A woman in a Bangkok co-working space reached past my elbow last week to get her own laptop bag off the floor, and apologised. Then she apologised for apologising. I watched the second one land and thought, there it is.
If you grew up polite, someone probably told you that saying sorry a lot is humility. I don’t buy it. Humility is knowing your size. What I keep seeing in people is different: a running tab they think they owe the room for letting them stand in it.
When sorry stops being a word
A real apology does a job. It names a specific harm, takes the weight for it, and offers something back. Three or four a year, done properly, will carry most of your relationships.
The reflex version does no job at all. Sorry, is this seat taken. Sorry, my invoice might be slightly overdue, no rush. By the fortieth repetition the word has been sanded down to a throat-clearing noise, so when you finally need it for something serious you’re reaching for a tool you’ve already worn out.
Evidence on apology frequency is thinner than the internet suggests. Everyone cites a 2010 diary study by Karina Schumann and Michael Ross, which found that women reported making more apologies than men, but also reported committing more offences. Both groups apologised for the same proportion of their own offences. What differed was the threshold for noticing one.
Worth saying plainly: one small study of undergraduates, and not one about compulsive apologisers. But the threshold idea is the useful bit. Chronic apologising can be a detection setting dialled far too low, so ordinary friction registers as damage you caused.
Where the setting gets dialled
Psychologists have a phrase for affection that arrives on terms: parental conditional regard. A child works out early that warmth is available when they perform correctly and withdrawn when they don’t. The 2004 study that named it, by Avi Assor, Guy Roth and Edward Deci, asked college students whether their parents’ regard had depended on meeting standards. Those who said yes reported a sense of internal compulsion, self-esteem that swung around, a feeling of being disapproved of, and resentment towards their parents.
Two decades of follow-up got pulled together in a 2023 meta-analysis, which linked conditional regard to more anxiety symptoms, lower self-esteem, perfectionism, trouble regulating emotions and weaker attachment security.
Handle that carefully, and I include myself in the warning. Those findings are correlations, mostly built on adults recalling their own childhoods, a notoriously creative genre. Nobody has run the study proving conditional regard is why some adults apologise for existing. I’m joining two dots that happen to sit near each other.
I was sent to boarding school in Australia, a long way from Manila, at an age when you’re still working out what you’re for. What I picked up there was that being tolerated and being wanted are different states, and that the gap could apparently be closed by effort. It took me until my thirties to notice I was still paying instalments on that.
Sorry as a white flag
An older strand of research fits the pattern uncomfortably well. Paul Gilbert’s work on social rank asks what humans do when they feel low in the pecking order, and the answer is that we appease. In one of his studies, shame, social anxiety and depression all tracked closely with feeling inferior and with submissive behaviour. Guilt didn’t. The framework has since held up in a systematic review, if not as a full account.
Strip out the terminology and it’s simple. Appeasement signals no threat here, please don’t come for me. A constant sorry is a small white flag waved before anyone has drawn anything. Online you’ll see this called fawning, a term from the therapist Pete Walker rather than from a body of research, so treat it as a handy description and not a diagnosis.
What actually shifts it
None of this responds well to being told off, which is why “stop apologising so much” is such useless advice. What works is smaller and duller.
- Swap the sorry for a thanks. “Sorry I’m late” becomes “Thanks for waiting.” Same information, none of the grovelling, and the other person gets something pleasant instead of your guilt.
- Delete the pre-apology. Sorry to bother you, sorry if this is a stupid question, sorry, quick one. Cut it and ask cold. The reply rate doesn’t drop. I’ve tested this for years.
- Keep the word for damage. If you actually stood on someone’s foot, apologise properly, once, and don’t circle back to it twice more that afternoon.
- Sit in the pause. Most reflex apologies fire into a silence you’ve decided is your fault. Count three seconds. It usually turns out to belong to nobody.
- Count them for a week. Tally marks in your phone, no judgement. Everyone guesses low, and a number is harder to argue with than a feeling.
Some sorries are just grammar
A caveat, because this idea gets oversold online. In London I said sorry ninety times a day and meant almost none of them. There it means excuse me, pardon, mind out, after you, hello. I once apologised to a lamppost. That’s dialect. Bangkok has its own version, so does Manila, and none of it means the speaker is carrying something.
Frequency isn’t the tell. What happens when you try to stop is. Go a day without the reflex ones. If it feels a bit rude, you’re probably just British. If it feels unsafe, like you’ve removed something structural, that’s worth looking at properly, ideally with someone qualified.
