The Link Between Women’s Ill Health + People Pleasing

As a holistic women’s nutritionist and trauma-informed health coach, women come to me to help improve their health, address poor lifestyle habits, and optimize their nutrition and behaviours for healing and vitality.

Very often, I come across lovely women who are constantly putting everyone first, who stay in abusive relationships, or who just are unable to speak their truth, stand up for themselves, or set healthy boundaries.

And what they don’t know, is how heavily this impacts their health, consciously and unconsciously.

Let’s take the topic of emotional eating as an example.

The majority of women struggle with this to some extent, and this learned behavior is a coping mechanism for emotions or stress that people feel unable to deal with or express. If we dive into this deeper from a somatic lens, food is being used as a way to soothe people’s nervous systems. When they enter an uncomfortable state of activation they have learned to utilize food as a way to soothe their system and get back to rest and digest (the parasympathetic state) where they feel safe again.

The excess food, calories, sugar, and fat (cause let’s be honest, no one is emotionally eating broccoli) then wreaks havoc on their physical health, which impacts their mental and emotional health and it becomes a vicious cycle.

What is important here, is to look at the root of the problem.

The people-pleasing tendencies and dysregulation of their nervous system.

If there was a healthy relationship to their emotions, and they felt safe to express how they felt, there would be less need to cope with behaviors like emotional eating.

Let’s explore this further.

Polyvagal Theory

According to polyvagal theory, when we perceive a threat to our system, which can be anything from an unpleasant facial expression from your partner to a man following you home- our nervous system has a few types of responses it may enter into.

1. Fight
2. Flight
3. Fawn
4. Freeze

When we encounter something threatening, our systems initially look to fight, to utilize their aroused energy to fight back against the threat. If we felt unable to fight, we would look to flight, to remove ourselves from the environment. Next, and the response that this article is about, is the fawning response. This is when our body’s stress response is to avoid conflict by trying to please or soothe the threat. Our systems become wired from an early age to have a default response.

Unfortunately, women have been socialized to embody the fawn response in everyday life. To keep the peace, be amicable, and not say what they truly feel or want, to stay safe.

Women have been conditioned to keep their emotions to themselves to not be seen as ‘weak’ or ‘hysterical’, and not to speak up in case to be called ‘selfish’ or ‘bitchy’ and deemed undesirable by society.

This no longer lies at a conscious level, or as an ingrained belief, this is now a physiological response from our nervous systems to every situation which causes arousal or threat.

The problem lies when we are meeting a threat, and automatically going into a fawn response, and we are not expressing any of the arousal energy that our bodies have created in response to the threat. In fact the opposite happens- by fawning and holding the peace, we are internalizing this energy inwards, and suppressing it inside our systems. Which is causing disease.

Women’s Ill Health Today

Today, women account for almost 80% of autoimmune disease cases. They are at a higher risk of suffering from chronic pain, insomnia, fibromyalgia, long-term COVID, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraines, and are twice as likely as men to die after a heart attack. Women experience depression, anxiety, and PTSD at twice the rate of men, and face a ninefold higher prevalence of anorexia, the deadliest mental health disorder. The rising levels of autoimmune are staggering, and 80% of all cases are in women, as well as more chronic illnesses.

Scientists have now stressed the clear link between suppressing emotions and illness.

In his best-selling book, The Myth of Normal, physician and author Gabor Mate writes that many of our society’s most “normalized ways of being” — the qualities we regard as “admirable strengths rather than potential liabilities” — are, in fact, incredibly toxic. “That ‘not listening to self’ to prioritize others’ needs is a significant source of the health-impairing roles women assume,” Mate explains. “It is among the medically overlooked but pernicious ways in which our society’s ‘normal’ imposes a major health cost on women.”

The repression of anger leads to the chronic secretion of stress hormones, such as cortisol, that suppress the immune system.

Gabor Mate- The Myth Of Normal

It is clear- that we need a new normal for all of us women.

So where can we go from here?

We must acknowledge it is challenging to change ways of behavior in a society that prioritizes a people-pleasing way of being for women. Needless to say, progress and change can still be made individually, and our health depends on it.

Emotions as an insight

We have been taught to be scared of emotions or see them as inconvenient, and push them down to keep the peace and stay safe. What is now important that we do, is become aware of how we are feeling, and allow the feelings, and emotions that often arise as an insight. For example anger, as something needing to be changed or a boundary being crossed, we now can look to utilize these powerful tools to listen to our bodies and ask ourselves: What am I needing right now?

Boundary setting

It can feel very hard to set boundaries, to even know or feel worthy enough to prioritize your feelings and your wants to even create a boundary. Communicating your true needs is essential for overall well-being and for healthy relationships. Counterintuitively, when you speak up more for yourself and your needs, your relationships become stronger as a result. And if some don’t then they are not the right relationships for you to be in.

Every time we do not express what we feel in some way shape or form, it stays in the body and later shows up as a symptom or contributes to a larger disease.

De-activation of our feelings is crucial and understanding this link between perpetual people-pleasing and poorer health outcomes is a crucial first step to taking back our power and our right as women, to honour our needs, whilst also being in a relationship with others.

Integration of Trauma-Informed Approaches Into Health

Our Nervous System effects every system in the body, and if it is operating in a disregulated way, our health will not be optimum. The health world is slowly beginning to recognise the sheer importance of the nervous system and its effect on our health, and I believe we will begin to see these approaches implemented more and more.

When it comes to utilising this somatic lens and perspective into our health and as a practitioner, I found it vital to train in Nervous system and Trauma-informed coaching methods in order for us to rewire our patterning of behaviour and remove barriers that are constantly holding us back as women to live our healthiest fullest lives.

I integrate somatic coaching and nervous system regulation tools and practises when working with clients if I can sense that there is dysregulation that needs to be addressed. This helps me and my clients truly achieve long-lasting change and most often reduce health symptoms that they have been trying to alleviate without results for a long time.

If you would like to know more about how I work with clients you can read more here, or book a call with me here to see if my current package would be a good fit for you.