Stop Living for Validation

The hidden cost of building your life around other people’s approval.

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We all want validation. It bleeds into our careers, our romantic relationships, our social media posts. While it exists on a spectrum, it’s part of the human condition — we want to be wanted, to be seen, to be good. The problem becomes when outside validation becomes more important than what we feel inside.

I have lived my life for validation as long as I can remember. And despite the healing, the growth, the years lived, it’s still my greatest battle. I’ve also learned that it’s a nervous system state — that external validation makes us feel safe. But it’s like a drug, and like any drug, when you’re living your life to chase it, the short-lived high isn’t worth the crash.

Zooming out, we live in a society that has made validation cemented into our very ecosystem. Likes, followers, social club memberships, even down to elaborate weddings and bachelorettes. We aren’t rewarded for being secure, happy, and honest — we’re rewarded for performing to a specific set of life’s circumstances. Whether that reward comes in the form of status or knowing that you checked every box you’ve wanted to check since you were a kid.

Over this last year, I left my career, ended a long-term relationship, moved out of my home in NYC, and faced many other obstacles — from the very significant ones, like my dad dying, to the seemingly insignificant, like putting my Instagram on public for the first time in my life, in the name of building a business.

Like most of us, my need for validation seems to have existed as long as I have needed to breathe. I needed my teachers to love me, for my parents to be proud of me, to be well liked, to feel like I was making a mark above the average — like my life meant something. Rarely did I worry about how I felt internally. I have always been able to sacrifice the happiness of now for future happiness. Every step that didn’t feel right was a sacrifice for the amorphous dream, something I would obtain once I got everything right.

I have always been willing to weigh the opinions of others about me before my own opinions about me. I have lived so deeply in my logical mind that the agony of this choice and the symptoms it perpetuated in my body — from anxiety to insomnia to hormonal issues — seemed separate and irrelevant.

Every setback or hurt I’ve endured — from painful friendship breakups to romantic rejections to career stalls — I have taken personally in the way I only knew how: I would be better, more beautiful, more likable, harder working, and that would protect me from ever feeling that way again. What I didn’t realize at the time was this was, literally, killing me in slow motion.

Like so many women on a similar trajectory, my life led me to a medley of doctors:

Ambien for the sleepless nights. SSRIs for the anxiety. Birth control for the mood swings and cystic acne. Six rounds of antibiotics for a chronic UTI no one could explain.

Here’s what I wasn’t asked:

• How do you relate to yourself, your body, your mind?

• Do you spend time outside every day?

• Is your career and life aligned with your happiness?

• What’s your biggest fear? What thoughts haunt you at night?

• Who are you following on social media? What is your screen time?

• Are you drinking too much alcohol — or for that matter, any alcohol?

• What have you done to heal the abandonment wound left by your brother and father?

Not one of those questions was on any intake form. This line of questioning isn’t billable.

The solution to my ailments was to work harder, be better, and take a handful of pills that were going to allow me to continue walking this path for the potential of future happiness.

The irony is, I’ve always known happiness is important. As long as I can remember, every time there was an opportunity for me to make a wish — whether on a birthday candle or an eyelash — I always wished “to be happy.” I could never decide which one thing I needed most in my litany of desires, so this felt like a hack. If I was happy, what else mattered?

And yet I had spent my entire adult life building the opposite. Measuring success by external validation. Adherence to “the path.” Dollars increasing, lifestyle improving, never a step sideways, never a step back.

I had wished for the one thing every year and built a life that systematically ruled it out. If achievement alone made us happy, we wouldn’t all be on SSRIs.

And this isn’t just my story.

80% of all autoimmune patients are women. That isn’t coincidence. Autoimmune conditions are rising 19% every year — almost entirely in women. The bodies of women are the bodies most often performing for the longest, suppressing the most, and breaking down the fastest.

When you silence one symptom, the body finds another way to talk to you. Your sleep gets fixed; you have a gut issue. Your gut gets fixed; your skin flares. Your skin clears; your hormones tank. The symptom moves. The source stays.

Now I will not say I am free from this trap. I still find myself trying to make sense of life by looking at myself and believing that if I were somehow better or more perfect, things would’ve gone differently. But now I can catch myself in this, and bring myself to the present moment (most of the time).

One thing I am learning the hard way: there are seasons when we are not ready to put ourselves out there. When our sense of self is still too fragilely rooted in others’ opinions, we cannot safely put our souls in someone else’s hands. We have to know — at a body level — that we will not abandon ourselves when someone or something doesn’t choose us. The work of holding our own ground has to come before the work of letting someone else hold us.

There are other moments when I am feeling more lost and untethered than I ever have in my life — the lack of stability I have now is something that my younger self would not have wanted to live to see. But now my equation is different, so my reaction is different.

Instead of trying to perfectly optimize for the future, I turn my focus to how I feel now.

I have started using my happiness and my peace as a north star. I’m being honest with myself and others about my emotions, my challenges, the things that aren’t working. I sit with them and feel them before they pop up in my sleep and in my skin. I’m making sure that nothing comes between me and taking care of myself — and I don’t mean an endless supplement protocol, a Sakara delivery, and a Solidcore class anymore (though I do still love those things). I mean I’m leaving space for a morning routine. I’m spending time in nature. I’m listening to my body again. I’m saying “no” when I need to.

Some days I do this well. Many days I revert back into that childhood conditioning. But the orientation has shifted: peace first, then everything else.

I’m not suggesting you quit your job tomorrow. I’m not suggesting you leave your partner.

I’m suggesting you start reprioritizing your happiness and your peace now. Not after the promotion. Not after the move. Not after the savings hit a number.

Now.

It’s not just because the magical happy day might never come.

It’s because your body literally can’t sustain it. And by the time it forces the conversation — through autoimmune, through anxiety so loud you can’t think, through a body that won’t quite work anymore — you’ll wish you’d had this conversation earlier.

This is the conversation worth having. So have it now.

With love,

Marissa