The Wrong Kind of Hard vs The Right Kind of Hard: What the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (AKA Brain’s Resilience Muscle) Teaches Us About People-Pleasing
The other day I stumbled across a video that stopped me mid-scroll. It was a podcast clip of @hubermanlab with @davidgoggins about a part of the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) which is just some big words for the resilience muscle of the brain). Huberman said, “Whenever we do something that we don’t want to do, this part of the brain grows.”
And instantly, my brain went: Hmmmmm Hello, what about people-pleasing?
Because isn’t that exactly what women who people-please do their entire lives? Saying yes when they want to say no. Swallowing what they really think. Smiling and nodding while something inside of them is screaming. If the brain grows every time you do something you don’t want to do, then surely people-pleasers should have Olympic-level anterior mid-cingulate cortices by now, right?
But that’s not what we see. Instead, the women I work with often feel exhausted, resentful, anxious, and disconnected from themselves. Which got me asking: what’s going on here? Why doesn’t all that “doing what you don’t want to do” translate into resilience?
Suppression vs Growth: The Wrong Kind of Hard
So let’s dig deeper.
Yes, forcing yourself to do something against your will feels effortful. But the brain doesn’t treat fawning or people-pleasing as growth-oriented effort. It treats it as survival.
When you smile at your boss while secretly wanting to tell him to shove it, your nervous system doesn’t register that as “choosing to do something difficult.” It registers it as staying safe by shutting yourself down. That effort is logged in your amygdala and survival circuitry, not in your anterior mid-cingulate cortex.
Over time, this survival hard actually shrinks resilience. Chronic stress, constant suppression, and unchosen effort keep you stuck in fear pathways.
The Right Kind of Hard Builds Resilience
On the flip side, when you do something uncomfortable by choice: like lifting weights, saying no, or sitting with the part of you that feels terrified of rejection, or consciously choosing to do the kind of healing work that requires different neurons to fire - the aMCC lights up. This is effort aligned with growth and values.
That kind of effort sends a different signal to your brain: I chose this. I can handle this. I can do hard things.
This is where self-efficacy comes in. Self-efficacy is the belief that you can handle challenges. Every time you choose to face discomfort for your growth, whether it’s in the gym or in deep healing work - you’re not just building self-efficacy, you’re also literally strengthening the neural circuits that make you more resilient.
Why This Matters for People Pleaser.
Here’s the paradox:
People-pleasing is the wrong kind of hard. It kept you alive, but it trained suppression, not resilience.
Healing, boundary-setting, and truth-telling are the right kind of hard. They feel terrifying at first, but they’re the exact kind of effort that rewires your brain and body for freedom.
That’s why women who start doing this work don’t just feel better emotionally, They actually become more resilient humans at a structural, brain-based level.
Real Healing Is the Right Kind of Hard
This is why I don’t teach women to push through with more mindset hacks. That’s just another form of the wrong hard. Instead, the work I do is about healing the parts of you that learned to fawn in the first place, and creating the safety to finally practice the right hard — saying no, trusting yourself, and reconnecting with your truth.
Because the truth is: you’re not broken, you’ve just been doing the wrong kind of hard.
Here’s the Instagram clip I’m talking about: https://www.instagram.com/share/_c4K3r9XQ
Go watch it and see if it lands the same way it landed for me.
And if this resonates, this is exactly the kind of work we dive into inside my programs. It’s not about fixing you. It’s about helping you feel, heal, and finally build the kind of resilience that changes everything.