How to Stop Over-Apologising
If your last three messages to a friend include the word “sorry” and none of them were actually about anything you’d done wrong, this one’s for you. “Sorry” has quietly stopped meaning “I did something and I regret it” and started meaning something closer to “please don’t be mad at me”, which is a very different sentence.
Sorry isn’t the problem
There’s a genuinely interesting piece of research behind this that undercuts the usual explanation. A well-known study looking at why women apologise more often than men found the gap wasn’t about women being more willing to apologise. It was about threshold:" women and men apologised at roughly the same rate for things they personally judged offence-worthy. Women simply judged more things as offence-worthy in the first place. In other words, the apologising itself isn’t the malfunction. It’s sitting downstream of a much more sensitive alarm system for what counts as “something I need to smooth over.”
What over-apologising is doing
Once you see it as an alarm system rather than a habit, over-apologising makes a lot more sense. Each “sorry” is a small, fast bid to defuse a reaction before it happens, for a delayed reply, an inconvenient question, existing in someone’s way on a train. It’s not really about the specific offence. It’s a general-purpose appeasement signal, sent early and often, to keep the emotional temperature in the room from rising.
Why this feels so automatic
This runs on the same wiring as the fawn response, appeasing to prevent conflict rather than freezing or fighting through it, which we cover properly in the Fawn Response article. If disagreement or disapproval used to carry real weight, growing up with a household where someone’s mood needed managing, or a relationship where conflict escalated fast, apologising pre-emptively becomes a genuinely sensible strategy. The trouble is the strategy doesn’t know the coast is now clear.
What to say instead
The advice to “just stop apologising” tends to fail, because it removes the placation without giving your nervous system anything to replace it with; a bit like taking away someone’s umbrella and telling them to stop worrying about the rain. Better substitutes:
“Thanks for waiting” instead of “sorry I’m late”
“I’ve got a different take on that” instead of “sorry, but”
Naming the fact plainly; “I need to reschedule”, rather than pre-emptively softening a request that hasn’t even been questioned yet.
None of these are about being blunter for its own sake. They’re about sending the same information without the automatic self-flagellation attached to it.
Why this takes practice
This is genuinely hard to do on willpower alone, in the same way it’s hard to stop flinching at a loud noise simply by deciding to. It sits close to the same ground covered in The Science of Boundaries and The Psychology of People Pleasing, because all three are the nervous system doing the same job: keeping you safe by keeping everyone else comfortable, at your own expense.
If this pattern is costing you more than the occasional over-used “sorry”, a therapist can help you build the tolerance for other people’s mild disappointment that this actually requires, at a pace that doesn’t just recreate the same old panic in a new setting. Out therapists at Battersea Rise and Lavender Hill work with this regularly.
You can browse our private therapists, explore our low cost counselling service, or find out more about how we work.
