The Surprising Link Between People Pleasing & Your Health: A Medical Doctor’s Recommendation on How to Say “No”

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Restrictions apply. Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.
So a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to go down to the Today Show and And I love being on the Today Show because first of all, I love Hoda and Jenna. Secondly, I just love going on the Today Show because it's always super fun and it's a really fun morning and it's everything that you would imagine it would be.
And when you're backstage at the Today Show, you are in these hallways where tons of people are coming and going, whether it's the folks that are working on the show, or it's the people that are appearing on the show. And so you just never know who you're going to bump into.
And so I'm standing back there. And the first person that walks by is Charlotte Tillsbury, who is this very famous makeup entrepreneur and artist and this fabulous woman who always talks like this, darling.

And I am a huge fan of Charlotte Tillsbury. And so she stops and I'm like, and she's like, and then I go, oh my God, my daughters love you.
And I love you. And she's like, I love you.
And so we have this hug and she was so fun. And then she leaves.
And so I'm like, oh my God, that was Charlotte Tillsbury. Well, all of a sudden around the corner comes this another extraordinary woman.
And she is so striking. She's tall and she is wearing this vibrant, I don't even know what color it was.
It was like this chartreuse meets Kelly green silk blazer and matching wide leg pants. And she comes breezing around the corner and she's so striking in terms of her presence.
Like there's this, this like confidence and this warmth to her. And it's the kind of person that you immediately are like, I'd like to be that person's friends.
So I see her coming. I do the 10-5 game that I've told you about.
She's 10 feet away. I smile.
She's five feet away. I'm like, hi.
And she goes, hi. Oh my gosh, Mel.
And I'm like, oh my gosh, hi. I don't know you, but I feel like I should know you.
And she walks up and says, can I hug you? And I'm like, of course. Nothing is better than a hug.
And so we hug and she introduces herself and her name is Dr. Neha Sangwan.
And we start chatting and I'm like, what did you just talk about? And she was talking about people pleasing on the Today Show and how your inability to say no is making you ill. And I stopped in my tracks and I was like, wait, what? And she goes on to explain that she is a medical doctor.
She practices internal medicine. She is also a researcher.
And she was on the Today Show to explain that your habit of people pleasing, always looking at other people, always being worried about what their reaction is going to be, couching what you're going to say, the fact that you say yes, when you actually mean no, that's what she talks about. And I said, we got to get you on the Mel Robbins podcast because I've certainly struggled with people pleasing.
I absolutely get worried about what other people are going to think. And guess what? She is here today.
So get ready to get control of your life, to learn how to say no, and to get better connected with what you actually want, which is where all of this is going to begin. Please help me welcome Dr.
Neha Sangwon to the Mel Robbins podcast. Oh, such an honor to be here.
Well, I have so much that I want to talk to you about, and I guess we should just jump right in. One of the things that caught my attention is that you describe this thing that we all do, where we become a yes person.
What does that mean? It is when we almost lose an anchor inside of ourselves and we become a yes to the outside world. We become driftwood in the ocean.
Like we're going in whatever direction the wind is blowing us. And really, it's overwhelming because we don't feel grounded.
We don't feel centered. We don't know how we're making decisions.
We're just going whichever way the world is going. And boy, these days, the world is going in a lot of directions.
I literally, when you said you're like a driftwood in the ocean going in whatever direction, I thought about my poor husband in our marriage, that I am such an overwhelming force. and what you're talking about is that you can become a yes to outside forces, and not even realize how much you're doing it, and you lose your ability to make decisions or even to know yourself.
Absolutely. I mean, the goal in the end is to become a sailboat with a rudder that is influenced by the wind, but charts its own course.

and so we don't ever want to go so far away from that that we're like anchoring ourselves and unable to move and we don't care which way the wind is blowing

we want to care about all of that and we don't care which way the wind is blowing. We want to care

about all of that. And we want to make sure that what we feel is that we have some input into the direction in which we're moving.
I would never have labeled my husband a people pleaser. but when I think about how he kind of goes through life or has until recently, he was very focused on making sure everybody else was okay.
And he put himself last. And is that the same thing as people pleasing? Or is people pleasing something else? So people pleasing is the moment that you give up what matters to you in order to appease or please somebody else so that you can belong, so that you don't have to confront conflict, so that you can keep that relationship intact.
Okay. So I think all of these have

spectrums, right? What I'd say is, at the end of the day, what you really want is that you're able

to take input from the outside world. But when it's time to make a decision, you turn up the

voice, the sound of your own heart slightly louder than you can hear the voices of others. I love you.
And so that's really the end way because it's a nuance. We live in a world with other people.
We care about each other. It matters to us that we belong.
And so to be able to say, oh, someone's a people pleaser, or they're not, listen, at the beginning of my life, 100%, first three and a half decades of my life, 110%, the scale was tipped. So far on one side, I'm a healer, right? I'm a doctor, I'm a coach, the all of these come from that place,

it's such a good intention to serve. But when it goes that far, at least what I learned about myself, was that it came from a trauma early on in my life, right, where I didn't feel like I belonged.
And so if I didn't feel like I belonged, or I didn't understand what I did wrong, then later on, I will almost overcorrect in my life. You know, it was me being sent away with my grandparents when I was really young.
And I didn't understand why am I being sent away? For my parents, it's an act of love. But to a child, it felt like, wait, why am I the one being separated? So how we interpret what happens early on helps us figure out coping mechanisms and strategies that we use to manage that pain or that stress that occurs later on.
And I went too far in one direction. What I hope I never lose, Mel, is caring about what the people around me think, what they want, who I'm in partnership with, and what he wants.
So I really resonate with your husband, because I think that's a lot of me. And I needed to come more into balance to become who I truly am.
And I needed to learn how to sit in the discomfort of another in order to be true to myself. There are so many things that you have already said that I don't want to go forward yet without stopping and taking some time and unpacking it.
I want to make sure you heard Dr. Neha say this image of a sailboat with a rudder and a sail that can use the outside forces to go in a direction that you want, but that you stay centered to yourself.
The second thing that I wanted to put a highlighter on is when you describe being a little girl and your parents sent you to live with your grandparents and you didn't understand why. Can you unpack that for us? Because I had a very similar, like visceral experience when I heard you say that story.
I had this visceral image of myself as a little, little kid going, why are you mad at me? So I'm going to tell you a little bit about it and we'll just see how I do. When I was three months old, my parents are immigrants from India.
And in 1965, they came here to build a life. I grew up in Grand Blank, Michigan, and I'm the middle daughter of three.

My grandmother came over to take care of the children while my parents were both working

full time to make ends meet.

And so my grandmother was cooking, cleaning.

I have an older sister, 18 months older than me.

So now there's a newborn.

OK, so my grandmother's there.

My grandfather gets stationed in Africa by the UN to help them with their agriculture. He calls my grandmother and says, I know Neha's three months and Rithu's 18 months, but I need you here.
I'll do the work of the United Nations project, but I need you to do the social world, which you do so well. My grandmother had a talk with my parents, scooped me up and said, you take care of Rithu.
She's potty trained. I'm going to take Neha with me.
We'll have plenty of resources there and me, and everything's going to be great. And my parents thought, oh my gosh, how amazing.
Like she'll get the love of her grandmother who was going to be here taking care of her.

So they sent me.

Fast forward two years.

And my sister and my mother came to pick me up.

A three-month-old didn't know what was happening, but a two-year-old sure does.

And so when they came to pick me up and brought me back, I didn't stop crying for more than a month. I would just wake up.
I'd be crying. Where is my nani and nana? Where are they? And my parents, who were in their 20s, doing the best they knew how, moving to a new country, all of these things, were beside themselves with this two-year-old who wouldn't stop crying.

It took about a month.

And I realized how stubborn I was because when I was little,

I would only call my dad in that time.

I'd only call him, hey, you.

I wouldn't call him dad.

I was like, hey, you potty.

Hey, you hungry.

Hey, you.

But it took about a month of his persistence.

I have to give him credit. And I upgraded him to uncle.
Wow. And I realized after about a month or two, that no matter how much I cried, I wasn't going back.
And so I better adjust to the environment I'm in. And I began to scan the environment.
I mean, I knew what everybody wanted my mom, my dad, my sister, and I became such a good child. That when my when I overheard my dad later on, he just made a comment like, yeah, the second one was a girl too.
Like I wanted a son who was an

engineer. And then I heard my mom saying, wow, I missed my calling to become a doctor.
I wish, I hope one of my girls becomes a doctor. Boy, Mel, my radar was so in tune to everybody else's needs And the Indian community, you know, in general,

it's like, hey, so you're good at math and science? Are you going to be an engineer or a doctor?

So this little girl grew up like a sponge, absorbing the external environment because

inside me was too painful. So I checked out and disconnected from myself and tuned into the accolades and love that I could get from going outward.
However you could get them. You bet.
So can you describe for us just what happened to you so that anybody listening might be able to locate them in this moment where they felt separate and people pleasing became a coping mechanism. I remember being really young, about seven years old.
And, you know, my dad's parents really never taught him about emotions. And so he has a temper that I write about in my book.
So my dad's temper, I wanted to figure out why I was getting bullied when I was older. But I, it was people who were getting really angry and blowing up in it and telling me to do things.
I think it's those moments that really create this experience where we are uncomfortable with other people's discomfort, or we feel as though we've done something wrong and we knee jerk, move into a mode of, how do I make this okay? How you show up today is as much determined like by your childhood blueprint as your wardrobe at home influenced what you're wearing today. So I want to help deconstruct the invisible connections between past and present moment experience.
So I traced it back to being about seven years old in a yellow kitchen, standing kind of behind a plant while my parents were arguing about something. And my dad got really mad.
He picked up a plate. It was empty, but a plate.
And he smashed it down on the table and it broke. And little seven-year-old, my mom said, Neha, can you please go upstairs, honey? Can you please? I'd like to talk to your father.
And so that was my cue to exit left. But I remember it wasn't until 20, 30 years later that I remember saying, oh, wow.
I, in that moment, came up with, don't make dad mad, because if you do, this time it was the plate. And if mom wasn't here, next time it would be you.
Right? Like, I didn't do this consciously, but my little brain went scurrying up the stairs and noted to itself, danger. Anytime someone starts raising their voice, thumping, breaking, slamming cupboards with doors, whatever it is, don't make any more trouble.
Get out of there. I think we all have an experience like that growing up because the hardest thing in the world when it comes to yourself is managing your own emotions, both what you're feeling and your ability to tolerate it.
And when we went to our, you know, massive audience online and started asking about people pleasing, the vast majority, 70% of people said, I often say yes when I mean no.

And the majority of the time it's at work and with friends. 82% of people responded that they feel constantly stressed, irritated, tired, and impatient.
And they attributed it as being related to some conflict that they were avoiding.

And you as a medical doctor have seen the impact not only in your own life, but with your patients, both when you were practicing as a resident and also in your current practice, the impact of all of this pent up inability to tolerate emotion and then twisting yourself in knots to make everything on the outside okay when you are simultaneously killing yourself on the inside. Can you talk to us about the physical impact that people pleasing and being somebody who's so concerned about the outside that you're not thinking about you and inside of you, what is the physical impact of doing this over time to yourself? Always putting everybody else first.
And here's some of the things that people said.

I avoid conflict because I'm afraid of criticism, because I hate confrontation. That was a huge one.
I hate confrontation. I just want to keep the peace.
It makes me uncomfortable. It's just easier.
Well, let me tell you, it's only easier short term. it's easier in the moment.
So when you have a, you know, you come to a decision point, am I going to address this? Or am I going to not say anything about someone wearing shoes in the house, someone leaving dirty dishes in the sink? Every day, this is an everyday experience. What happens is in the short term, you have a choice.
If you choose to ignore it, you take the short term high of, you know, not having to deal with it. It's just easier to do the dishes.
It's easier not to say something. It's easier to go to their house for the holidays.
It's just easier to say, I'll take the pager or I'll do the summary of the report or I'll handle the thing or I'll pick it up or I'll just say yes because I don't want to deal with the drama. So in the moment, you're like, okay, I know that this is not the right decision because I can feel my resistance to it and I can feel my kind of like, but then I just take it on myself because I think it's easier.
But you as a medical doctor, Dr. Neha are here to say, no, no, no, no, no.
Something else is going on. What's going on? Well, you're taking the short term high and you're going to end up with the long term y.
Okay. You're going to end up with looking yourself in the mirror saying, does everyone think I'm a magic fairy around this house? Like nobody else does anything.
So what happens is, Mel, if there's a conflict between you and I, and it's between us, and we ignore it, it grows bigger. It doesn't go away.
We think we've just avoided it. It actually grows bigger, and it changes location.
And so it took me a good 10 years wanting to be curious about why I got bullied in my life, why I felt so tearful when I would leave people. All these curiosities led me

down the path of exploring my childhood, which gave me the answers of what the unhealed experiences

were for me that I needed to heal in order to, in the present day, feel more connected,

be able to talk about these stories without crying, right? And sometimes I do get tearful.

So there's something here, Mel, that I want to say is underpinning a lot of people pleasing. And it's that we don't really teach our children, we weren't taught.
And oftentimes, because our parents didn't know themselves, the how to handle disappointment, how to handle discomfort, an underlying sense of unease in our bodies. And whenever we get physiologically or biologically, we feel uncomfortable, our body starts talking to us.
We do anything we need to, to make that go away. I think every single one of us has had that experience.
And what also resonated with me is this idea that it's just easier. It's just easier to make everybody else happy.
It's just easier to do it myself. It's just easier not to say something.
And what you're also telling us, Dr. Sangwon, is that this is a learned behavior.
And to me is great news because if you can learn a behavior, you can unlearn a behavior and so that's what I

want to dig into next. How the heck do you unlearn people-pleasing? We're going to talk about that when we come back.
Stay with us. Welcome back.
I'm Mel Robbins, and you and i are here with dr neha sangwan and we are talking about people pleasing she's a medical doctor who has not only struggled with it but she is now researched it written books about it and she is here to tell you you need to unlearn this behavior people pleasing can not make you physically sick, but it is also keeping you from living the life that you deserve to live. She shared some of her experiences about how being sent away to live with her grandparents made her outwardly focused.
She became the kind of person that was so focused on getting approval from everybody else around her that she

lost connection with what actually she wanted, what would make her happy. Maybe you've had a very similar revelation as she's been telling this story.
And so I want to go even deeper into people-pleasing Dr. Sangwon.
Why do we walk around saying yes all the time? The way I think of people pleasing is it's a behavior that we use in order to feel safe and belong. I became an engineer and a doctor, and I blamed my parents.
Like, oh, my parents made me do this until a very smart coach once said to me, really Neha? Who applied to engineering school?

Who did all the problem sets? Who took the exams? Who did the 36 hour shifts in residency?

I'm pretty sure it was you. So you want to tell me what you wanted more than they wanted? Like

you're the one who did it. And in that moment, I was like, oh, I wanted to be seen.
I wanted to the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the value of the in the world. I wanted to be of value and I didn't want anybody to send me away again.
So it's a safety thing. It's subconscious.
Of course, I didn't know it at the

time. But boy, this is the value of going back and understanding the blueprint of your childhood, of understanding the decisions you made to survive and to adapt and to adjust to a world you didn't yet understand.

Is everybody on the planet a people pleaser?

I think what I would say is I think everybody has had the experience of giving up themselves in order to belong to another. You know, I'm thinking it's Gabor Mate who speaks about authenticity over attachment, that sometimes we choose attachment over authenticity, and that we give up who we really are if we know that consciously.
If we know who we are, we give it up in order to keep the relationship, stay attached, be part of a group. I went to med school.
So yeah, engineering and med school. Absolutely.
I did it. Now I can see that I did it.
With those underlying subconscious intentions. I went to engineering school, because I heard my dad say that one day

in the office, I was walking by, he had no idea I heard him. And then the second piece is

the Indian community and my mom revered doctors. My mom missed her calling.
And I think that's a

bigger piece underneath here, which is when you don't know, when you're not anchored to what

Thank you. doctors.
My mom missed her calling. And I think that's a bigger piece underneath here, which is when you don't know, when you're not anchored to what you value and who you are, you are that driftwood in the ocean.
I want to go back to what I said at the very beginning, which is that I had never thought about my husband, Chris, as a people pleaser. Because I consider myself a people pleaser, not anymore.
But that in the past, for probably almost 50 years, I was actively trying to make sure nobody was mad with me. And actively trying to avoid conflict.
and actively scanning the environment, and saying yes when I meant no, and not really good with boundaries, and feeling a lot of anxiety, and a lot of resentment, and all of that kind of stuff. And so my experience of people-pleasing was on the type A end.
Yep. You are actively engaging in something to manipulate the way other people respond to

you.

That's what you're doing.

And I got it.

And I never thought about my husband on the spectrum of people pleasing.

And so I have learned about my husband that he was like so many people and perhaps you listening. He felt like the forgotten one in the family.
Nobody was there to pick him up. Everybody was too busy to come to his games.
He's got story after story after story. Just a couple of weeks ago, his mother was reflecting with tears in her eyes about how poor Christopher, we put him up in an unfinished

attic in a crib. And that was his room because we didn't want to hear him.
And so when you said driftwood floating in an ocean, I had this visceral experience that that's what my husband must have felt like for years.

And so disconnected from himself because his experience was, it didn't matter what he said.

It didn't matter what he did. Nobody was coming.

It didn't even matter if he was crying.

Correct.

Oh, because he was up in the crib in the attic.

Correct. The function of your brain is to help you seek pleasure and avoid pain.
Very basically, that's, it's like this, this, this amazing, incredible tool that helps keep us safe in the world, seek pleasure, avoid pain. And so when we, since we were little, if we were told things like go in your room and don't come out until you have a smile on your face, right, we're told things that when we're feeling unhappy, disappointed, when we express it, when we say it, it's wrong, it's bad, don't go there.
And it's not welcome in this household. We grow up believing that we need to fix it.
We need to make fix it in ourselves and fix it in the environment because who knows what's going to happen if we don't. You know, the way that you're explaining this, it's making me realize all the ways that people pleasing can show up in your life.
I mean, obviously, if you can't say no, because you're afraid to disappoint somebody, that's an example of people pleasing. But another example is if you're chronically stressed out about work, so you're working late at night, and you're working the weekends, because you are worried that your boss is going to be disappointed, or your boss is going to be mad at you, or that your boss is going to fire you.
That's people pleasing. If you're like me, and you actively try to make sure that people like you.
So maybe you change up your opinions or you pretend to like things that you don't like. That's what I used to do.
That's a form of people pleasing because you can't handle the thought that people don't like you. Or maybe you're like my husband.
You had an experience growing up where it didn't matter what you wanted because you weren't getting it. And so you stopped asking for it and you just sort of let everybody else decide what's going on.
Let everybody else pick the restaurants. You're not even quite sure what you want anyway, so it's just easier to let everybody else do it.
That's people-pleasing. And why is all of this an example of people-pleasing? Well, it comes back to the original metaphor.
The outside forces in your life, your boss's reaction, what other people think, the fact that you already believe that nobody's going to help you anyway, so you don't ask. That's an example of outside forces steering your behavior.
And these outside forces keep you disconnected from either what you want or from acting in a way that is truly aligned with the person that you are deep down inside. And I would imagine that the more that you try to please other people and the more that you feel like the world is pushing you around, Dr.
Sang-won, the more resentment you feel. Because every time you say yes, when you want to say no, resentment is building.
Can you unpack that for us? Yeah. Well, listen, resentment is such a big clue.
It's a big clue that your boundaries have been trampled all over, and you probably never even drew them. So you may never have even told people that boundaries were there.
Most people don't. No.
And yet you find yourself resentful. And the how I've heard basically a saying, and I'm not pinning where I've heard it from.
But it's basically that resentment is like me drinking poison. Right.
Hoping that you die. Right.
That's how effective that is. And so the resentment is one of those big clues that you have overextended yourself, that you have said yes when you meant no.
You've given people parts of you that you wanted to keep for yourself, whether it was your time, your energy, your expertise, your care, whatever it is. So you want to really ask yourself in those moments.
Wow. First of all, how does resentment show up in my body? What's the way that I am aware right now? Is my stomach sinking? Do I feel weak in my knees? What is happening? So the first thing you want to do is decipher how you know.
I can tell you how it is for me. Yeah.
It's a gigantic, ugh. Like it's a full body like, fuck.
Yeah. Ugh, this shit again.
It's like a full thing that I feel. And the other thing that I've come to learn, this is why it was like a huge thing, like, oh my God, you're overextended, is that it is also a sign of a broken process or a broken system that you're in.
Something that needs updating, leveling up, some communication pattern that's broken.

Like, it's something outdated that needs leveling up.

And when I think about it that way, Dr. Neha, I don't make it personal like an attack.

I'm able to go, oh, I'm really resentful right now over this, and I'm kind of stupid to be,

so something must be broken that needs attention. Is that a good way to think about it? Yeah, absolutely.
You know, you may have been carrying a boulder uphill. I mean, I am guilty of single-handedly trying to change the healthcare system, trying to make it be different than it is.
And so once again, I'd ask you, what is your role in this? You really wanna do something amazing to help people. What's your role in it? What's the environment that you're in? But the question becomes, have I voiced this? Have I told anyone or do I just vent at home? I love that because the second you voice it, you know what you're doing? You're standing up for your boundary.
And when you stand up for your boundary, resentment doesn't build. And you stop allowing the outside forces to just make you do things that you don't want to do.
That makes so much sense. And I want to raise the stakes a little bit, because now that we're starting to understand the mechanics of people pleasing, let's talk about the impact that it's having to you physically from a medical standpoint.
Because Dr. Sang-Wan is here to tell you that people pleasing, when it becomes your default, it makes you physically sick.

And as a medical doctor, this is her medical opinion, and she is going to unpack all of

what this means medically when she comes back. So don't go anywhere.
Welcome back. I'm so glad you're still here.
I'm Mel Robbins, and you and I are talking with Dr. Neha Sangwon.
She's an engineer, she's a medical doctor, and in her words, a recovering people pleaser. So Dr.
Neha, how did you come to realize that you were a people pleaser? You have this story when you were 31 years old, you were practicing as a physician. Can you share that with the person listening? Because I think when they hear it, they're gonna see themselves.
And then I want you to talk about how you as a medical doctor connected the dots between illness, stress, overwhelm, anxiety, depression, and people pleasing. Yes.
So my regular life at work was busy, 18 patients in the hospital, five days on, five days off. Takes me three of the five days to recover.
I'm in this whole cycle. And I still remember it was June 17, 2004.
I walked into the hospital. I'm, you know, seeing my 18 patients last day on service, I get to sign everybody off, somebody calls in sick, what do I say? They say, Can you take the alpha pager? Somebody's sick today.
The alpha pager means you also take all incoming traffic, air traffic control from all neighboring hospitals. Oh my gosh.
So what did I say? Last day on service. I'm exhausted.
I say, sure, I'll do it. I take it.
Five hours later. So I started at 6 a.m.
It's 11 a.m. I've seen two of my 18 patients and I turned to the nurse and I say, Hey, Nina, could you please get 40 milliequivalents of IV potassium for the gentleman in room 636? And she turns to me and says, Dr.
Sangwon, are you okay? And I say, Yeah. Why? And let me just tell you, truth be told, that was my first indication I might not be.
I said, Yeah, sure. Why? And she said, because you've asked me that same question four times in less than five minutes.
And I've answered you every time. Wow.
And it was one of those moments where I kind of went into a little bit of shock. Like, I don't know what's going on here, but I better pay attention.
So I walked to the bathroom and I contacted a psychiatric colleague. And I just said, Hey, Roger, when can I do it? You know, I just want to consult you.
Something weird just happened. And he said,

sure, stop by today at five o'clock. It was 11 in the morning.
And I looked at my pale,

weary face in the mirror and I said, how about now? And boy, that is code in doctor world for

I am in trouble. And he took me in and one hour later, he diagnosed me as a severe people pleaser.

I love that another medical doctor diagnosed you with people pleasing.

He did. He did.
He told me that single handedly, I was trying to take care of the fact that the hospital environment was understaffed to make budget, that I was in an environment of bullying in the hospital,

and that I was a real people pleaser that had started to manifest here in my work,

that every time someone needed something, I was the one to volunteer.

I want to be sure that you listening got what Dr. Neha just said.

She took on something that wasn't hers to own, because that's what you do. And as you listen to me, maybe you're doing this with your family, because that's what you do.
Or maybe you're like Chris, and you let everybody else decide where we're going for dinner, what are we having for dinner, what are we doing on the vacation, because that's what you do. And it's so important for you to see this because we often think, oh, I just love to give, or I just want to be helpful, or it's just easier.
I don't really care. But that's not actually what's happening here.
So after he diagnosed you as a professional people pleaser, what else did the doctor say to you? What he told me that was really lovely is he said, I really want to acknowledge how much you give. So he wasn't making me wrong or bad.
He was trying to help me understand that there's what I now refer to as me, we world. What is that? So I'm an engineer.
So I like to get to the root cause of problems, not just bandaid them.

And in our world, I think a lot of times people get overwhelmed because they think about me now.

Or they zoom way out and they think about world and I can't do anything, right?

And when I think about problems and how I solve them or how do I get to the root of them,

I realize that oftentimes it has something to do with me.

It has something to do with me, it has something to do with we, it has something to do with world, the environment of the hospital, in general, being understaffed, contributed to my needing to take the pager needing to do more with less all the time, even if there's no resources. So what I do, even in conflict, like if I'm any conflict, you can do it anywhere in your life.
You want to think about it as what's my part in this? What's someone else's part in this? What's the role of the environment and the situation that we were in? So I call it me, we world, because it reminds me that I need to expand my perspective to understand what's happening. That is incredibly helpful.
And I love this framework. And I also love the fact that once he connected the dots, medically speaking, between this coping mechanism of people pleasing and taking on everything around you as a way to feel loved and needed and all this stuff.

And I know tons of our listeners will resonate with this, regardless of whether you work or not.

They just take it all on.

You're the one in the family taking care of mom and dad.

You're the one that's always doing this. You're the one that's a volunteer at the school.
You're the one that's always saying yes. You're the one in the family taking care of mom and dad.
You're the one that's always doing this.

You're the one that's a volunteer at the school.

You're the one that's always saying yes.

You're the one that's organizing everything.

That this kind of stopping and going, okay, what's my part in this?

What is my role to play in this?

What is the role of the environment in this?

Can you explain this in the context of you've got aging parents and siblings and one person feels like it's all on them? So if I am, let's say a child, my parents are aging and I'm the one being like, why do I have to do everything? Well, I need to take a moment to say, When mom and dad aren't doing well, what's my first reaction? Is it I'll pay for it? I'll, I'll, I'll be there. I'll go over.
And let's say a sibling says, well, I can go over in an hour. And I say, well, that is not good enough.
I need to go over this minute. Sometimes it's true that things are urgent and I need to go over this minute.
But if my answer every time is, no, I need to take care of it right now because I need to be the good girl, because I need to be the good daughter, because I want to get an A, right? Whatever it is, I need to pay attention to my part in it. And so if your adrenaline starts running every single time, you want to just say, Oh, what's my part in what's my sense of urgency here? Then why does my sister or brother always think it can be done tomorrow or next week? Pay attention to what's going on for them.
Pay attention to the larger dynamics of your family. What role have you been playing for a very long time in your family? And how does it show up with your parents? And there's a bigger, you know, ecosystem.
So it goes me, we world. Gotcha.
But the first part, which I'm really starting to get, is that when you ask yourself, what's my role in this, you will inevitably find yourself having to look in the mirror and see those moments where you can't deal with discomfort in your body. Yep.
You can't deal with the disappointment that it's not going a certain way. Yep.
Or that there's some uneasiness that you feel. But what if nobody goes? What if this happens? What if that happens? And so the people pleasing is triggered by something happening in our bodies.
What I would say to you as a doctor is I learned from my patients that their inability to communicate with themselves and each other makes them physically ill. Wow.
Can you talk a little more about that? Because that really, really piqued my interest. Unresolved conflict, unmet expectations, misunderstandings, broken promises, heartbreak, fractured relationships, loss, separation, unhappiness, all of this stuff, all of this discomfort that we process by saying, it's just easier not to say no.
It's just easier to give in. It's just easier to make the world around me okay and work another weekend and take on that thing that isn't my responsibility to take in, that it actually bubbles to the surface as physical illness, stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, all that stuff.
Is that what you're saying? 100%. 100%.
I found that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness. Wow.
And when I realized that I came back in the hospital and I was like, hey, guys, I figured out that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness. Why are we not asking our patients once we physically stabilize them? Let's ask them what's at the root of their stress.
And my colleagues, one at a time, gave me some version of this. Neha, just like you wouldn't order a test or a diagnostic that you didn't know what to do with the result, nor should you ask a question that you don't know what to do with the answer.
And I'm telling you, Mel, I got angry. I got sad and I almost got emboldened.
And then we give them some cocktail of medications, antidepressant, anti-anxiety, or sleep medication to help their physiology get back in sync. Now, these things are good to do when somebody is about to fall over the edge of burnout or stress or overwhelm or whatever it is.
They're helpful. One month later, we send them back in the ring for round two with no new awarenesses of how they got there or tools to fix it.
All right. I want to make sure the person listening really gets the takeaway, which is the root cause of 80% of the diseases and the health issues that people have can be traced back to the stress in their life.
And you are also saying that the majority of the stress that you have control over and that this all stems even deeper to an inability individually for you to tolerate unease in your body, discomfort, or disappointment. And that that is what is triggering people's inability to effectively communicate with themselves or other people.
That is what turns us into people pleasers. That is what turns us into yes people.
That is what is contributing to you getting sick and unhealthy and feeling anxious and stressed and that there is a solution. So tell us these five questions that you ask the people that you work with, Dr.
Neha. I call it the awareness prescription.
Okay. So the night before their discharge, I would say to them, I'm getting ready to discharge you tomorrow.
And I'd like to give you the opportunity to answer five questions. Question number one, why this? Why a heart attack? Why not your liver or your left leg? Why is this part of your body broken down? And whatever comes to you is the right answer.
Okay.

Question number two.

Why now?

Why not three years ago? Why not two weeks from now? What is the message that you needed to get in this moment that you were not getting? Question number three. Since hindsight's 20-20, what clues, symptoms, patterns that didn't make sense now make perfect sense? Question number four, what else in your life needs to be healed? Oh, that's the doozy.
And question number five, if you spoke from the heart, what would you say to me? And so every patient knew what was at the root of their stress. They knew why they were sick.
They knew what they needed to do. There's not a single patient.
Thousands and thousands of them have done it. And I speak about it actually in Talk Rx, how I use this and help them get to the root of what was going on.
Here's the best part, Mel. My patients' families weren't the ones that started writing me after this.
The patients themselves would show up in the hospital cafeteria, would write me letters themselves and say things like, hey, doc, you remember that lifelong migraine medication I was on? I only need half the dose. Hey, doc, it's the first time in five years I've slept through the night without back pain.
Hey, doc, I only need, you know, a third of my anxiety medication now. I think I'm making progress.
And they had started to do their own work. What they wanted was that sacred exchange that we have an opportunity to have with one another, where I was willing to slow down and ask them the real questions.
And they were willing and open to answer. You know what this reminds me of is this year, I read about it in the Harvard Medical School Journal, I don't know what the thing is called, where there was a meta analysis done of, I've got it right here, that encompassed 97 meta reviews of more than a thousand randomized controlled trials involving over 125,000 participants where they concluded that exercise is one and a half times more effective for most people in treating depression and anxiety than medication and therapy.
And in listening to you, you not only have managed to expand this people pleasing or kind of a banding of self or being a yes person to include all of us on some level. you have also made a very compelling case that the root cause of the things that are causing you to feel anxious or feel overwhelmed or feel disconnected or feel burnt out or sad is your inability to effectively communicate with yourself and with somebody else.
And by effectively communicating with yourself, I'm assuming what you mean is coming back into your own body and finding that anchor inside yourself so that if you've been adrift and life just pushes you around and you go with the flow and you find yourself just trying to take care of everything, that you now have an anchor to come back to. How do we do that? Like, can you teach us?

Yeah. All right.
So when you are somebody, and this happens for women in particular, that constantly are saying, I can do that. I can do that.
I can do that. I can do that.
How do you manage your own people pleasing at work? So in a work setting, know that if there's some gray zone that's happening, now it's about drawing healthy boundaries. So you're my boss, you've asked me to work the weekend, or do something.
So I would say to you, hey, Mel, so it sounds like you want me to work the weekend. I'm going to need to figure out if I can get childcare and see if this can work for me.
Is this something that might be ongoing that we need to talk about and arrange so that, you know, we need to have a discussion on this? I wasn't aware of this as part of what we were going to be doing. And then when I got into that discussion, I would be saying, how long is this for? Now, the thing that people worry about is...
Am I going to get fired? Yeah. And so you just get to say, listen, I'd like to talk about this because I want to do a really good job for you.
Help me understand what's changing about the role, about the company. Because listen, it's not about me being a victim and being fired.
The deal is, if the company's changing, I need to figure out whether I'm still a good fit for this role, this company, this new chapter, this new phase. We're in a world moving faster than many of us, definitely me, can keep up with.
And so the name of the game now here is going to be, can we navigate the unknown together? Can we ask these questions? Can we draw healthy boundaries? Do we know what levels of agreement we've made? And do we have the courage to speak up when something feels hard, different, not what we want to do? Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. I think that when the world talks about people pleasing, we immediately go to boundaries.
And what you're talking about is the medical and physiological fact that people pleasing is triggered the root cause by an inability to tolerate discomfort and unease in your body. And if you can start with that, you will start to build a muscle of tolerating that wave that normally triggers you to say yes when you really wanted to say no.
And it's in that ability to tolerate and be aware of the discomfort that you gain choice and you gain that anchor and you get reconnected to yourself. And now you have a chance to start doing the things on the surface, no, or a boundary or renegotiating agreements, all of which you have so beautifully empowered us to do.
And so I just want to say thank you for spending so much time with us. Thank you for so much deep and profound wisdom on this topic that I thought was going to literally be more surface level.
I cannot thank you enough for saying hello when we met at the Today Show. And thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.
God, you are so welcome. Oh, this is one of those episodes that it's so much more profound in terms of how it hits you.
And I want it to hit you in a very profound way. And I want you to go deep with this information.
And I want you to start with that connection to yourself and being the anchor that you need in life. My wish for you is not that you feel like you are clinging to a shipwreck floating around in the middle of the ocean and whatever it is that happens around you is what you just kind of do.
I hope you use this information to locate the power within yourself to start making decisions that really empower you and that align with what you want, not with the discomfort that you feel in the moment. And I want to make sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in your ability to do this.
And when you start to make better decisions, you will create a better life. Alrighty, I'll talk to you in a few days.
Woo, I made it. Hi.
Well, I want to tell you about something in particular that happened when I, okay, I got to start all over. Now I said, okay, hold on a second.
I got to start all over. I don't even need to talk about that.
Is a yes person the same thing as a people pleaser? Let me do that one more time. Or we could do it this way.
I wish I would have said, say, okay. Okay.
What am I doing here, I need to make this bigger. Which one was this that we're talking about? Okay.
Oh, I'm looking at the wrong thing. Oh yeah.
Okay. What is it? Is that good? Good enough.
Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper.
This is the legal language.

You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.

This podcast is presented solely

for educational and entertainment purposes.

I'm just your friend.

I am not a licensed therapist.

And this podcast is not intended as a substitute

for the advice of a physician,

professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good.
I'll see

you in the next episode. Stitcher.