--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So a couple weeks ago, I was invited to go down to the *Today Show*. I love being on the *Today Show*. First of all, I love Hoda and Jenna. Secondly, it's always super fun. It's everything you would imagine it would be. When you're backstage, you're in these hallways where tons of people are coming and going—whether it's the folks working on the show or the people appearing on it. You never know who you're going to bump into.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I'm standing back there, and the first person that walks by is Charlotte Tilbury—this very famous makeup entrepreneur and artist, this fabulous woman who always talks like this, *darling*. I am a huge fan. She stops, and I go, "Oh my God, my daughters love you and I love you!" And she's like, "I love you!" So we have this hug. It was so fun. Then she leaves.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, all of a sudden, around the corner comes another extraordinary woman. She is so striking. She's tall, wearing this vibrant—I don't even know what color it was—like a chartreuse meets Kelly green silk blazer and matching wide-leg pants. She comes breezing around the corner. Her presence is so striking. There's this confidence and warmth to her. She's the kind of person you immediately think, "I'd like to be that person's friend."
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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." She goes, "Oh, 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." She walks up and says, "Can I hug you?" And I'm like, "Of course. Nothing is better than a hug." So we hug, and she introduces herself. Her name is Dr. Neha Sangwan.
--:-- Mel Robbins: We start chatting. I'm like, "What did you just talk about?" She was talking about people pleasing on the *Today Show*—how your inability to say no is making you ill. I stopped in my tracks. I was like, "Wait, what?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: She went on to explain that she is a medical doctor. She practices internal medicine. She is also a researcher. She was on the *Today Show* to explain that your habit of people pleasing—always looking at other people, always worried about their reaction, couching what you're going to say, saying yes when you actually mean no—that's what she talks about.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I said, "We've got to get you on the Mel Robbins Podcast." 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 Sangwan to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Oh, such an honor to be here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I have so much that I want to talk to you about. 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?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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—going in whatever direction the wind is blowing us. 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I literally, when you said "driftwood in the ocean going in whatever direction," I thought about my poor husband in our marriage. I am such an overwhelming force. 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. You lose your ability to make decisions or even to know yourself.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Absolutely. The goal in the end is to become a sailboat with a rudder—influenced by the wind, but charting its own course. We don't ever want to go so far away from that that we're anchoring ourselves and unable to move. We want to care about the wind, but we also want to make sure we have some input into the direction we're moving.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I would never have labeled my husband a people pleaser. But when I think about how he goes through life—or has until recently—he was very focused on making sure everybody else was okay. He put himself last. Is that the same thing as people pleasing? Or is people pleasing something else?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: People pleasing is the moment 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. I think all of these have spectrums. At the end of the day, what you really want is to be able to take input from the outside world, but when it's time to make a decision, you turn up the voice of your own heart slightly louder than you can hear the voices of others.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love you.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: That's really the end game. It's a nuance. We live in a world with other people. We care about each other. It matters to us that we belong. To say "oh, someone's a people pleaser or they're not"—listen, at the beginning of my life, 100 percent. First three and a half decades of my life, 110 percent. The scale was tipped so far on one side. I'm a healer. I'm a doctor. I'm a coach. 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 where I didn't feel like I belonged. If I didn't understand what I did wrong, then later on I would almost overcorrect in my life.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: It was me being sent away with my grandparents when I was really young. I didn't understand why. "Why am I being sent away?" For my parents, it was an act of love. But to a child, it felt like, "Wait, why am I the one being separated?" How we interpret what happens early on helps us figure out coping mechanisms and strategies we use to manage that pain or stress later on. 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. I really resonate with your husband because I think that's a lot of me. I needed to come more into balance to become who I truly am. I needed to learn how to sit in the discomfort of another in order to be true to myself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: There are so many things you have already said that I don't want to go forward without stopping and unpacking. I want to make sure you heard Dr. Neha say this image of a sailboat with a rudder and a sail that can use outside forces to go in a direction you want, but you stay centered to yourself. The second thing I want 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? I had a very similar visceral experience when I heard you say that story. I had this visceral image of myself as a little kid going, "Why are you mad at me?"
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: I'm going to tell you a little bit about it. We'll just see how I do. When I was three months old, my parents—immigrants from India—came here in 1965 to build a life. I grew up in Grand Blanc, Michigan. 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. My grandmother was cooking, cleaning. I have an older sister, 18 months older than me. So now there's a newborn.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: My grandfather gets stationed in Africa by the U.N. to help with 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 U.N. 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. Everything's going to be great." My parents thought, "How amazing. She'll get the love of her grandmother who was going to be here taking care of her." So they sent me.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Fast forward two years. 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. 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 crying. "Where is my Nani and Nana? Where are they?" My parents, in their 20s doing the best they knew how, having moved to a new country, were beside themselves with this two-year-old who wouldn't stop crying.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: It took about a month. I realized how stubborn I was. When I was little, I would only call my dad "Hey, you." I wouldn't call him "Dad." I was like, "Hey, you potty. Hey, you hungry. Hey, you." It took a month of his persistence—I have to give him credit—and I upgraded him to "Uncle." I realized after about a month or two that no matter how much I cried, I wasn't going back. So I better adjust to the environment I'm in. I began to scan the environment. I knew what everybody wanted—my mom, my dad, my sister. I became such a good child.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: When I overheard my dad later on, he made a comment like, "Yeah, the second one was a girl too. I wanted a son who was an engineer." Then I heard my mom saying, "Wow, I missed my calling to become a doctor. I hope one of my girls becomes a doctor." Boy, Mel, my radar was so in tune to everybody else's needs. In the Indian community, it's like, "Hey, you're good at math and science. Are you going to be an engineer or a doctor?" This little girl grew up like a sponge absorbing the external environment because inside me was too painful. I checked out and disconnected from myself and tuned into the accolades and love I could get from going outward.
--:-- Mel Robbins: However you could get them. You bet. Can you describe for us what happened to you so that anybody listening might be able to locate themselves in this moment where they felt separate and people pleasing became a coping mechanism?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: I remember being really young, about seven years old. My dad's parents never really taught him about emotions. He has a temper that I write about in my book. I wanted to figure out why I was getting bullied when I was older. It was people who were getting really angry and blowing up and telling me to do things. I think those moments 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 move into a mode of "How do I make this okay?"
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: How you show up today is as much determined by your childhood blueprint as your wardrobe at home influenced what you're wearing today. I want to help deconstruct the invisible connections between past and present moment experience. 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. 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. Little seven-year-old me—my mom said, "Neha, can you please go upstairs, honey? I'd like to talk to your father." That was my cue to exit left.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: It wasn't until 20, 30 years later that I remembered saying, "Oh, wow. In that moment, I 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." 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 or doors—don't make any more trouble. Get out of there.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think we all have an experience like that growing up. 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. When we went to our massive audience online and started asking about people pleasing, the vast majority—70 percent of people—said, "I often say yes when I mean no." The majority of the time it's at work and with friends. 82 percent of people responded that they feel constantly stressed, irritated, tired, and impatient. They attributed it to some conflict they were avoiding.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 in your current practice—the impact of all this pent-up inability to tolerate emotion and twisting yourself in knots to make everything on the outside okay while you are simultaneously killing yourself on the inside. Can you talk to us about the physical impact of people pleasing? Of being somebody so concerned about the outside that you're not thinking about you? What is the physical impact of doing this over time, always putting everybody else first?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Here are some of the things people said: "I avoid conflict because I'm afraid of criticism. 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." Let me tell you, it's only easier short term. It's easier in the moment. When 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.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: In the short term, you have a choice. If you choose to ignore it, you take the short-term high of 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 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 just say yes because I don't want to deal with the drama." In the moment, you know it's not the right decision because you can feel your resistance to it. But then you just take it on yourself because you think it's easier.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But you, as a medical doctor, Dr. Neha, are here to say, "No, no, no. Something else is going on." What's going on?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: You're taking the short-term high, and you're going to end up with the long-term yuck. You're going to end up looking at yourself in the mirror saying, "Does everyone think I'm a magic fairy around this house? Nobody else does anything." 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 changes location.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: It took me a good 10 years of 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 feel more connected in the present day, to be able to talk about these stories without crying. Sometimes I do get tearful.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: There's something here, Mel, that I want to say is underpinning a lot of people pleasing. We don't really teach our children—we weren't taught, often because our parents didn't know themselves—how to handle disappointment, how to handle discomfort, an underlying sense of unease in our bodies. Whenever we feel physiologically or biologically uncomfortable, our body starts talking to us, and we do anything we need to make that go away.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think every single one of us has had that experience. 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. What you're also telling us, Dr. Sangwan, is that this is a learned behavior. That, to me, is great news. If you can learn a behavior, you can unlearn a behavior. 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 has now researched it, written books about it, and she is here to tell you: you need to unlearn this behavior. People pleasing can not only make you physically sick, but it is also keeping you from living the life you deserve to live.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 so focused on getting approval from everybody else around her that she lost connection with what she actually wanted, what would make her happy. Maybe you've had a very similar revelation as she's been telling this story. I want to go even deeper into people pleasing, Dr. Sangwan. Why do we walk around saying yes all the time?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: The way I think of people pleasing is it's a behavior we use in order to feel safe and belong. I became an engineer and a doctor, and I blamed my parents—"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? You're the one who did it."
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: In that moment, I was like, "Oh, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be valued. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be recognized in the Indian community and in the world. I wanted to be of value, and I didn't want anybody to send me away again." It's a safety thing. It's subconscious. Of course I didn't know it at the time. But this is the value of going back and understanding the blueprint of your childhood, understanding the decisions you made to survive and adapt to a world you didn't yet understand.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is everybody on the planet a people pleaser?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: I think everybody has had the experience of giving up themselves in order to belong to another. I'm thinking of Gabor Maté, who speaks about authenticity over attachment. Sometimes we choose attachment over authenticity. We give up who we really are—if we know who we are—in order to keep the relationship, stay attached, be part of a group.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I went to med school. 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. He had no idea I heard him. The second piece is the Indian community and my mom revered doctors. My mom missed her calling. I think that's a bigger piece underneath here: when you're not anchored to what you value and who you are, you are that driftwood in the ocean.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to go back to what I said at the very beginning. I had never thought about my husband, Chris, as a people pleaser, because I consider myself a people pleaser—not anymore—but in the past, for probably almost 50 years, I was actively trying to make sure nobody was mad with me, actively trying to avoid conflict, actively scanning the environment, saying yes when I meant no, not really good with boundaries, feeling a lot of anxiety and resentment. My experience of people pleasing was on the Type A end.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: You were actively engaging in something to manipulate the way other people respond to you. That's what you were doing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I never thought about my husband on the spectrum of people pleasing. I've learned that he was like so many people—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 has 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." 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. 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.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Correct. Because he was up in the crib in the attic.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Correct.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: The function of your brain is to help you seek pleasure and avoid pain. Very basically. It's this amazing, incredible tool that helps keep us safe in the world: seek pleasure, avoid pain. When 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," or we were told that when we're feeling unhappy or disappointed, when we express it, it's wrong, it's bad, don't go there, it's not welcome in this household—we grow up believing we need to fix it. We need to fix it in ourselves and fix it in the environment, because who knows what's going to happen if we don't.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The way you're explaining this is making me realize all the ways people pleasing can show up in your life. Obviously, if you can't say no because you're afraid to disappoint somebody, that's an example. Another example is if you're chronically stressed out about work, so you're working late at night and on weekends because you're worried your boss will be disappointed or mad, or that your boss will fire you—that's people pleasing. If you're like me and you actively try to make sure people like you, so you change up your opinions or pretend to like things 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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. So you stopped asking for it. You just 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Why is all of this an example of people pleasing? 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 nobody's going to help you anyway so you don't ask—these are examples of outside forces steering your behavior. These outside forces keep you disconnected from what you want or from acting in a way that is truly aligned with the person you are deep down inside.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I would imagine that the more you try to please other people and the more you feel like the world is pushing you around, Dr. Sangwan, 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?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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. You may never have even told people that boundaries were there. Most people don't. And yet you find yourself resentful. I've heard a saying—I'm not sure where—that resentment is like me drinking poison, hoping that you die. That's how effective that is.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Resentment is one of those big clues that you have overextended yourself. 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. You want to ask yourself in those moments: "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?" The first thing you want to do is decipher how you know.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I can tell you how it is for me. It's a gigantic "Oh, this shit again." It's a full-body thing.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: The other thing I've come to learn—this is why it was 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 you're in. Something that needs updating, leveling up. Some communication pattern that's broken. Something outdated that needs leveling up.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Yeah, absolutely. You may have been carrying a boulder uphill. I am guilty of single-handedly trying to change the healthcare system, trying to make it be different than it is. I'd ask you: "What is your role in this? You really want to do something amazing to help people. What's your role in it? What's the environment you're in?" The question becomes: "Have I voiced this? Have I told anyone? Or do I just vent at home?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love that. Because the second you voice it, you know what you're doing? You're standing up for your boundary. When you stand up for your boundary, resentment doesn't build, and you stop allowing the outside forces to just make you do things you don't want to do. That makes so much sense.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to raise the stakes a little bit. Now that we're starting to understand the mechanics of people pleasing, let's talk about the impact it's having on you physically from a medical standpoint. Dr. Sangwan is here to tell you that people pleasing, when it becomes your default, makes you physically sick. 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm so glad you're still here. I'm Mel Robbins, and you and I are talking with Dr. Neha Sangwan. She's an engineer, she's a medical doctor, and in her words, a recovering people pleaser. Dr. Neha, how did you come to realize that you were a people pleaser? You have this story when you were 31 years old, practicing as a physician. Can you share that with the person listening? Because I think when they hear it, they're going to 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.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Yes. My regular life at work was busy. 18 patients in the hospital. Five days on, five days off. It takes me three of the five days to recover. I'm in this whole cycle. I still remember it. It was June 17th, 2004. I walked into the hospital. I'm 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh my gosh.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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—I started at 6 a.m., it's 11 a.m.—I've seen two of my 18 patients. I turn to the nurse and I say, "Hey, Nina, could you please get 40 milliequivalents of IV potassium for the gentleman in room 636?" She turns to me and says, "Dr. Sangwan, are you okay?" And I say, "Yeah. Why?" Truth be told, that was my first indication I might not be. I said, "Yeah, sure. Why?"
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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."
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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. I just said, "Hey, Roger, when can I do it? 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love that another medical doctor diagnosed you with people pleasing.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here. 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 are we 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?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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."
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is that?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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 realized that oftentimes, 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 in 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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, that you 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 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?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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 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 this? 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 ecosystem. So it goes me, we, world.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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. You can't deal with the disappointment that it's not going a certain way. 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.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Can you talk a little more about that? Because that really, really piqued my interest.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: Unresolved conflict, unmet expectations, misunderstandings, broken promises, heartbreak, fractured relationships, loss, separation, unhappiness.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 on," that it actually bubbles to the surface as physical illness, stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, all that stuff. Is that what you're saying?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 100%. 100%. I found that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80% of all illness.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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. 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 2020, 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 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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?
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: 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 child care 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 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?
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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: saying 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.
--:-- Dr. Neha Sangwan: God, you are so welcome.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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, 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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.
