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The Burnout of Making Everyone Else Happy
Description
Episode 15 of The Burnout Podcast examines people-pleasing at work — the hidden driver of exhaustion that isn't about workload but about emotional over-investment in others' approval. Lucas and Luna look at the psychology behind the compulsion to say yes, drawing on research from Harvard Business Review on the 'high cost of low disagreeableness' and a real case of a marketing coordinator who spent 18 months agreeing to extra projects until she collapsed. They discuss how people-pleasers end up doing work that doesn't serve their own goals, why the habit is especially common in client-facing and support roles, and three concrete strategies to reset boundaries without becoming a jerk. A practical episode for anyone who's ever left a meeting wondering why they volunteered for something they didn't want to do.