What a need for approval is — and why it is not vanity
What a need for approval really is, why it is not vanity, and how to tell the pattern apart from healthy kindness. With evidence.
“I do not know why I apologise when I did nothing”
If you have thought that this week — or heard yourself say “sorry” walking past someone, asking the time, existing in a meeting — this is exactly about that.
There is a version of the need for approval that does not look like a need for approval. It is not the one who chases applause. It is yours: the one that apologises before knowing if it did anything wrong, that changes its opinion depending on who is in the room, that walks out of a conversation knowing exactly what everyone else thinks and nothing about what it thinks. And because it does not look like vanity, it is hard to recognise for what it is.
It is worth starting there, because the name cheats. The word “approval” brings up the image of someone who needs an audience. And most of the people who depend most on the nod do not have an audience: they have a permanent sense of being in the wrong, without knowing why.
1. What it is, plainly
A need for approval is the tendency to organise what you say, decide and even feel around what others will think of you.
Look at the last part: what you say, decide and even feel. This does not stay in behaviour. If someone tells you the thing you liked is silly, you stop liking it; not because you changed your mind, but because feeling something they disapprove of becomes uncomfortable. That is the real reach of this, and it is bigger than it sounds.
There is a reading that helps you understand it without blaming yourself. Leary and colleagues (1995) proposed that self-esteem works like a sociometer: an internal gauge that tracks how likely others are to accept you. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.518 Read that way, chasing the nod is not a moral flaw. It is an alarm system, and like any alarm system, it can be set at a threshold that is far too high.
In most people that threshold is reasonable: the alarm goes off when there is a real signal of rejection. In you it also goes off when there is none: when someone is distracted, when a reply is slow, when a message sits unanswered for three days. And because the system does not tell “they are rejecting me” apart from “they are busy”, you treat the second as if it were the first. You correct yourself. You apologise. You pre-empt. And all of that has a cost.
That is the honest starting point: you are not broken or fake. You have a sensitive alarm, and you have been treating it as if it measured reality when much of what it measures is your fear.
2. The misunderstanding that tangles everything: confusing it with caring for your relationships
Here is the knot, and that is why this text is comparative: almost everyone mixes up two things that look very similar from outside and are opposites from inside.
Caring for a relationship is attending to the other person without letting go of your own judgment. You try to understand what is going on with them, you adjust how you say it, you pick the moment. But what you think stays yours, and it is still standing when the conversation ends.
Needing approval is attending to the other person by letting go of your judgment. You do not adjust how you say it: you change what you say. You do not pick the moment: you pick what the other person will like. And what you think stops being yours halfway through the sentence, the moment you see their face.
From outside, the two look the same: someone considerate, attentive, who does not pick fights. From inside they are night and day. In the first, you leave the conversation knowing what you think. In the second, you leave knowing what the other person thinks — and searching your memory for what you said, because in the moment it slipped away.
| Caring for the relationship | Seeking approval | |
|---|---|---|
| What you hear | You understand them and still hold your position | You guess at them and drop your position |
| What you adjust | How you say it and when | What you say and what you think |
| If they disagree | It bothers you and you hold it | You collapse and withdraw it |
| Leaving the conversation | You know what you think | You know what they think |
| The cost | Normal tiredness of living together | Emptiness and swallowed anger |
The misunderstanding has a frequent collateral victim: your own kindness. Because the need for approval disguises itself as being a good person, many people believe that working on it means turning cold or selfish. It is not that. It is to stop using the other person as a mirror to confirm that you exist.
3. How to tell them apart in you, with three signals
General comparisons help little if they are not grounded. These are the three marks that separate healthy care from the pattern that weighs. None of them is a diagnosis; they are clues to look at yourself without fooling yourself.
The first is the speed of the change. If your position changed because you heard an argument, it was a conversation. If it changed the instant you saw the face of displeasure, your judgment did not change: it switched off. The test is simple: could you explain why you changed your mind, in your own words? If you cannot, you did not change your mind.
The second is the automatic “sorry”. Apologising when you did something is repairing. Saying “sorry” when someone is upset about something you did well is something else: it is repairing a harm that did not exist, to bring the tension down. If your apology shows up before you know whether you did anything wrong, it is no longer an apology: it is a reflex.
The third is the judgment that disappears in the moment. Almost everyone with this pattern recognises it better afterwards than during. In the moment you say yes; that night, in bed, you know you wanted to say no. That distance — realising late — is the clearest signature that you were not choosing, you were reacting.
With these three signals you can already do a small exercise without leaving this page.
People who recognise having corrected themselves after the conversation, not during. It is the most comforting finding: it is not that you do not notice; you notice late, and that can be trained.
People who say yes to requests they do not want to accept and only notice when they hang up. The automatic yes is not born of generosity: it is born of the fear of disappointing, and it feels just as involuntary.
People whose mood for the day depends a lot on how others treated them. When self-worth is hung outside, you do not decide your day: the last person who looked at you does.
People who feel instant relief after saying yes, and emptiness a while later. That relief is the alarm switching off. The emptiness is the price, and it always arrives afterwards.
4. What each of the two needs
If the two things call for different work, it is worth knowing what each one needs, because trying the wrong work is what keeps people circling for years.
The healthy relationship needs presence and limits. It needs you to really listen, to hold what you think, and to accept that the other person may disagree without that being a catastrophe. The discomfort of disagreement is part of the relationship, not its failure. It is uncomfortable and it keeps working.
The approval pattern needs something different: lowering the alarm’s threshold. It does not ask you to care less about others or to turn hard. It asks you to learn to tell the signal from the alarm — that someone’s frown is not a verdict on your worth — and to train holding a small judgment without asking permission to have it.
And here is a finding almost never mentioned, and it changes the prognosis. Baumeister and Leary (1995) documented that belonging operates as a basic human need, not a whim. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 The problem is not that you want to be liked: it is what you do with your own life when you believe your place depends on it. Working on this is not switching off the desire to belong — that would be switching off something human — but taking your judgment out of the other person’s custody.
Crocker and Wolfe (2001) showed something that completes the picture. Self-worth can get tethered to specific domains — other people’s approval among them — and when the source collapses, your mood falls with it. DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.593 That is why one cold comment can last you two days: it is not that the comment was serious, it is that you had your worth hung there. And it also explains why moving your worth to a less volatile source — one that does not depend on anyone’s face — is the deeper work.
5. The exercise: telling the signal from the alarm
This is the text’s exercise, and it is done today. It is called telling the signal from the alarm, and it has four steps you do with paper or your phone, in five minutes.
- Pick one interaction from the last forty-eight hours where you believe you read disapproval. Not the worst: an ordinary one. The message left unanswered, the dry tone, the face in the meeting.
- Write what happened, in facts. Only what could be filmed: what they said, what they did, with which words, at what moment. No interpretation yet. “They replied ‘ok’ and changed the subject” is a fact. “They were upset with me” is a reading.
- Now write the interpretation, and set it aside. Write what you assumed. Almost always a line appears like “I did something wrong”, “they do not like me”, “they are going to stop loving me”.
- Look for the simplest alternative explanation. Not the most comforting: the simplest. Tiredness, hurry, a hard day, the other person’s own issue. The question is not “what is the truth?” — you cannot know it — but “how many explanations fit these same facts?”.
When you finish, look at the two columns. The facts almost never reach the conclusion you drew. That gap between what happened and what you assumed is your alarm, and seeing it on paper, separated from reality, is the first real training. Over time you learn to notice the gap while it happens, not three hours later.
And if I cannot find any interpretation, is something wrong?
No. Sometimes the facts do point somewhere: there was a real problem, someone is genuinely upset. This exercise is not meant to convince you that everything is fine — that would be another trap — it is meant to make the reaction proportionate. If, after separating facts from interpretation, the conclusion still stands, then you have something concrete worth attending to. What changes is that you attend to it by choosing, not from inside the alarm.
6. What this is NOT (three things worth taking off)
Before this text turns into another self-help mould, there are three things a need for approval is not, and they are worth saying because they do harm when they slip in.
It is not shyness. Shyness is a fear of judgment that tends to appear in specific social situations and to pass in familiar ones. The need for approval does not rest in your comfortable group: there too you check, there too you correct yourself. You can be the most extroverted person in the room and depend on everyone’s approval.
It is not a lack of personality. People with this pattern usually have plenty of judgment — which is exactly why it hurts to watch it disappear. You are not empty or a blank page that copies others: you have firm opinions that switch off in certain contexts. The work is about context, not character.
It does not get fixed with affirmations. Telling yourself “I am worth a lot” in the mirror does not change the threshold of the alarm, because the threshold does not move with sentences: it moves with new experiences. Holding a small judgment and finding that the world does not fall apart. That does move it.
7. Why this work is worth it
It is worth it because the cost is not what it seems. It is not that you come across badly to someone: it is that the life you live stops being yours.
When every decision passes through the filter of “what will they think”, the important decisions pass through it too. The job you take because it looks good. The relationship you keep because leaving would disappoint. The project you do not start because someone laughed. And one day you look back and see a life that everyone approves of except the person living it.
The good news is that this pattern responds. Not to willpower — “today I do not care what they say” does not work — but to the repetition of small gestures where you hold your judgment and find that nothing serious happens. Each such gesture lowers the threshold a little. It is not fast. But it is one of the few kinds of work where what you practise stays with you.
8. How it looks in four areas of your life
The pattern does not behave the same everywhere. Recognising which of these four areas it dominates most tells you where to start, because you do not work the same muscle at the office as at home.
| Area | How it shows up | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Work | You say yes to loads that are not yours; you do not claim credit | Overload and a record that does not reflect what you did |
| Partner | You change your opinion with their mood; you ask permission for your own things | A relationship where your desire barely has a voice |
| Family | You go back to the old role, the one that does not make anyone uncomfortable | The sense of going back to being twelve |
| Friends | You pick the music, the plan and even the topic the group likes | Ending up not knowing what you like |
Look at the last row. Friends are the cheapest ground to start on: there is almost no real cost and plenty of information about how much you correct yourself. That is why it is worth training there first and carrying the trained muscle to your partner or your job, where the bet is higher. Going in the opposite order — starting with the most expensive — is what makes people collapse at the first step.
9. The mother who apologised for crying
Let us go to a case, because ideas land better attached to a life. It is a composite case, with details changed: it is not a real person.
She is a woman of thirty-eight, with two small children. One Thursday everything landed at once: work, the younger one’s fever, an empty fridge. At seven in the evening, sitting on the edge of her son’s bed, her eyes filled with water. Her older son looked at her and asked if she was sad.
And she said “no, sweetheart, sorry, I am just tired”. She apologised for crying in her own home.
That is the scene, and there is nothing dramatic in it — precisely why it works. No one judged her. There was no audience. But the reflex showed up anyway: she felt a legitimate emotion at a legitimate moment and her first response was to apologise, as if her tiredness were a fault that needed repairing.
The next day she thought about it. And she realised it was not just that once: she apologised for arriving a minute late, for asking someone to pass the bread, for not feeling like talking. The alarm went off about everything. And the important part: her son did not learn that crying is wrong. He learned that crying needs an apology, which is almost worse.
That is what gets passed on without meaning to. The need for approval does not stay inside you: it becomes the air the person watching you breathes. The children of someone who apologises for feeling learn to apologise for feeling.
What she started to do was small and concrete. One sentence a day without the “does that work for you?” in front. One “sorry” fewer, the one that did not belong. And what she noticed weeks later was not that she stopped caring what people think: it was that “sorry” stopped coming out on its own and became a decision. Sometimes she decided to apologise. It was no longer automatic. That is the real change: not the absence of the reflex, but the instant in which you can choose.
And if the problem is that I do not know when something is "normal"?
Almost nobody has a calibrated measure, so it is worth giving you one. The question is not whether your way of relating is “normal” — normality does not exist as a measure — but whether it is costing you something: sleep, decisions, relationships, time. If it is costing you, it deserves work, even if nobody else notices from the outside.
10. The alarm and you
Back to the first line, to that “I do not know why I apologise when I did nothing”. Now you can read it differently.
You do not apologise because you are weak or fake. You apologise because you have an alarm set at a threshold that measures mostly your fear, not reality. And because the alarm goes off before anything happens, you act before knowing whether there was anything to fix. The “sorry” that comes out on its own is the alarm; the question this text brings is what you would do if you could hear it go off before obeying it.
That is the part no article resolves, and it is worth saying. It is trained with repetitions, and the repetitions look a lot like holding a small judgment and seeing that nothing serious happens. One day you will hear yourself say “not this time” without the apology behind it, and you will notice something odd: the alarm still goes off, but you no longer send anyone to switch it off right away.
If you want to keep going, the piece on where the pattern comes from goes into the origin and how it installs, and the one on how to loosen it without turning cold is the day-to-day practice. And if you have spent years correcting yourself for what people will say, therapy at rdkterapia is one possible door.
People who notice sustained change in weeks with small repeated gestures, not with a change of character. The pattern responds. Not fast, but it responds — and what you practise stays.
Two questions that usually hang loose when someone recognises themselves here
What if my partner or my boss takes advantage of me saying yes to everything? It is a real risk and worth seeing clearly. Environments adapt to whoever never complains: if you have always given in, the other person learned to ask without looking. That does not make you responsible for any abuse, but it does mean the change will move the relationship. At first, holding a no will create more discomfort than now, and that discomfort is the sign that the pattern is genuinely moving.
How do I know I am not turning selfish? By a simple test: selfishness does not generate guilt or questions. If you are asking yourself whether you are turning cold, it almost certainly is not that. You will keep caring for your people; what will change is that you will also be on the list.
Caja de crisis. If you are in an acute crisis right now — thoughts of harming yourself, or that nothing is worth it — do not keep reading. Call right now. Colombia: 123 (emergencies) and 106 (psychological crisis line). If you are in the US: 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline). If you are in the UK: 116 123 (Samaritans). If you can, stay with someone while you call.