Gemma Speig
speaker
1,085 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 7 May
Gemma Speig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
This kind of brings me to the final cost of trying to be universally liked.
It's just plain exhausting.
Like it's just so tiring.
The psychological toll of pretending is like so enormous.
On top of everything else that you are doing right now to just exist.
You then have to monitor like every word, every action, every step you take.
And that puts you into a state of chronic hypervigilance, draining your cognitive resources, draining your energy, fragmenting your sense of self, all for somebody who probably doesn't even like you to begin with and doesn't appreciate any of the psychological stuff you're putting yourself through.
You pay the cost and they don't even appreciate the reward.
That's what's really happening when we try and cater to the people who seem to have the greatest level of dislike for us.
Science, the research, of course, you guys know it backs this up.
A study from 2025 investigated whether people-pleasing is linked to poorer mental health.
They looked at over 2,000 university students.
These university students were asked to basically rate
how to kind of yeah say how many approval seeking thoughts behaviors and emotions they probably experienced on a day-to-day basis and then they also gave them this test that measured their personal well-being so how happy they were how fulfilled they were how at peace they were I feel like you guys probably know what the results are but the results just to just to make it very obvious showed that the higher the level of people pleasing the lower the psychological well-being
And actually, the greater the loneliness, the more emotional distress.
The people who were working the hardest to have the most people like them were the loneliest.
Participants with strong people-pleasing tendencies also had the worst mental health profiles overall.
And obviously that's a bi-directional relationship, right?
But it does show how psychologically harmful it is to be in the state of constantly needing to be liked.
Being everyone's favorite person doesn't work if you have no time for yourself.
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