I once had a chef who never took a day off. Not once in two years. He covered other people’s shifts, fixed the walk-in when it died at 2am, drove a waitress home the night her scooter got nicked. Everyone loved him. Nobody knew a single thing about him.

When he finally quit, he sent a text saying thanks for everything, and then I never heard from him again. I’ve thought about that man more than almost anyone I ever employed.

Here’s the trouble with the person who always shows up. We read them as generous, and sometimes that’s exactly what they are. But often something quieter is running underneath, and it’s worth naming, particularly if you’re reading this with a faint sinking feeling.

Being needed is the easier ask

Psychologists have a word for the pattern: sociotropy. Ugly word, simple idea. It describes people who pour themselves into relationships and take their sense of worth almost entirely from other people’s approval. Aaron Beck coined it in the early eighties as a personality dimension that leaves people more vulnerable to depression, and the research has broadly held up since.

The label isn’t the interesting part. What sits underneath it is.

Wanting to be liked is a request you have to make and then wait on. Wanting to be needed is something you can manufacture on demand. You can be the one with the spare charger, the one who knows a guy, the one who answers at midnight. Nobody rejects a favour. Nobody has ever said no thanks, I’d rather struggle.

So if approval is the currency you grew up chasing, usefulness is the reliable way to earn it. In a recent piece on chronic people-pleasing, psychologist Toshiaki Sato described people who put their entire self-worth in others’ hands, because approval is the only proof they trust that they’re worth anything at all.

Where the wiring usually comes from

This rarely starts in adulthood.

Bowlby, the attachment theory man, described a pattern he called compulsive caregiving. It tends to grow in homes where a child ends up managing the adults. Maybe a parent was volatile, or unwell, or simply overwhelmed. The child works out fast that the household runs smoother when they’re helpful, and that being helpful is the surest route to safety and attention.

That child becomes extremely good at reading rooms. What mood is she in? Is now a bad time to ask? They learn to scan for other people’s needs the way the rest of us learn to ride a bike, and they never quite unlearn it.

Then they grow up and become the friend who organises everything, the colleague who stays late, the sibling who handles the paperwork when someone dies. Not performing a role. Just doing what has always kept them safe.

The tell isn’t the helping

Plenty of people help constantly and are perfectly fine. So how do you tell the difference?

Watch what happens when you can’t help.

If you turn down a request and feel a normal, mild twinge, that’s just being a decent person with a diary. If you turn down a request and feel a genuine spike of dread, like something structural is about to give way, that’s the tell. The panic is the information.

The second tell is subtler. Ask yourself whether the people closest to you actually know anything about your life. My chef knew about everyone’s divorce and nobody knew about his. He’d built dozens of relationships that only ran one direction, and the traffic never reversed.

That’s the sad arithmetic of it. Being needed feels close to being loved right up until the moment you have nothing to offer, and then you discover how much of the closeness was structural.

How to test the theory

I’m not going to tell you to set boundaries. That advice has been flogged half to death and it doesn’t help, because the problem was never that you didn’t know you could say no.

Try something smaller and considerably more frightening.

Ask someone for a favour. A real one, mildly inconvenient, the sort of thing you’d drop everything for if they’d asked you. A lift to the airport. Help moving a wardrobe. An honest read of something you wrote.

Then watch what happens in your own body while you ask. If it costs you nothing, brilliant, you’re fine. If your throat tightens and you find yourself pre-apologising and building them an escape route before they’ve even answered, you’ve learned something useful about yourself.

And watch what they do. Most people say yes. Most people are quietly pleased to be asked, because letting someone help you is one of the few ways to tell them they matter.

Carl Rogers spent his career arguing that people need to be accepted without conditions attached, what he called unconditional positive regard. You cannot find out whether anyone offers you that while you’re still busy earning it.

So put the wrench down occasionally. See who’s still standing there.