Breaking Free: How to Overcome People Pleasing as a New Working Mom
Takeaway: Learn how to overcome people-pleasing, anxiety, and guilt as a new working mom and find peace in your life.
As a new mom, your plate is completely full. You have a new little being to take care of, a household to keep up, a career to maintain, and a partner to continue building a life with. New moms have a ton of pressure on them to keep everything going the way it was before the baby came, and it can feel impossible to keep up with.
If you’re a people-pleaser, being a mom comes with even more stress. You’re trying to please everyone around you – at work, at home, and in your friendships – but you feel like you have absolutely zero time for yourself or what you need. Trying to juggle everything can leave you feeling overwhelmed, burned out, anxious, and constantly irritable.
As a therapist, a recovering people-pleaser, and a working mom myself, I understand the struggle. I used to be in your shoes, trying to do it all and becoming increasingly exhausted and desperate. Now I help new moms escape that hamster wheel and find peace in their lives. Keep reading to learn how people-pleasing might be impacting you as a new working mom, why you're so anxious all the time, and how to cope.
Signs of People Pleasing in New Moms
Maybe you don’t think of yourself as a people-pleaser. Or maybe you know it’s something you struggle with, but it feels too ingrained and you aren’t sure how to stop.
Do you relate to any of the following?
You avoid conflict for as long as possible
You feel resentful for being spread too thin, but don’t speak up until you feel like you’re going to explode (and then you end up feeling guilty)
You’re angry and irritable at your partner
You feel overworked, overcommitted, and low capacity
You over-commit and overbook yourself too often
You have a hard time saying no to people
You set up your schedule in a way that makes it almost impossible to get everything done
Setting boundaries feels extremely uncomfortable
If you resonate with any of the above, you very likely struggle with people-pleasing. There are a lot of reasons that people become people-pleasers and lots of ways it can show up in someone’s life. (To learn what type of people-pleaser you are and receive helpful tips, take my people-pleasing quiz.)
People-pleasing usually starts in childhood and is a coping mechanism in order to avoid hurting others, being perceived as bad, or feeling unworthy. While it can keep you safe in childhood, it tends to wreak havoc in your adult life. There’s a strong link between people-pleasing and anxiety that can keep you stuck, stressed, and in pain.
If people-pleasing has started to feel unsustainable and exhausting for you, that can actually be a good thing. It might mean you’re more willing to take action to create a healthier and calmer balance in your life. I see this a lot when women become mothers. Motherhood can force you to recognize that you need to become more assertive with your boundaries, energy, and time – not just for yourself, but for your child and your whole family.
Why Do I Have So Much New Mom Guilt and Anxiety?
We all received messages when we were young about the right way to be a person in the world. Women in our culture are taught from an early age to be good, submissive, and palatable. They’re punished or shunned for being bossy, needy, or assertive. These messages are reinforced throughout our lives. Women aren’t taught to ask for what we need, we’re taught to do what others need of us.
As a new working mother, you’ve learned that you have to be everything to everyone in order to have worth in the world. So you overcommit yourself, hoping to manage everything and please everybody, but you know deep down that you can’t do it all, and this makes you anxious. Your standards and expectations are too high, and each time you overcommit or ignore your own needs, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’re also worried about letting other people down if you can’t live up to your commitments. All of these things create a lot of anxiety, guilt, resentment, and shame in your system.
A lot of new moms I work with have gotten to a breaking point. They feel like their lives are too packed and stressful, but they still feel like they should be able to get everything done. After all, maybe a colleague has a similar workload as you and seems to manage just fine. Or maybe you used to be able to do this same amount of work without an issue.
Not to mention there’s an expectation that you’re supposed to be enjoying and treasuring the early moments of motherhood, but this may feel far from your experience. The reality of early motherhood can be grim and lonely: you’re full to the brim with hormones (which can sometimes help cause postpartum depression), adapting to huge changes in your family and personal life, and trying to keep up with the enormous pressures from work and home life.
All this can cause you to ask yourself: “Why can’t I do it anymore? What’s wrong with me?”
The answer? Nothing is wrong with you. You’re simply trying to do too much, and you’re trying to please too many people or external forces. Motherhood requires so much from a person, and it can bring you to a crossroads. It can cause you to realize something’s got to give.
How to Stop People Pleasing and Adapt to Life After Maternity Leave
As a working mom, how can you adapt to your new life and dial down your stress and people-pleasing tendencies? Here are three ways to start.
Reflect on your values
If you’re like most of the mothers I work with, you were likely never taught to do what feels good to you and aligns with your values. Instead, you were taught how to predict and adapt to the values, needs, and desires of everyone around you. By connecting what matters to you, you can begin to align your life more closely with things that bring you joy and cut out things that cause unnecessary stress or tension.
A person’s values are the experiences, desires, or ways of living life that matter most to them. Start by thinking about the things in your life that bring you joy. Then think about all the different ways you actually spend your time. Do these lists overlap? Are they completely separate?
It can help to think about a value as an internal compass. If you can feel an internal tug toward something, like a warm feeling or a sense of curiosity, play, or joy, it’s probably important to you and worth spending time on. If it feels surrounded by anxiety or stress, or thinking about it makes you resentful, or there’s a “should” attached, it’s probably not your own value.
Gently explore some of the obligations and experiences in your life through this viewpoint. Being honest with yourself about what truly matters to you can feel scary. Some of my clients don’t want to do this because they’re worried it will feel too overwhelming, or that it will mean they’ll have to make huge changes in their lives once they realize things feel unsustainable. But being honest with yourself doesn’t mean you have to take action. It’s just the first step in learning to trust yourself and your needs.
Speak up sooner
A big problem my clients have is feeling resentful, angry, and burned out. As a new mom, it often feels like too much is required from you in every area of your life: the work emails are neverending. Your spouse left the dishes in the sink again. Your baby won’t sleep through the night (and needs yet another diaper change.) Trying to keep up with everything everyone else needs feels exhausting and frustrating.
To soothe this cycle, it’s helpful to speak up and be assertive about what you need. Being more assertive requires noticing when something feels off, overwhelming, or too much, and then being able to speak up to either ask for help or take a few commitments off your plate. By doing this early, you can avoid a build-up of growing resentment and overwhelm. Think of it as letting off steam from a boiling dish on the stovetop: it’s better to crack the lid than to let the whole thing boil over, right?
Being assertive more early can feel scary to people pleasers. It requires creating safety within the nervous system. It requires a slow build of trust that asking for what you need will not make you a bad person. This often means you have to develop the skills required to practice over and over until you learn it’s safe.
Make small, bite-sized changes
It’s easy to want to jump into a self-improvement plan straight away and begin making a million changes all at once. While this may be tempting, don’t do it. It will only add to your already too-full plate and feel like one more impossible thing on the to-do list.
Instead, choose just one area of your life – social, work, or home – that you’d like to make a change in. First, ask yourself: what do I want or need more in this area? What can I implement that will align me with something I want or need in my life?
For example, maybe you want to do less house cleaning during the week. Or maybe your social cup is empty and you want to carve out time to go for a walk with a close friend a couple of times per week. Commit to doing just that one small thing for a while and see how it feels. Then, begin building up the things in your life that you do for you – not for anybody else.
Work With Me to Ease New Mom Guilt and People Pleasing
Being a new working mom is tough – I’ve been there, and I get it. And I’m excited to be able to offer you the same tools that helped me recover from people-pleasing and gain more control over my life.
If you’d like support overcoming anxiety, guilt, and people-pleasing as a working mother, I’ve created a program just for you. Path to Peace, my live 7-week online program, helps give you tools to cope with and work through anxiety, people-pleasing, and burnout.
You’ll learn how to:
Challenge unhelpful patterns and beliefs
Learn how to implement healthy boundaries
Dial down self-critisim
Gain control over your stress
Say no with more ease and less guilt
Align your actions with your values
You’ll even get a step-by-step curated guide to implement everyday self-care rituals. This program is for you if you’re tired of feeling burned out, resentful, and overwhelmed all the time and are ready to learn how to say goodbye to your anxiety and people-pleasing habits.
You don’t have to deal with the trials and stresses of being a working mom alone. Join me in overcoming your anxieties and finding peace in your life. Check out all the details for the course right here.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Justine Carino
Justine is a licensed mental health counselor with a private practice in White Plains, NY. She helps teenagers, young adults and families struggling with anxiety, depression, family conflict and relationship issues. Justine is also the host of the podcast Thoughts From the Couch.
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