertility challenges. When we do not feel safe, we are down-regulating our hormone production in order to make more stress hormones.

The only time I had PMDD or more significant hormone issues was in an abusive relationship. My body knew. My body was responding before I did. We see thyroid dysfunction, digestive issues, and immune dysregulation. The number of women I have worked with in the last 11 years with autoimmune disease who are also people pleasers with super traits and chronically hypervigilant, we cannot disconnect the two.

Control Is the Opposite of Intimacy

Control is the opposite of intimacy. The hypervigilant, people-pleasing woman who has learned to read the room, preempt conflicts, and plan ahead so things don't go wrong will generally have a lot of career success. But if we bring that same skill set into our most intimate relationships and into the bedroom, it kills desire.

Intimacy requires presence. Not anticipating what is happening next, the state we spent our whole lives in. It requires pleasure, where we are actually receiving the good feelings. And it requires connection, being with what is, without editing it.

Three Tools for Tolerating Uncertainty

Understanding the uncertainty conceptually does not automatically make us better at tolerating it. This is a body-based skill. The more present we can be with pain, the more present we can be with pleasure.

Separate sensation from the story.

When uncertainty arises, notice what happens in your body before narrating it. There is a physical sensation, a tightening in your chest or your pelvic floor, shallow breathing, feeling hot, and your stomach contracting. The story we stack on top of it is often what creates more suffering.

Practice asking, "What is happening in my body right now?” What is the sensation? Where do I feel it? How big? What color? Does it move? Feelings will not kill you. Learning to sit with them is a practice.

The physiologic sigh.

Inhale through your nose as much as you can, and when you think your lungs are full, inhale a little longer. Then a slow exhale through the mouth. This is a quick and easy way to down-regulate your stress response in real time. Use it in a meeting.

Use it when your kids are melting down. Use it when you are triggered by your partner. The extended exhale activates our parasympathetic nervous system, our rest, digest, receive. We breathe our way down.

Titrate the discomfort.

When we stop controlling, we feel like the walls are crashing in. I call this the clamped fire hose. Things have been building up behind the scenes for years. The practice is not to jump in the deep end but deliberately choose small, manageable doses of not knowing. Let the text sit unanswered for an hour.

Make a decision without researching all the options first. Choose a restaurant you have never been to and just show up. Small, deliberate, repeated doses of tolerating the unknown are how your nervous system learns that uncertainty is not the same thing as actual danger.

You didn't build this life by waiting until conditions were perfect. If you are at the point where something needs to change, apply to work with me. I read every application personally.

This is your sign.

Connect with Dr. Jordin:

Two spots remain for summer private coaching. Not a course, not a group program. A series of deep one-on-one sessions where we map out the dynamic you're inside, untangle the over-accountability you've been carrying, and rebuild your life and relationships around pleasure, physiologically and somatically. APPLY NOW

And if you want to go deeper on super traits, over-functioning, and building a pleasure-centered relationship and life, the Pleasure-Centered Society on Substack is where that work lives. JOIN HERE

If you want to understand the specific dynamic you're inside before going deeper, the Pleasure Path Assessment is a private one-on-one deep dive. Book HERE