People Pleasing Statistics 202634 Numbers, Every One With Its Source.

Studies put numbers on the habit long before the internet named it

Each entry names the paper and links to its DOI. Where a study measured something adjacent to people pleasing, the entry says what it measured, and nothing more.

• 1
  620 readers of a Denver newspaper answered a survey on love in 1987, and it named the 3 attachment styles adults still useHazan and Shaver, 1987
• 2
  Roughly 1 in 5 of them picked the anxious paragraph: wanting to merge completely, and worrying the other person did not really want themSame paper.
• 3
  A quarter picked the avoidant paragraph: uncomfortable close to others, with a pull away when someone gets nearSame paper.
• 4
  The pattern had a clinical name in 1977: anxious attachment, in a paper on the making and breaking of affectional bondsBowlby, 1977
• 5
  Askers guessed how many strangers would agree to help, and underestimated by roughly halfFlynn and Lake, 2008
• 6
  Across 94 studies and 8,461 people, a plan that named the moment and the move together had a medium-to-large effect on follow-throughGollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006
• 7
  Writing down what you do shifts the behaviour on its own, in the direction you want, and unreliablyKorotitsch and Nelson-Gray on self-monitoring, 1999
• 8
  6 researchers at UCLA went back through the stress literature in 2000 and found fight-or-flight had been drawn mostly from males; under threat, females more often tend and befriendTaylor and colleagues, 2000
• 9
  Among 626 adults aged 18 to 40, the ones who had been breadcrumbed reported less satisfaction with life and more loneliness than the ones who had notNavarro and colleagues, 2020
• 10
  Closeness has been measured since 1992 as 7 pairs of overlapping circles, from barely touching to almost oneAron, 1992
• 11
  Across 3 studies, the more of themselves people had folded into a couple, the less clearly they could say who they were after it ended, and that blur tracked the distressSlotter, 2010
• 12
  Those who anxiously expect rejection read it into small things and react, and their partners grow less satisfied and more likely to leaveDowney and Feldman, 1996
• 13
  Of 155 people fresh out of a relationship, the ones leaving one that gave them little reported the most growth and the most positive emotionLewandowski and Bizzoco, 2007
• 14
  210 people were split in 2 after a breakup; the half that answered questions about it repeatedly over 9 weeks came out with a clearer sense of self and less lonelinessLarson and Sbarra, 2015
• 15
  6.1% of people who opened the median diary app on day 1 still opened it on day 30, and mental health apps in general kept very few past a monthBaumel and colleagues, 2019

None of these studies was run on women saying yes at a kitchen table. Each measured a mechanism the habit runs on, and the entry says which.

She said it herself, and the counts are from the day we read them

Between 16 and 20 September 2026 we read roughly 1,540 public comments and reviews by women describing 11 habits, across TikTok and Reddit, plus Goodreads and the App Store. These are the lines the most people agreed with, with the count on the day.

• 1
  130,012 hearts on one TikTok comment: she has commitment issues, and once someone convinces her to trust them she has abandonment issues insteadThe largest single line across the 11 habits. Pattern: pushing people away.
• 2
  66,579 hearts on the line about being the one nobody has to worry aboutPattern: hyper-independence.
• 3
  30,490 hearts on a comment under a breadcrumbing video that read, in full, damn I am the breadcrumberOn the first page of 50 comments, 9 said they were the breadcrumber and 8 said they had been breadcrumbed.
• 4
  4,922 hearts on the line about saying no to a glass of water you wantedPattern: people pleasing, the fawn response.
• 5
  372 upvotes on a 35-year-old asking why 2 dates were so hard to get over, and 242 on the answer: you fall for the idea, not the personA dating forum for over-30s. Pattern: accepting breadcrumbs.
• 6
  324 likes on a book review saying she exercises and eats well only in the weeks her partner is awayPattern: losing yourself.
• 7
  314 hearts on a comment describing a note on her phone of things she remembers she likes, which she said felt like getting her personality backThe fix the most women agreed with for losing yourself.
• 8
  11 habits, one page each, and a 12th line that came up under all of them: I know what I am doing and I do it anywayThe gap between knowing and doing is the whole reason the app exists.

What she types into Google, in searches a month

Monthly US search volumes from Semrush, read on 20 September 2026. The same terms this site’s pages are built for, with the page each one has.

• 1
  27,100 searches a month: anxious attachmentLargest term in the set by a distance. The page.
• 2
  5,400: hyper independence, and 1,600 more for hyper independentThe page.
• 3
  1,600: how to stop being a people pleaserThe page.
• 4
  1,300: how to stop people pleasingSame page as above.
• 5
  1,300: how to stop caring what people thinkPlanned.
• 6
  720: how to get over a situationshipThe page.
• 7
  590: why do I push people away, and 590 again for how to find yourself againOne page and the other.
• 8
  320: shadow work appPlanned.
• 9
  170: anxious attachment quiz, and 110 for people pleaser testOne quiz and the other.

Where the apps stand, by the one retention study that counted

2 numbers about apps, one of them ours.

• 1
  Glissa scores 11 habits, re-scores all 11 every week, and asks 30 seconds a day$4.99 a month, billed as $59.99 a year, iPhone only, live on the App Store since 22 September 2026.
• 2
  Almost everyone leaves a mental health app inside a monthBaumel and colleagues, 2019, entry 15 above. We built for 30 seconds a day because of that number, and we do not claim to have beaten it.

Questions

How to cite this page

Glissa, People Pleasing Statistics 2026, glissa.io/blog/people-pleasing-statistics, read on the date you read it. For any single number, cite the study named beside it, because we are only the index.

If you want your own numbers, we built one. One number for how much of you is showing, 11 habits re-scored weekly, one dare a week. 30 seconds a day on an iPhone. If it reads you wrong, tell us.

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