Struggling to create calm as a highly sensitive person? You’re not alone. Many HSPs find it difficult to manage overwhelming emotions, sensory overload, and the constant need for control. This sensitivity makes it harder to embrace calmness, but with the right tools and techniques, peace is possible.
Over the years, I’ve come across a lot of advice about aligning with natural rhythms—circadian rhythms, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clocks, Ayurvedic clocks—you name it. And while these ideas sound beautiful in theory, I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated. They just don’t work for me, and I’m beginning to think they don’t work for many people, especially those of us living with chronic illnesses. So I decided to research them and find out where these clocks came from.
Not that I’m always looking for silver linings (because I feel that’s largely unhelpful) but this time I found one in overcoming people pleasing as a highly-sensitive person. This flare up showed me where my people-pleasing has gotten much more sneaky.
Often when we talk about people pleasing, we think of:
Agreeing to something even though we don’t have the time, energy or mental white space for it
Offering to help even when we didn’t give ourselves a chance to think about it
Bending over backwards to make sure someone else is happy. Even if it comes at the cost of our own wellbeing and mental health
Changing how you show up with a different group of people to fit in (when you go against who you really are in order to feel accepted)
This time, my Inner People-Pleaser was so much more sneaky.
At the end of 2021, I started experiencing extremely high levels of anxiety. With three to four panic attacks a day, things weren’t normal for me. The frustrating thing was that my usual stress management strategies weren’t working.
Each generation, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z, brings its own set of values, expectations, and communication styles. It’s important for us to recognize and acknowledge these differences when we’re examining burnout.
When I first learned about burnout I heard it was a stress management problem. Essentially it was too much stress and not enough coping strategies to deal with all that stress. But after my own epic burnout experience, I realized that way of perceiving burnout was wrong. The truth is, burnout is not a stress management problem. It’s an energy management problem. And that completely changes the way we look at burnout recovery strategies.
When you think of meditation, you likely think about someone sitting down on the floor, legs crossed, eyes closed, hands resting on their knees, breathing deeply and looking calm and relaxed.
But what if meditation didn’t have to look that way? What if all of the typical self-care practices could be adapted to what works for you, not what everybody else seems to be doing?
I never used to be the kind of person that would get anxious or overwhelmed. I used to be proud of that and think it was a skill especially when I was working as an ICU Registered Nurse and things were going sideways that day.
Turns out it was dissociation, aka a coping mechanism from trauma.
What can I say, hindsight’s a jerk sometimes.
Now, the truth is I get very anxious, not just my OCD anxiety disorder, but also just generalized anxiety. I think it’s kind of wild sometimes how creative my anxious brain can be, and how clear it can make the most awful, worst-case what-if scenarios feel so possible and so real.
It’s really easy for the anxious part of me to start drumming up feelings of overwhelm because I can convince myself that I’m not able to cope with whatever my anxious brain or perfectionism have built up. But anxiety is just a friend of mine now, welcome to stay here as long as they need.
Overwhelm, though, that’s a red-flag warning sign for me that I’m heading down the road to burnout.
When people talk about regulating emotions as a highly sensitive person, they often use the pot of water heating up on the stove analogy. In this scenario, by suppressing your emotions it’s like you’re trying to hold down the lid on this boiling pot of water, but eventually the pressure from the steam gets to be too much and it pushes out in a little burst.
I don’t like this analogy though because it seems to only speak to the emotions we typically label as negative. But if we truly want to honour ourselves as a highly sensitive person, then we need to feel all of our emotions.
So instead of thinking of it as a boiling pot of water, I like to think of it as holding onto apples. Find out what I mean in this episode.
I came to a realization recently that I thought might be helpful to share because it highlighted one of the sneaky ways we can sabotage ourselves. It’s so sneaky because it feels like we’re really just trusting our own intuition and experience – but really it’s just trying to keep everything the same because, to our nervous system, “the same” is safe. But as I’m learning, living with OCD adds a whole other layer of complexity to everything.