No More People-Pleasing: Why We Stop Being "Nice" and Start Being Authentic

What if the sudden urge to stop performing isn’t a phase, but a feature of a changing brain? We dive into the science and lived experience of “aging out of pretending,” exploring how midlife hormone shifts and synaptic pruning reshape the mental load of people pleasing. The result isn’t rudeness; it’s a recalibration of energy, attention, and honesty that can feel terrifying at first and liberating over time.

We connect the dots between social conditioning—especially the training to read the room—and the decision fatigue that mounts across careers, caregiving, and relationships. As estrogen and oxytocin pathways downshift, the circuitry that once fueled micro-adjustments gets costly, and your brain quietly trims it back. That pruning mirrors a garden: removing dead wood so the healthiest branches can bloom. Expect pushback from systems that rely on your old role; families, teams, and friend groups are built for stability and will nudge you to “go back.” Those nudges are data, not destiny.

Along the way, we offer practical language and body cues to hold your ground without heat. Swap apologies for clarity, practice small truths that don’t require a thesis, and let silence do some work. We talk about pruning relationships with compassion, recognizing when a one-way street stays one-way, and celebrating the ones that get deeper when you stop managing everyone’s reactions. You’re not becoming difficult—you’re becoming free, clear, and more you.

If this resonates, share it with someone who’s ready to take up their space. Subscribe for more grounded science, real talk, and tools you can use today, and leave a review to help fellow listeners find the show.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And The Spark
• 0:31 The Great Unf—ing Defined
• 2:10 Hormone Shifts And Whole-System Change
• 4:18 Socialization And Reading The Room
• 6:24 Synaptic Pruning In Midlife
• 8:26 Estrogen, Oxytocin, And Letting Go
• 10:06 Decision Fatigue And Staying Small
• 12:06 Systems Pushback And Labels
• 14:12 Authenticity Over Approval
• 16:06 Pruning Relationships With Care

Transcript

Mary: 0:00

Good morning and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. I saw an article, a blog post on um Substack recently. And I'm not sure if I ended up seeing this just because of my algorithm, because of what I talk about here on this podcast. But it was written by Ellen Scher, and I'm really hoping that eventually I'm gonna find her and get her on here as a guest. But she wrote something called Aging Out Fucks, the Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can't Pretend Anymore. And it really struck so many chords because not only have I experienced this, but so, so many women that I've worked with have also. And it creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. So let me tell you a little more about what she talks about in this blog post. So she calls it the great unfuckening, which is hilarious. Um I typically do not swear on here, but I gotta use her words because I swear a lot in real life, let's be honest. But anyway, she refers to this as the point in midlife when your capacity to pretend, perform, and please others starts shorting out like an electrical system that's finally had enough. So what happens is you're tired of apologizing or making allowances for things that internally for most of your life have felt a little uncomfortable. But y'all know how often I talk about socialization and we've been socialized to connect and not create awkward situations and to kind of stay in our lane and stay small. So one of the things that is so cool about what she writes is that what is happening during this stage of life is first of all not a surprise. Our hormones are shifting. We must hear that as women in midlife or menopause, postmenopause, we must hear or see that a hundred times a week. But yes, our hormones have shifted. And so what that means is when one hormone, just one, shifts, your entire system changes. So it's like an orchestra. Um, for instance, I had thyroid cancer. So once my thyroid was removed, what that meant was I don't have the thyroid hormone in my body anymore. And I have to take medicine every single day. So something that's manufactured is not going to work the same way. And then when I hit menopause, or actually perimenopause, the shifts started to happen because my progesterone dropped first. And then your estrogen stops being produced in the same way. So you have almost none of that being produced in the same way it was. So that creates shifts in your entire system, which is why we have trouble sleeping, because that has to do with hormones. But okay, so that aside, there is a physiological reason that we stop caring as much or we stop having the energy to manage other people's reactions. Your brain is literally restructuring itself. So for such a long time, we have been socialized to read the room. Now, I think first our brains are different. Our brains are different. We are built to connect, we're built to nurture a little bit more than men. And I don't like to make such a strong divide there. There's obviously a lot of socialization that happens. I think if you watch typical parenting, and this is not blaming parents because this goes back a long time. But if you watch parenting, we treat little girls differently than we treat little boys. And again, I'm doing, you know, two separate genders. If you take into account gender fluidity, that's a whole other thing. But we're really socialized to read the room. We look at social cues, we calculate the risk in actually saying the thing that first might occur to us. We kind of um censor ourselves because we don't want a reaction that's uncomfortable. So we tend to suppress an authentic response. And we fall into this kind of this world of feeling like we're responsible for everyone else's reactions. And I see this with women 80% more than I do with men. So for instance, we know that if we say or do a certain thing, it could make someone angry, upset, disappointed, fill in the blank. But we feel like we have a responsibility for that response. So we will temper what we say and do to try to monitor or mold or control the response of another person. So we take on this responsibility for the emotional response of everyone around us. And when we do that, it takes a toll. So what happens as these hormones shift? We don't have as much capacity to do this. And I think the other thing that I'm going to talk about more in a minute is we also have built up a lifetime of little losses or big losses or little traumas or big traumas or just life events that wear us down. It's like, you know, you take a set of tires and you keep driving on all these different roads, you hit a couple potholes, it's going to affect the balance of your car, right? But you keep going, you keep, you keep steering in a way that corrects for the ability to want to drift off the side of the road. So the cool thing that happens at this time of year, as our hormones are shifting, our body is changing too. And in our brain, something that happens, it's called synaptic pruning. What is so, so cool about this is this happens in newborns. So when you're born, your brain has way too many neurons. So as a baby is raised and learns from its environment, the brain allows some of those connections to simply die off. And I find that endlessly fascinating. I mean, we could talk about that for an hour in another episode, but synaptic pruning basically is like, I'll give you my garden analogy. If you allow certain kinds of shrubs or bushes or even trees to grow as grow like they want to, a lot of times they start to get woody, they don't produce as well. If they are a flowering shrub, they're not going to get as many flowers. So we prune them. We take out the branches that are not healthy. We want to optimize the things that are healthy and are producing the flowers. That's what your brain does. Your brain does that when you're a baby, which is why parenting, eye contact, talking, cuddling, all of those things are so important to raising a healthy kid. So this is what our brain does when we hit this point going into midlife. So some of these neural pathways that are the ones that in the frontal lobe that we tend to placate or don't say the thing that first occurs because we're worried about sort of controlling the emotional climate of the interaction, those things start to die off. And, you know, Ellen Scher talks about this as Marie condoing itself, which is so cool. So anyway, so Luann Brisendine is a neuropsychiatric, a neuropsychiatrist, and she wrote The Female Brain. And she's talking about sort of what I am, that we are particularly wired as women for social harmony, caregiving. It's driven by estrogen and oxytocin. Well, of course, what happens in midlife, the estrogen levels shift and drop. So we're not able to do that as much. And plus, I think we just stop caring. And I'm starting to see a lot of social media accounts now with women in their 50s, 60s, and their whole shtick is how they've stopped caring. Again, that could be my algorithm, but it cracks me up. So the things that we typically would have done, you know, making sure that other people are comfortable, laughing at jokes that we don't think are funny, um, or being very careful with how we say something because we're reading the micro expressions. We're looking to be um very aware of, okay, was that a little micro frown? Do I need to soften this even more? So I think we underestimate how exhausting it is, and this is called decision fatigue, how um exhausting it is to continually monitor that and adjust our behavior based on everything around us. So I think the reason, and this goes along with Ellen Scher makes this point too in her blog post. I think the reason that women experience this, and I talk about this so much on this podcast, is we have been told things like, what do I say all the time, stay small. And so we don't take up our space. We have made ourselves into the version of ourselves that the world likes because we're not pushing boundaries. We are staying within the guide rails that the world has put on us. And when we stop doing that, it is very uncomfortable for the world around us. So once that starts to happen, and you know, this is another theme that you've probably heard me talk about, it is scary as hell for women to finally stand up straight. And I'm talking about this literally and figuratively, to stand up straight, put their shoulders back and down, stand in what, you know, yogis call mountain pose, take up your freaking space. And it is terrifying because we have been rewarded. If we look at behavioral psychology, we've been consistently rewarded for the times when we do stay small, when we smile, when we kind of swallow the comment that we really want to make, or we check ourselves and don't say the thing that we really want to say, we get rewarded for that. When you step past the world's guardrails and you expand them into where you want them to be, you start to say and do things that other people don't like. The system doesn't like change. So systems theory says that we all sort of run in the way that we've been programmed to run, but our doing that also programs the system around us. This is true in families, this is true in organizations. So you start to, as the cog in the whole process, you start turning differently, faster, slower, whatever it is. The rest of the system has to adjust to that. And it will do everything in its power to get you to keep doing what you have historically done. So you'll get comments like, you're too much. Oh, you're obviously going through something. You're being difficult. Why have you changed? So we start to have this idea of women in menopause, women in midlife, women moving through menopause are now difficult and or were abrasive. You know, that kind of language. What is really cool, and I've said this, I said this a lot to my college students actually, because they were they're at a stage where they're starting to have deeper relationships and they're worried about being who they really are. What if somebody doesn't like me? And what I've always said is if you, I used to say to them, if you fly your freak flag, like you be you, the people that stay, they know exactly who you are. That authentic love and care is the most powerful force. If you try to be what you think somebody wants you to be, and I would say this to even women now going on first dates, they're back in the dating game. Don't try to figure out what somebody wants you to wear, say, be, do, look, all of those things. Order the big damn appetizer at the first date and eat it like you would eat it in front of your family. Because if somebody likes you the way that you are, that is authenticity. So you don't have to fake it with these most important relationships. My God, we have to fake it enough in life with at work and all of those other things to get where we want to get. But when we start to have these hormonal shifts, we basically lose a little bit of our filter, or it's much more effort to allow that filter to do the work that it had been conditioned to do since we were, I don't know, eight. Um, then we start to be ourselves. But that feels really dangerous. But what I'm gonna tell you is what you gain from that is, you know, I talked about pruning. One of the things you gain from that is the people and relationships in your life get pruned out if they're not serving you. The dead wood, the branches in your world that aren't blooming, that aren't bringing something into the world that makes it better, that makes your life better, they get pruned out. And it's scary because the other thing we're socialized to do is maintain relationships. It doesn't matter what kind of position we have to twist ourselves into to keep them going, maintain the relationship. But relationships stop working after a while sometimes. Kids that maybe people that we were friends with as kids, that might not still work. That friendship might have turned into quite a one-way street and it's going the wrong way. So you're gaining authenticity. You're being you. You don't have to perform. And I think the other thing is the energy that it takes to manage that, you don't have to do that anymore. You just be you. And this is not an excuse, let me be clear, to be rude. You're just being authentic. You're allowed to say, I hear you, I don't agree with that. You're allowed to say that. You're allowed to wear things that other people think maybe you shouldn't wear. You can wear makeup, not wear makeup, let your hair go gray, color your hair. You get to decide it's your life, it's your body. You're gaining clarity. So when you stop trying to run everybody's comments and opinions through a filter that is not your own, that is society's or what you've been handed, when you stop doing that, then you really see things much more clearly. It's much less stressful. So while initially the fear is going to want to stop you, that is your amygdala. Your amygdala is saying, this is dangerous. The couple times you have actually stated an opinion, something bad happened. Somebody at work didn't like it. You stopped getting calls from the guy you were dating. Well, guess what? That's okay because what you gain from all of this is real relationships. So if you had relationships where you were serving their purpose, you were people pleasing, you don't have to do that anymore. And I can tell you where I am now, it's pretty amazing. And I'm not saying it's like a smooth path where there's no stumbles or hurdles. Sure, life always has hurdles, but when you can put aside that um tendency or socialization of feeling responsible for every freaking thing that happens, you have more time to actually live your life. And the relationships that don't survive, well, they're either they're either gonna evolve into more authenticness or you're gonna figure out, oh my gosh, these are the people who always saw me, who I always felt like I could let see me. And that is one of the most powerful things. So remember, if you're going through this phase, it doesn't matter what age you are. If you start to do this before your brain starts this shift, more power to you because that is awesome. And remember, the system is gonna want you to stay the same. So that pushback means you're doing something right. You're not becoming difficult, you're becoming free, you're taking up your space. Have a great week. It's Thanksgiving week. I hope that you have time with your favorite people, the people you love. And I hope that when you think about your life, you find you have amazing blessings. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.