← Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
#226 | Unpacking a Moment of Overwhelm Using the Three Pillars of Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People
00:19:42
Ever felt completely overwhelmed by something seemingly small—like a game of pickleball? If you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), even a casual social situation can spiral into emotional overload. In this episode, Todd Smith shares a powerful...
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Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll see how a single moment of overwhelm can become a powerful teacher and how the three pillars of stress management can guide your next steps. Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I'm your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I'm a highly sensitive person myself. In this episode, you'll discover what happened when I lost it on the pickleball court and what that moment of overwhelm revealed. How the three pillars of stress management for HSPs can help you turn a stressful moment into growth, and why it's actually a good thing when your irrational side breaks through your carefully managed control. The other night, playing with our club of pickleball players, about 15 of us, I had a total meltdown. And this is unusual for me, especially in a public place. And so I ended up throwing the ball, throwing my paddle into the net. I really lost it. And people were coming over, what's going on? And it was actually quite something. So this is a moment of overwhelm, and let's break it down and look at what was actually going on there and what we can learn from that. Using the three pillars of stress management to explore. Um, the first thing is just to understand what was going on. So we were playing a game. This. We keep track of our scores. So it was a little bit competitive, and I was playing with somebody who does not keep score very well. Uh, he always forgets the score. I also tend to forget the score a fair bit, but he's even worse than I am. And we were just. It was just like, every time you say, what's the score? And I would answer and there'd be like, this doubt, and. And it just. Pretty soon nobody knew what the score was. And this kept going on and going on and going on for many points. And it. It reached a final kind of. The finale was when the other team won by, I think, a point or two. And I was just like, this is just crazy. This is not fun. I'm lost, I'm confused, and. And all of that. So that's the moment. Oh, and another factor was my. My actual partner, life partner is in the background, and he knows I can't keep great score. He knows the other person can't either. And so he started putting the score out, like, from the sidelines, but he wasn't like the official, officious official scorekeeper either. So now we have like, you know, four people on the courts, plus him, all trying to tell what the score was and little. Little arguments ensuing. And meanwhile, I have to try to concentrate to play the game, which takes a lot of focus anyway. So I really reached the breaking point, and that's our moment. That's our stressful situation where I got overwhelmed. So how do the three pillars of stress management help us here? When I say three pillars of stress management, I mean three pillars of stress management for highly sensitive people. These pillars are something that I came up with to help have a framework for how to deal with stress as a highly sensitive person. And those pillars are, first of all, to understand the HSP trait. When you understand this trait, when you understand that's what it is, it can give a lot of understanding, a lot of compassion. The second pillar is to take care of yourself and live a balanced life. And the third pillar is to surrender your ego and find true inner freedom. So let's look at how each of these pillars can help to unpack this situation. The first one is understanding the HSP trait. And you know, the pioneer researcher Elaine Aaron, who came up with this or kind of really popularized the idea of being hsp, she emphasizes a lot the idea of four main characteristics of hsp. She calls it does D O E S. One is depth, one is overwhelm, one is emotion or empathy, and the other is sensitivity. And so if we look at each of these four in this situation, it can shed some light on what was going on for me. The first one is depth. So one of the things that I do when I play pickleball is I try to go deep. I try to really focus on the nuances of how I hit the ball, where I'm going to be moving, the strategy of it. And I. I almost need undivided attention. And of course it's challenging because there's all kinds of distractions to bring me out of that. But that just knowing that gives a lot of understanding for why I would get flustered when this scoring thing keeps coming up. And in reality, that became a bigger deal than the actual game, the actual playing, which is what I was more interested in. So that is part of being an hsp, and it makes it understandable why I would get overwhelmed if that came along far enough. So that brings us to the second point of being an hsp, which is overwhelm. Overwhelm is a normal part of being an hsp. It happens to us more frequently. Than other people because we become flooded more quickly, because we tend to notice a lot of different things and we tend to process them and we want to try to make it all work out. So what was I dealing with? I was dealing with the. The game itself, which is a huge amount of focus. There's my. My playing partner who was not able to keep score, and then the interaction I had with him, and me almost feeling hesitant to correct him, which is also an HSP trade. And then my actual life partner in the background telling the score, and me feeling kind of in the middle there and not wanting to be controlled either, and feeling like it's almost a criticism of me. All of these things, though stressful in general for anyone, are more understandable in the light of being an HSP because we take all of these things into consideration. And because of that, it's very easily easy to get overwhelmed. The E of DOE S stands for emotion or empathy. And the empathy I was feeling was kind of being a little bit almost too much in my partner's business and wanting him to like me and not wanting to ruffle his feathers by being too strong with what the score actually is. Emotional. As you can see, this whole thing became charged for me and became emotionally overwhelming because of the frustration. And then finally sensitivity. I was sensitive to all the different people playing and all the different interactions happening. We kind of covered that a little bit. But all of this is a package deal. That is, you put any HSP in this situation and 99% of the time they're going to get overwhelmed. So just understanding that means that it's. I can cut myself some slack and I don't have to think there's something wrong with me. I just have a narrow bandwidth when it comes to these things, and there's a point where that goes too far and I lost it. So that's the first pillar. The second pillar of stress management for highly sensitive people is to take care of yourself and live a balanced life. And so how could I have taken care of myself in this situation? If I was replaying it again today, I could have first of all interrupted the game and asked my partner if I could be the one, like, dedicated one to call the score. Because I know that I. He doesn't do it great, but I can do it a lot better than he could. And I never actually asked for permission. So I was in this kind of nebulous state of not knowing if I should take control. But really it's the server's job to call the score. So I Could have stopped and said, do you mind if I just call the score for the rest of the game? And he probably would have been relieved. And I could have taken care of myself that way. And it would have been a much more balanced situation if necessary. Another option could have been to take time out to talk about the issue with all sides, like both sides of the net, all four people playing, and just say, okay, we've got a scoring issue. My partner's not. Not remembering. I also don't remember that well. So is there. Who's the strongest person here for remembering the score? Can you be the dedicated scorekeeper? Similarly, we could have included my. My life partner who's in the background trying to keep score, but again, not the official scorekeeper. And I could have said, hey, do you mind if he comes in and just stands at the net and calls the score for us? And he'd probably love that. And we'd all love that, too. So this is how you can take care of yourself. Like, you can do things to balance the situation once you're aware of it, if necessary. One other area I could apply this idea of balance would be if I'm really getting flustered, I could call a timeout and just say, I need a moment, get a drink of water, go step outside for a second. If I need to go to the bathroom, do something just to. Just to calm my own nerves for a moment before coming back in. And that could have helped a lot. So this is in the level of balance, the third pillar, and probably the most important or equally important maybe, is the idea of surrendering my ego. And this is where true inner freedom can be found. Where was my ego showing up in this? Well, underlying all of it was a desire to win. That's ego fair and square. And so I can look at that thought, I want to win, and I can just question it a little bit, loosen it a little bit. Do you really want to win? Is that really the most important thing here? Are you sure about that? And who would you be without that idea that you want to win? I would be more relaxed. I would be maybe having some more fun. Maybe that's the turnaround. I want to have fun. And so I would be. I could actually start laughing, like, this is obviously not the game for me to go deep into playing and having this more zone like experience. This is the game to just kind of laugh at how crazy the situation is and have it a little looser. All right, so how else is my ego there? The idea of needing to win, but also needing to concentrate, to win. You know, like, the idea that this is serious and I need to go deep with this. It's an attachment. And when I'm attached, even though it's a good thing to go deep, I attach to that. And then when I can't go deep, I get frustrated. So, again, stepping. Stepping back and loosening that attachment could help me take it with a grain of salt. Another place where my ego showed up is I didn't want to take responsibility for the scoring, so I wanted the other person to. To just, like, take care of it, even though he couldn't, because I was afraid that he wouldn't like it if I just took over and started scoring. What I love about the balancing that we saw is that I could have asked and talked about it and said, hey, do you mind if I just take over the scoring or just make it easier? And as long as I ask, then there's sort of a transfer of power, and I'm not trying to usurp the power, which is what I was afraid he wouldn't like. But nonetheless, it's this fear in me, like, I want to stay safe. This is ego. I don't want to take the lead. He'll criticize me. This is ego. And if I question that and maybe step into taking the lead, he may not criticize at all. He may find gratitude, and I can find peace as well. So this is an interesting one for people like me. I tend to be introverted as well as hsp, and it's. It's easy for me to step into the background and let other people lead. But look here, the turnaround is pointing me in the opposite direction to actually take the lead. And I may find more peace by doing that, the opposite of what my ego wants. And I may find peace by actually engaging rather than deferring. Other ways that my ego shows up is blame, you know, like putting myself above him. He's a terrible scorekeeper. So then I feel insecure, and I can't connect with him in a human way because I've put myself above him, and I'm critical. Another place my ego came in was with my. My life partner in the background who was calling the score from the sidelines. And I saw him as interfering or taking over. And so I was defensive, and the beliefs there were. I wanted to figure it out for myself. I wanted to be in control, and that's pure ego. So if I can question those thoughts and maybe surrender control, like, turn around. I don't want to be in control and let my Partner do the calling, like have them come to the net and actually take over for that. It might be a relief for everybody. In this episode, we looked at what happened when I lost it on the pickleball court and what that moment of overwhelm revealed. It revealed, first of all, that I'm an HSP and that it's okay to get overwhelmed. We don't have to prevent overwhelm completely all the time. We just have to understand it so that it becomes less of a big deal. And we may become less, you know, maybe move in the direction of less overwhelming, but it happens. So it also revealed that a lot of stuff was going on under the surface there. And when I look at it clearly and think about can actually show me a lot of options for this situation and other situations into the future. We then looked at the three pillars of stress management for highly sensitive people, and we saw that one of them is understanding the HSP trait, understanding that we naturally look for depth. We tend to go deeply, and we can get frustrated and overwhelmed when we get distracted from that, pulled out of that. And we can get overwhelmed easily because we're also paying attention not only to the depth, but to all of the surroundings and all of the things going on around us. So this is. Helps. It helps us to understand that it's. That this is a tendency for us as HSPs. We then looked at the second pillar of stress management for highly sensitive people, which is balance. How to take care of ourselves and the options that are there. To interrupt the game, ask if I could be the scorekeeper, to have a conversation with others, to even include my life partner in and have him be the scorekeeper. And then we looked at the third pillar of stress management for highly sensitive people, which is to surrender ego and find true inner freedom. And the ego is full of wants and needs and judgments. And so when I recognize what those are and notice them and pay attention, even write some of them down, even question them, then I can find some distance on the ego. And that gives me a lot more breathing room. And then finally, I want to just mention the good side of having an irrational, you know, breakdown. Like when the irrational side breaks through. And it. It kind of makes a big mess of things. I mean, I threw my paddle, I. I threw the ball. I. I looked like McEnroe there, or probably a weak version of that. I was a. I was a mess in public. And you might think that's a terrible thing, but I can tell you there was something really good about it. If something felt liberated in me that I could be, I could let down my guard in a way, be vulnerable with people that I care about and just be an average person who sometimes has meltdowns. Like, there's a certain humility in that and there's certain freedom in that, and there's a certain joy in letting my, my, my crying out, you know, my emotion out. And I actually feel closer to everybody that was there because of that. I'm not guarded as much with them anymore. So that's the value of being human. And so thanks for listening and I look forward to exploring more things with you in the future. In the meantime, have a great rest of your day dreaming of a stress free, balanced life. Visit trueinnerfreedom.com and complete the HSP Stress Survey. Gain clarity on your stress triggers and Enjoy a free 15 minute inner freedom call designed to guide you towards lasting inner peace and fulfillment. Sam.