Why Being Liked Never Feels Like Enough
Oct 21, 2026You already have people who like you.
You have friends. You have colleagues who respect you. You might have a partner. Family. A dog, even. There are actual humans in your life who genuinely think you're great and who have made that clear to you, in words and in gestures, more than once.
None of it fully lands. There's still a tightness that shows up in the meetings that matter. Still an anxiety in the moments when you're trying to be liked by someone new. Still a quiet craving for the approval of the next person, even after the last twelve people already gave it to you.
If you're honest about the pattern, you can see it. You don't relax around the people who already like you. You brace for the next person whose approval you don't yet have. And when you get that person's approval, you don't relax then either. You just move on to bracing for the person after.
Somewhere underneath, some part of you assumed that if enough people liked you, the anxiety would resolve. It hasn't. Which is what makes this pattern so quietly bewildering. You've been doing the work. You've been earning the approval. And the underlying tightness doesn't diminish.
Here's why. And here's what actually shifts it.
What You Were Actually Trying to Solve
Almost every conversation I have with clients about this pattern gets stuck on the same wrong question.
How do I get more people to like me?
Or the more sophisticated version: how do I get the specific people whose approval I need to actually give it to me? Investor. Boss. Client. Potential partner. Family member. Whoever.
That question feels like the right question. It's the question the pattern itself keeps generating. But it can't be the right question, because it hasn't stopped generating regardless of how many people have given you the approval you were asking for.
Here's what the pattern is actually trying to solve.
The tightness in your body when you're trying to be liked isn't about them. It isn't about their perception of you. It isn't about whether they'll approve or disapprove. The tightness is about a very specific internal state you don't yet have direct access to. A base-layer sense of I'm okay in this moment. A feeling of being fundamentally safe inside your own body, in this room, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
Because you don't have direct access to that state, you're trying to reach it through the only path you learned. Their approval. Someone else's yes, you're okay substituting for the internal one you can't produce on your own.
Which is why more approval doesn't resolve it. The other person's yes is a hit. It gives you a brief version of the feeling you're trying to reach. Then it wears off. And you need another hit.
The Cigarette Structure
I want to name the mechanics carefully because they're exact.
If you've ever known someone in the middle of a nicotine addiction, or if you've been that someone yourself, you know the loop. There's a low-level unpleasant feeling in the body. Tension. Restlessness. A specific quiet discomfort that has nothing to do with anything in the environment. You smoke a cigarette. The discomfort briefly disappears. Twenty minutes later, thirty minutes, an hour, the discomfort returns. You need another cigarette.
The person in the middle of the loop reads it as I need nicotine. That's not what they need. What they need is relief from the discomfort. Nicotine happens to produce a brief version of that relief. But nicotine is also what created the pattern that requires the relief. Which means every cigarette solves the surface problem while deepening the underlying problem.
This is the exact structural equivalent to what approval-seeking does.
You feel a low-level discomfort in your body. Tightness. Anxiety. Restlessness. The discomfort has nothing to do with anything in the actual environment. Someone smiles at you, tells you they like you, invites you to the thing. The tightness briefly disappears. Fifteen minutes later, it's back. You need the next hit of approval.
The person in the middle of the loop reads it as I need this person to like me. That's not what they need. What they need is relief from the underlying tightness. This person's approval happens to produce a brief version of that relief. But the pattern of seeking approval is what created the tightness that requires the relief. Which means every successful bid for approval solves the surface problem while quietly deepening the underlying one.
Nicotine addiction resolves when the person stops feeding the loop and lets the nervous system slowly find equilibrium without the substance. Approval addiction resolves the same way."
The Ping-Pong Story
Here's the specific example from my own life that made me see this clearly.
In my early thirties, I joined a mastermind program in business. The leader was successful, wealthy, confident in a way I wanted to be confident. I signed up because I wanted to learn from him. And also, quietly, because I wanted him to like me.
Between the formal sessions, there'd be social moments. Casual interactions. One evening, four of us were going to play ping-pong at the venue. The leader was one of the four. Three others, including me.
I remember standing at that table, with a paddle in my hand, and being unable to breathe.
Nothing was happening. It was ping-pong. Recreational. Not scored. Not evaluated. I wasn't even on his team. But there was this pressure in my chest that felt like I was doing something high-stakes.
Because I was. Just not the thing I appeared to be doing. The high-stakes thing wasn't the game. It was the running check that was happening underneath. Am I doing okay in his eyes? Am I being interesting enough? Am I coming across as competent? Is he going to like me after this? Every ball I hit was a datapoint in the internal calculation about whether I was making the impression I needed to make.
I could not enjoy ping-pong because I was not playing ping-pong. I was performing for a specific man's approval, in a recreational activity that had no relationship to that approval, and I couldn't stop the performance long enough to actually be present with the game.
That's what the approval-seeking loop does to your life. Not just in the high-stakes moments. In the casual ones too. It removes your access to what's actually happening, because your attention is entirely on the internal calculation about how you're landing.
The Question That Changes the Game
Once you can see the addiction structure, the question stops being how do I get them to like me. That's the nicotine question. Getting the next person to like you doesn't solve the pattern any more than smoking the next cigarette solves nicotine addiction.
The question becomes: how do I access the feeling of I'm okay inside, directly, without needing their approval to produce it?
That's a completely different question. It's aimed at a completely different layer. And it opens a completely different path.
Some clients I work with have almost never accessed this state. They've been outsourcing the I'm okay feeling for so long that they don't remember what it feels like to produce it internally. That's a real starting point, and there's work to do to build the capacity from the ground up.
But most people have felt this state occasionally. Alone at home in the morning before anyone has asked anything of them. On a hike, present with the trees. In a moment of real connection with a pet. During a piece of work they're deeply absorbed in. Some kind of activity that produced, briefly, a sense of ah, I'm okay.
The practice starts with noticing when that state arises. Naming it internally when it does. This is my natural state. Because it is your natural state. It's the base layer that the approval-seeking is trying to substitute for. And it's available.
The Two Layers
Once you can access the base layer, there's a second layer of the work.
The specific pattern that fires when someone doesn't like you is one of four. That pattern determines what happens when the base layer gets threatened by actual disapproval. Not imagined disapproval. Real disapproval, from a real person, in a real situation.
The base layer is where you build the capacity to be okay inside your own body, on your own terms. The second layer is where you learn to hold that capacity when someone comes at you with a genuine bid to make you not-okay. That's the training I do with people in the mastermind. Real exposure. Real situations where disapproval might come. The nervous system practicing staying home when the alert circuit fires.
But the second layer only works if the first layer is in place. If you don't have any felt sense of being okay in your own body absent someone else's approval, no amount of exposure work will land. You need the base first.
What Most People Miss
The pattern isn't asking to be fed. It's asking to be understood.
Everything approval-seeking has ever gotten you was a hit, not a resolution. The hits felt good in the moment and left you needing more. That will not stop by adding more approval. It will stop by turning toward what the pattern has actually been trying to reach the whole time, and finding a way to get there directly.
The person underneath the pattern, the one who could stand at the ping-pong table and actually play ping-pong without an internal calculation running, is available. She's just been hidden behind the loop for a while.
The work is to stop feeding the loop long enough for her to come forward.
Discover your approval type. Take the 2-minute quiz at www.draziz.com
The specific version of the approval-seeking loop you're running is one of four. You'll find out which is yours, how it has been shaping the specific ways your body braces around people whose approval you want, and what the base-layer practice looks like from where you are now.
Reading blogs and watching videos online is a start...
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