What Your Body Knows About Your People-Pleasing and Perfectionism: Masking Takes a Toll on Your Body
There’s a particular kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix.
It’s the kind of exhaustion that shows up even after eight hours in bed. The kind where you wake up already bracing yourself for the day—heart a little tight, jaw a little clenched, brain already scanning for what might go wrong and how you’ll need to manage it. You drink your coffee, open your email, and feel your shoulders creep up toward your ears before you’ve even answered a single message.
If you’re someone who tends to people‑please, overachieve, or chase perfection, you probably know this tired intimately. You might describe yourself as “stressed,” “burnt out,” or “overwhelmed,” but underneath those labels is something more specific: your body is carrying the cost of constantly trying to be acceptable, impressive, and easy to be around.
If you’re queer, trans, and/or neurodivergent in Denver or anywhere in Colorado, you may also be masking—hiding or softening parts of who you are so you seem more “normal,” less “too much,” less likely to draw negative attention. Masking can help you survive. It can also quietly take a toll on your nervous system in ways that show up as fatigue, anxiety, chronic tension, or even physical pain.
This post is about that toll. It’s about what your body knows about your people‑pleasing and perfectionism, even when your mind is insisting you’re just being “nice,” “responsible,” or “doing what you have to do.”
Your nervous system is always tracking safety
You don’t consciously choose every time your body tenses up or your heart speeds. Much of that is your nervous system doing its job: scanning your environment for cues of safety or danger and adjusting accordingly.
When things feel safe enough, your system leans toward connection and rest. Your breathing is fuller. Your muscles soften a bit. You might feel more present in your own skin. This is where genuine play, curiosity, and creativity live.
When things feel threatening, your system can move into fight or flight—ready to defend or escape—or into freeze, where everything slows down or shuts down to get you through something overwhelming.
There’s another survival response that doesn’t get talked about as much, but is central to people‑pleasing: fawn. Fawning is what happens when your body decides, “The best way to stay safe is to be very, very pleasing.” It’s the instinct to smooth things over, agree quickly, laugh at the right times, and make yourself as non‑threatening and helpful as possible.
None of these responses are moral judgments. They’re simply what your nervous system has learned to do in order to keep you alive and attached to the people you depend on.
People‑pleasing as a body‑based survival strategy
From the outside, people‑pleasing can look like a personality trait. You’re “easygoing,” “sweet,” “flexible,” “a team player.” But inside, it often feels more like an obligation than a choice.
Maybe your chest gets tight when someone seems even slightly disappointed in you. Maybe you say, “It’s fine, no worries,” while feeling a sinking sensation in your stomach. Maybe your mind races to solve everyone else’s problems before they even ask, because a part of you is sure that your safety, belonging, or worth depend on it.
For many people, especially those who grew up with emotionally immature parents or in environments where love felt conditional, this kind of fawning once made perfect sense. If your caregivers got angry, withdrawn, or overwhelmed when you had needs or boundaries, your body may have learned that the safest option was to anticipate their moods, soothe them quickly, and ask as little as possible for yourself.
Over time, that survival strategy became a habit. You might not even feel the moment your system flips into fawn mode. You just notice that you’re nodding along, saying yes, offering help, or swallowing your own preferences—over and over, with coworkers, friends, partners, and family.
Your mind might call it “being nice.” Your body experiences it as work.
Perfectionism as a full‑body alert system
Perfectionism gets framed as high standards or ambition, but on a nervous system level, it often functions like a full‑body alarm. Underneath “This has to be perfect” is often some version of “If I mess this up, something bad will happen.”
You might notice this when you’re about to send an email or share something you’ve created. Maybe your heart starts pounding as you hover over the send button. Maybe your mind replays possible negative reactions in a loop: They’ll think I’m incompetent. They’ll be disappointed. They’ll realize I don’t belong here.
Your muscles tense as if you’re physically preparing for impact, even though the “threat” is a few lines of text or a minor mistake in a document. Your body isn’t being dramatic; it’s responding to an old association: error = shame, criticism, or rejection.
If you grew up being praised mainly for achievements, composure, or how “mature” you were, you may have learned to tie your safety and lovability to performance. Perfectionism then becomes less about excelling and more about avoiding something that feels unbearable: being seen as flawed, messy, or merely human.
Your nervous system keeps you on high alert, pushing you to reread, rework, and overdo because it’s convinced that if you relax, you’ll be blindsided.
Again, your mind might say, “I just like to do a good job.” Your body might be living in a state of chronic, low‑grade emergency.
Masking: when your whole self is doing emotional labor
If you’re queer, trans, and/or neurodivergent, you may also be familiar with masking—the effort of consciously or unconsciously hiding aspects of yourself to appear more socially acceptable or less vulnerable to harm.
Masking might look like:
Laughing at jokes that actually hurt you
Changing your voice, mannerisms, or interests depending on who you’re with
Forcing yourself to make eye contact or to tolerate sensory overload so you don’t seem “weird” or “difficult”
Downplaying your pronouns, identity, or relationships to avoid awkwardness or hostility
Pretending you’re fine when you’re actually overwhelmed
On the surface, masking can help you navigate spaces that aren’t built with you in mind. It can reduce immediate risks. But it is also an intense form of emotional and physical labor.
Your body is constantly monitoring the room: How are they reacting? Am I passing? Did I just say something “too much” or “too queer” or “too autistic”? Am I taking up too much space? That level of vigilance is work, even if it’s happening in the background.
It’s no wonder so many queer and neurodivergent adults feel utterly drained after social interactions, meetings, or family gatherings—even ones that were “fine” on the surface. Masking takes a real toll over time. Your body has been quietly working overtime to keep you safe.
How masking, people‑pleasing, and perfectionism show up in your body
If we zoom in on the physical sensations of these patterns, you might notice things like:
Tightness in your chest when someone hints they’re disappointed
A knot in your stomach when you consider saying no
Jaw clenching as you push through one more task you don’t have capacity for
Headaches after long stretches of being “on” around others
Shallow breathing when you’re trying to get something “just right”
A general sense of numbness or disconnection after a day of heavy masking
You might also notice rebound effects when you finally get alone: a crash in energy, zoning out for hours, scrolling mindlessly, or feeling too tired to do things you actually enjoy.
These aren’t random. They’re the bodily footprints of living in fawn, freeze, or constant micro‑fight/flight. Your system hasn’t had many chances to settle into genuine rest and connection, because it’s busy managing external impressions and potential threats.
Your body has likely been telling you for a long time that something about the way you’re moving through the world isn’t sustainable. The question isn’t whether it’s speaking; it’s whether you’ve had enough safety and support to listen.
Listening to your body without blaming yourself
When you start to notice how much your body is carrying, it can be tempting to turn that awareness into another reason to be hard on yourself. You might think, “Why can’t I just stop?” or “I’m the one doing this to myself.”
It’s important to remember: you didn’t invent these strategies in a vacuum. You learned them in response to real environments, real relationships, and real risks. At some point, being highly attuned, pleasing, and precise probably helped you avoid conflict, criticism, or even danger. Your nervous system was doing exactly what it was supposed to do with the information it had.
Listening to your body now doesn’t mean blaming it—or yourself—for adapting. It means acknowledging the reality that what once helped you survive is now costing you sleep, energy, health, and authenticity.
You might try starting small. The next time you feel your chest tighten before saying yes, notice that sensation and gently ask, “What are you afraid of right now?” The next time you realize you’re obsessing over a minor detail, see if you can feel where the urgency lives in your body. Is it a buzzing in your limbs? A clench in your gut?
You don’t have to change anything in those moments. Just noticing and naming your sensations is a way of saying to your body, “I see that you’re working very hard.” That, in itself, is a shift away from constant override.
How therapy can help you renegotiate the mask
Because these patterns are rooted in your nervous system and in your history, they can be hard to change by willpower alone. This is where therapy—especially with someone who understands trauma, neurodivergence, and queer experience—can be a powerful support.
In therapy, we can:
Map out how people‑pleasing, perfectionism, and masking developed in your specific life, rather than treating them as random quirks
Notice, in real time, how your body responds even inside the therapy relationship (for example, feeling the urge to impress your therapist or downplay your distress)
Practice tiny experiments with more honesty and less masking in a space designed to be safe enough
Develop nervous system tools that help you come back to yourself after fawning or over‑performing, instead of crashing alone
If EMDR or other trauma‑informed approaches are part of our work, we might also directly process past experiences that taught your body “I must be pleasing and perfect to be safe.” That doesn’t erase your history, but it can soften the intensity of your current reactions.
As a therapist who works with queer and neurodivergent adults in Denver and across Colorado, I don’t see your people‑pleasing and perfectionism as character flaws. I see them as evidence of how hard you’ve worked to navigate a world that hasn’t always made room for you. Together, we can be curious about what it would be like to let your body rest a little more often—to have relationships where you don’t have to be performing safety all the time.
You’re allowed to be a body, not just a performance
It can feel risky to imagine letting the mask slip, even slightly. You might worry that if you stop trying so hard, people will leave, everything will fall apart, or you’ll discover you don’t know who you are underneath it all.
Those fears are real, and they make sense. You don’t have to rip the mask off in one dramatic motion. You can start with small, manageable shifts: one honest answer instead of automatic “I’m fine,” one email you send without rereading five times, one plan you say no to because you’re tired, not because you have a “good enough” excuse.
Your body will likely react—tightness, fluttering, doubt. That’s okay. Over time, with enough support and repetition, your nervous system can learn that you can be more fully yourself and still be safe enough. Not everywhere, not with everyone—but more often than you’ve been taught to expect.
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own exhaustion, know that your body is not betraying you by being tired. It’s telling you the truth about what it costs to constantly perform okay‑ness.
You’re allowed to listen.
If you’re in Denver or anywhere in Colorado and you’d like support in untangling people‑pleasing, perfectionism, and masking, you’re welcome to reach out. Therapy can be a place where your mask gets to rest, your body gets to be believed, and you don’t have to earn care by being impressive or easy.