Is Being Too Nice Making You Sick?

In his recent book, The Myth of Normal, acclaimed physician and therapist Gabor Maté makes some startling claims about the relationship between "niceness" and ill health. Having spent much of his professional practice caring for terminally ill patients, he noticed that many of his patients had personality or psychological traits in common. Many of them were what he called "nice people": people who went out of their way for others; who made self-sacrifices for work, friends, and family; and who generally put others before themselves. These people were regarded well by others and, as he reports, had very nice eulogies.

What Maté concludes, however, is that this niceness often came at a cost of personal health and well-being. There are many important implications of his argument, even if we do not accept the causal effects between niceness or people pleasing and ill health.

The first important conclusion here is that we often sacrifice our authenticity—our true voice, our gut impulses—for the sake of smooth relationships. Much of his work explores this tension between a human's need to be authentic and another need to maintain connection and attachment. Many of us learn in childhood to suppress our wants and needs so as not to upset an adult figure like a parent. In this way, we preserve the attachment that we need to survive.

This tension persists often as adults, where many of us who are conflict-avoidant suppress our feelings and our needs to maintain stability and homeostasis or just to not "rock the boat" with friends, colleagues, and family. Maté argues that underlying this are often deeply held core beliefs:

1. “I am responsible for how other people feel.”
2. “I must never disappoint anyone.”

These are powerful core feelings that many conflict-avoidant people feel, and the fear and shame that often accompany them frequently prevent them from speaking out honestly. As a result, many of these unmet wants and needs can become internalized, slowly manifesting as symptoms like anxiety and depression over the course of a lifetime.

How can we be more authentic?

Learning to be authentic is a lifelong process, but it often starts with looking at your patterns, particularly around conflict and interpersonal tension.

Where do you become anxious or withdrawn? Where do you hold back? What happens after—are you left feeling shamed, resentful, or uncomfortable?

We can then continue to track what motivated our inauthentic response—was it fear of making someone angry, weakening our position at work, or coming across too strongly or standing out?

The more that we can track these processes, the more we can understand them as learned behaviours (likely rooted in childhood) and begin to explore “alternative actions” that are less habitual and reflexive, and instead show a little more of our mature adult selves.