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Why You Feel Responsible for Everyone (Is It Responsibility - or Self-Betrayal?)

• Dr Amen Kaur

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Ever wonder why you jump in to fix, smooth, and stabilize before anyone even asks? In this episode, we unpack the neurobiology of over-responsibility-how a highly attuned brain and nervous system can mistake other people’s tension for a threat to your own safety.

Rather than shaming the instinct to help, we examine how early somatic learning shapes this pattern. Long before conscious choice, your nervous system learned through tone of voice, silence, micro-expressions, and relational rupture that intervening reduces uncertainty. That reduction in uncertainty creates relief via dopaminergic and limbic pathways - not because stepping in is always aligned with your values, but because it temporarily restores predictability.

Dr Amen Kaur will walk through the neuroscience behind this loop, including:

  • the medial prefrontal cortex, integrating self–other representations
  • the temporoparietal junction, amplifying perspective-taking and responsibility attribution
  • the superior temporal gyrus, decoding social meaning and implicit cues
  • the anterior insula, mapping interoceptive signals and threat salience

When this network is chronically activated, unresolved situations register as bodily alarms. Action becomes regulation. Regulation becomes identity. Over time, the cost isn’t just fatigue - it’s stalled careers, capped earning potential, constrained leadership, and creative energy siphoned into managing other people’s emotional states.

You’ll also learn how passive nonverbal control - withdrawal, disappointment, ambiguity, subtle neediness - can recruit you into action without a single request, and why guilt or anxiety spikes when you resist. These reactions aren’t moral failures; they’re predictable outputs of a sensitized regulatory system.  So its NOT YOU - its something you can unlearn somatically

Finally, we pivot to change. You’ll learn a brief, neurobiologically informed pause that brings prefrontal cognition online so sensation becomes data, not command. We explore a reframing that separates responsibility from regulation, allowing boundaries to register as safety rather than threat. A real client example shows how breaking the caretaker loop at work restored agency, redirected talent, and unlocked growth that had been stalled for years.

If you’re ready to stop sacrificing your

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It’s called “How to Reset Your Biology for Calm, Confident Success — Even If You’ve Faced Setbacks.”

You’ll learn how to release survival stress, regulate your nervous system, and grow from safety, not struggle.

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Because you can only grow as far as your body feels safe to go — and it’s time to start again from calm, clarity, and connection. 🌸

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🧠 Best For: Transformation, Empowerment, self-help, confidence, mindset, healing, identity transformation, psychology-based growth, neurobiology, success without burnout.

⚖️ Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not replace professional advice.

If engaging in guided practices, ensure you’re in a safe, grounded space.
By listening, you accept full responsibility for how you use this information.

SPEAKER_00:

Have you ever noticed that you're the one that steps in and solves things for others, and it feels good sometimes in the short term. There's a relief, a sense of purpose, sometimes even a quiet reward. But you also know there's a cost to you now. You're the one that fixes everything, problem solves, holds it together, and you're the one that feels responsible. Sometimes when people aren't even asking you to. And it's not just a habit, maybe you've noticed that, but it feels like it's wired into you and you can't stop. Like something in you is always scanning. What does everybody else need? What kind of support they need? What would go wrong if you didn't step in? It's like you can preempt stuff. Even with strangers. If that's you, this episode is for you. Because today I want to explain with neuroscience, and we're gonna leave the shame and the guilt and the everything else at the door. But why is over-responsibility like in you? And why it's not a flaw? It's actually an adaptation, a biological adaptation. And by the end of this episode, you'll understand why boundaries feel uncomfortable in your body. To be able to say no to someone is difficult. And why responsibility, yes, it can feel good in that moment. You might get that dopamine hit. But then later, guilt and shame sometimes shows up, even when you did the right thing, because you're neglecting yourself. And how passive nonverbal control keeps this pattern alive. So it's not so much what you're seeing and what people are saying, it's more the passive nonverbal control that is actually getting you to take these actions and how to reclaim responsibility for yourself as a priority and not for everyone else and for you to sacrifice yourself for. Responsibility isn't itself a problem. You're responsible for something in this lifetime. Like you're responsible for fulfilling your life, your potential, your capacity. You were given unique skills, and you're here to experience, express, and create to be the best version of yourself. That's your responsibility. And over-responsibility begins when you're starting to take on more than what is yours to carry. And it starts pulling energy away from what it is that you're meant to fulfill. And that feels draining and it becomes like a burden. And you feel like you're held back. You might genuinely feel that you're called to serve others. That might be part of your purpose, but it doesn't mean that you're responsible for fulfilling other people's potential. And when helping others becomes an expense on your own life, on your own growth, and your own happiness, career, and evolution, helping is actually a distraction. It actually blocks you from actually fulfilling what it is that you came here to do. Not a moral failing, but a biological one. This is where we need to slow down. Because this pattern did not begin as a thought. When over-responsibility formed, your cognitive brain wasn't even developed yet. So it doesn't make sense what you're doing. Because in early childhood, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that's responsible for reasoning, logic, conscious decision making, impulse control, is actually not developed. It's not online. So you didn't sit there as a child and think, I'll take responsibility so I feel safe. I'll make that choice. That's an adult logic. You didn't have access to that. In early development, it was entirely somatic. It's body-based learning. It's like your body is doing the controlling. Your nervous system learned through sensation, someone's tone of voice, emotional shifts, maybe even energy. You could sense it. Some people are really highly attuned to energy. They can just sense people and they can feel it in their body. Even silence. And maybe there was relief when tension dropped, when something changed, when your body learned, when I do this, the environment starts to feel safer again. So responsibility didn't form as a belief. It formed as a felt pattern. If I do this, then that tension goes in my body. That's why, as an adult, this doesn't respond to insight alone. Like, why am I taking on responsibility for everyone? I need to take care of myself. Because it's not cognitive. You can tell yourself as much as you want, it's actually biological. As children, our nervous systems are organized around one core question: how do I stay safe in relationship? The truth is that without a relationship, you wouldn't be alive. You needed someone to take care of you at that age. That's the reason why that question was the ultimate question: like, how do I stay safe in relationships? So if you grew up in an environment where emotions were unpredictable, conflict felt unsafe, or someone's mood set up the tone for the whole home. Or you had to be good or helpful or mature early and take care of everybody else. Maybe their emotions, whatever it is, it was your nervous system that learned. Monitoring others keeps me safe. That learning became automatic. You didn't choose it, your body learned it. And now you need to learn something new, or your body needs to learn it. And once that body learns something as survival, it doesn't let go easily, even when you've grown up. That's why it's so hard. You can know it. You can know where something's not right, but you need your body to know it. So let's look at what's happening in the brain. Neuroscience has identified a brain network involved in responsibility taking. This includes the medial prefrontal cortex, that's integrating yourself and other, the temporal parietal junction, which is about empathy and perspective taking, and the superior temporal gyrus, which is all about social meaning and the interior insula, internal sensations and threat detection. So it's like what's going on in my own body. So you've got this whole network involved in what's going on with everybody else and the meaning behind it and what's going on in my body. So in people who take responsibility easily, this network is highly active, which means you sense everything quickly, you simulate outcomes. Okay, this is the outcome. If this happens, then this could happen. So you're very good at analysis, if you like. And uncertainty, when there's some sort of uncertainty with other people, it registers as discomfort within your own body. So unresolved situations can feel physically stressful for you. Your body doesn't ask, should I help? It asks, something's wrong, I need to act, so that this physical sensation within me is relieved. So it's like you take it on in your body. When you can help or fix or stabilize the situation, your brain releases dopamine. It's yay! But it's not really pleasure as such, it's more from the relief of uncertainty. So you get that kind of hit of okay, there's no more uncertainty, everyone's calm now. So when tension settles or someone comes down or a problem is solved, or the energy shifts, your nervous system experiences, yes, safety is restored. Tick. Responsibility becomes regulating. Do you get that? So then that's the equation that you've made is that responsibility equals regulation within my own body. But dopamine is short acting. When responsibility is all the time, it becomes constant. And when it becomes an identity rather than choice, because you don't have the ability to choose, because it's not based in your prefrontal cortex, it's based in your biology. The body shifts into threat, not challenge. It's not like you're choosing to grow and develop, it's actually a different. It's I have to do this, otherwise, I'm feeling this threat. Even when performance is high, and this is another thing that we can look at another study. Even when others are benefiting, you still feel it as a threat in your body. So EEG studies show that when others are present, even the fact that they're just there, say if you're someone that takes a lot of responsibility, just having someone else there present, responsibility takers experience a reduced sense of agency, like you can't be yourself. The brain links your actions to their outcomes. You feel like I have to be responsible for all their outcomes. So when you don't step in and fix things for other people, then there's like this level of uncertainty that rises, and then a guilt appears, and then anxiety follows. This is not a moral guilt problem, it's biological distress. Your nervous system isn't saying you're wrong, it's saying, you know what, this feels really unsafe. I don't feel safe to just relax and allow my body just to relax because there's someone else there. Because you can't, you're not allowed to because your nervous system isn't allowing you to. And here's another layer that's often missed. The people who benefit from your over-responsibility rarely are open about it. What they're doing is actually influencing you indirectly through silence, disappointment, helplessness, emotional withdrawal, pity. They avoid confrontation or they avoid being clear and upfront about what it is that they want. But what they're trying to do is engineer outcomes behind the scenes. And because your nervous system learned this language very early when you didn't have that cognition. So when today, say if someone's feeling uncomfortable or distressed, your body is reacting before your mind does, it because your cognition catches up later. So you act to stop that internal dysregulation that's happening inside of your body because of what's happening to someone else. Have you ever had those situations where you're with someone and there's those uncomfortable silences? And when I was younger, I would feel really, oh my gosh, I've got to talk. But now I'm okay with that. I'm uncomfortable with those silences, especially with close friends. It's actually really lovely to have those silences sometimes. Over time, sensations stop feeling like information. And what happens is you start feeling like their instructions that I have to do something. And then it feels like your body exists to serve others, like it's designed to pick up everything that's going on around you and then fix everything around you. But it's not designed for that. Your sensations were meant to guide your life of what it is that you want, where you want to move to, how you want to grow, how you want to develop, what is it that you're meant to do, what is your purpose, what makes you feel good? That's what your sensations are for. And what's happened is it's been hijacked at a very young age when you know you're meant to play and enjoy life. It was hijacked at that time to be more responsible for whatever reason. Yeah, it was just conditioned in. But now you can fix it for yourself. But before we look at what you need to do, let's look at what happens when, say, you take an action to help somebody else. What tends to happen afterwards when the cognition comes online is that after you've helped, you fixed, no, you give given, you might feel a little bit ashamed. I don't really want to tell anyone that I did. Say if a friend comes along, they say that they've got a gambling addiction, for instance, and they say, Oh, I really need this money, and you give it to them, and then you don't want to tell anyone because it's oh my gosh, I don't want anyone to know that I gave it to them because we all know they've got a gambling addiction. Like, why did I do that? I'm never gonna see that money again. So you might feel a bit of shame because the action wasn't something that you would have chosen to do if your cognition was online. You acted to stop the discomfort that you were feeling at that time from seeing that friend going through what it was that they were going through, that you could sense their discomfort and the discomfort that they created within you. So you acted from that discomfort, not from alignment. And then we try and hide what it is that we've done because shame does keep patterns hidden. I could do another podcast on shame, to be honest. Like the most important thing is to not allow shame to be hidden because then it does control us. And basically, the shame keeps the pattern invisible, controls us. One of my clients who is incredibly talented, we uncovered that. She felt responsible for her boss. She was supporting her emotionally, stabilizing situations, managing her stress, just taking care of her and doing more than her role. Instead of her boss supporting my client's growth, career progression, and salary, my client was taking care of her. But the problem is my client's career had stalled. Her income had stagnated. It didn't impact her boss's potential at all. If anything, the boss was getting all this great talent. The sacrifice was going one way. And this pattern had started in childhood. She was responsible for her mother, who had a personality disorder. She never completed in a healthy separation. Her nervous system had never learned. Her nervous system hadn't learned my sensations belong to me, and I am not responsible for other people. I can actually be responsible for myself without feeling those feelings of guilt. And that separation is the most important stage that she's ever been through. And it's absolutely incredible to see her on this journey of separation, going for a new job for more money, and just helping her get to understand what's really been the cause of all of this. Being responsible for yourself is not selfish. Over-responsibility is when sensations control you. Responsibility is when the sensation informs you and then you choose. So you're using your cognition as well. That pause is everything. Over-responsibility isn't about being too kind or having too much empathy. It's about losing ownership of your body. Where you have these sensations, but it's been taken over by what other people are feeling. And when that stays unexamined, the cost isn't just exhaustion. The cost is your career, your income, your leadership, your capacity to grow, your potential, because your nervous system is trained to manage others, will always prioritize stability over expansion. It will have so much work to do in trying to solve things for everybody else. You will prioritize that stability over your own expansion. That's why so many capable people stay stuck below what they're meant to do. Not because they lack ability, but because their system is already full. Responsibility becomes healthy again when it returns to choice. You choose. You allow the cognition part to come online before you take action. When sensation is the information and it's not the instruction, then you have the ability to connect back to your prefrontal cortex and then decide. If you want support with that shift, I've created a free masterclass that goes deeper into this work. We explore the mechanics, the core of over-responsibility, how it's wired into the nervous system, why boundaries alone don't fix it, and how to reclaim your body so it supports your life, so you can succeed, and being able to hold being in uncertain times and still make the right decisions for yourself. You'll find the link in the show notes. And the moment you stop sacrificing your body, your purpose, your energy, and your future for other people's comfort is the moment that your life starts moving forward again. The joy comes back, the life force energy comes back. You just feel good about what you're meant to do and what you are doing. You just feel like I'm alive again and I feel fantastic. Remember, you didn't learn this by thinking it through. You learnt it by feeling. And what was learned somatically can be unlearned, safely and with choice. I'm sending you so much love. Till next time.