#229 | Why “Being Nice” Keeps HSPs Overwhelmed—And How Inner Work Can Break the Cycle - Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions

Transcript

Todd Smith (0:00)

By the end of this episode, you'll discover why being nice can secretly fuel overwhelm for HSPs and how inner work helps you set boundaries without losing your compassion. 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's really behind the thought I need to be nice and how it shapes your energy. A gentle inquiry to loosen the grip of people pleasing and how to reconnect with your authentic kindness without self sacrifice. This is an edition of Guided Meditation Mondays where I'll be guiding you to do the work of Byron Katie. As you listen, it's easy to say, just say no. You know, people tell you all the time you should just say no. You should ask for what you want. You should take up more space. It's easy to talk like that, but it's hard to do. The reason for this is that you have to feel it. You have to. It has to be something that you see clearly is something valuable, something real, something good. And that feeling can't come from an intellectual understanding alone. Intellect can help point us in the right direction. But to really find the know that is honest and real and to be able to find the courage to say it requires inner work. And inner work means finding out where you're stuck and then working with that stuck part and seeing if you can help it find some wiggle room. Notice I'm focusing on the stuck part itself. I'm not focusing on the wise part of me that understands already that you should say no or that you should ask for what you want. I'm talking about a small stuck part inside of myself that is unable to say no. It's too scared to say no. It's too scared to take up space, it afraid that part needs to be met, it needs to be discovered, it needs to be held. And it has to be done in a very compassionate way, but also with some challenge being presented to that part as well. In other words, we're asking the stuck part to stretch a little bit, to expand a little bit, and to see if it can see things from a new perspective. This is what inner work is about. And my favorite way of doing inner work is called the work of Byron Katie. And it does just like that. You find a situation and the Reason for a situation, instead of just a generalization, is that we're doing inner work, and inner work requires that we be grounded in an experience. Otherwise, it becomes an intellectualization. So you start with a situation. I'm going to give you an example from my life where I was listening to an audiobook with earbuds on, and my partner had his iPad right next to me and had the volume up without any earbuds, and it was distracting me. I did say turn down the volume, but there was that little bit of hesitation. There's a little stuck part inside of me that was saying, oh, I shouldn't be interfering. He's gonna get mad. I'm not. It's. I should just, you know, be quiet, be nice, be gentle. So this is really important when you're doing inner work, is to find a specific place or specific time where you actually got triggered, where that little stuck part of yourself came up into the forefront. And for me, it just came up in the form of a. Of a thought or a little bit of a fear. So once you've grounded yourself in that, then the next thing to do is to look for what are the thoughts that are showing up coming out of that fear or coming out of that emotion that I'm experiencing in that moment. This is a connection between the underworld and the conscious world. And when I'm aware of the emotions which come from deep down underneath, and then I pay attention to the actual thoughts that are connected with them, I bridge this gap and I can begin to work with this underworld. So the thoughts in that situation for me were things like, I need to be nice. It really comes back to a thought almost of being a kid. Like children are seen but not heard. And in some ways, I do treat myself like a child with my partner. There's a certain similarity there that. That happens in me. So these are the thoughts that are coming up connected to this emotion of I shouldn't ask him to turn down the volume. So underneath that is a fear. And the fear for me is he won't like it. The fear for me is he will be angry with me. He will be upset, and I don't want that. So these are the thoughts that I'm harvesting. They're like the little fruits that are connected to the trunk of the tree of the emotion that I was feeling, which is a certain amount of fear. So I can pick any one of those thoughts. And the beauty of this work is that you take the thought which is connected to the emotion, and when you work the thought, the emotion can shift. You can, of course, work from the opposite direction, taking emotion and working with that, and then the thoughts will shift. But I love this way of the work of Byron, Katie, of taking the thought, which is connected so intimately with the emotion, and playing with that and watching the emotion change. So I'm going to do a very short version of this here, just to give you a little taste of what it's like. The thought I'm going to work with is I need to be nice. And it kind of comes from that feeling of I have an identity of being nice and I have that kind of childish quality of wanting to be seen but not heard and just kind of going with the flow. So what I'll do now is hold myself in that moment when I was asking my partner to turn down the volume or just thinking about it. And I'm going to ask myself these four questions. So the first one is, is it true I need to be nice? And I have to sit with that. And what I find is, and this is really important, I'm not asking my mind, I'm asking my emotion. I'm asking my. The part that's caught on this, the part that's stuck, is it really true that you need to be nice? And I can hear its voice coming through me. It's like. Like I'm having a conversation with a part of myself that I don't even control that side of the dialogue. And it's saying, yes. It's saying, yes, I need to be nice. So I'm honoring that and I'm allowing that to be my answer. Then at question two, I'm going to come back and challenge that part again and say, okay, can you absolutely know it's true that you need to be nice? Are you sure? And I'm waiting for that response. And I see it hesitating. I see this little scared part of myself hesitating and being, oh, no, I can't absolutely know that that's true. Where is this coming from? It's not coming from my intellectual mind that knows what to do and what's the right thing, and yes, you should stand up for yourself and all that stuff. No, it's coming from this inner part of myself that is. That is bought into and super scared of, like, it's bought into the idea of being nice and super scared of not being liked or not being. Or having somebody be mad at me. And what I'm finding is that part of me is not a hundred percent sure that I need to be nice. So this is like that Beginning of wiggle room. That starts to happen. So then I go to the next question, which is, can I absolutely know it's true that I need to be nice? Oh, no, sorry. That's the question we just asked. So next question number three is, how do you react? What happens when you believe that you need to be nice? Now I'm asking that part inside of me, that emotional part that's going to. That's fearful, that's worried of repercussions. And what I'm finding is it has its own answers. So I'm going to listen as it shares its answers. So how do you react? What happens when you think you need to be nice? And the feeling is, I shut down. I don't say anything. I have a pretense that I am a nice person. I'm quiet, I'm gentle, I go with the flow. I'm an easygoing person. I like that people like me for that. It's. It's one of the things that I am attached to. So how do I react when I think I don't I need to be nice? I hesitate to say, please turn down the volume. And secondly, I imagine that if I do say, turn down the volume, there are going to be repercussions. I'm not going to be liked, My partner will be upset, something bad will happen. So this is just a taste of the kinds of reactions, and you can sit longer in this when you're doing your own work. But let's go to question four, which is a very interesting question. Who would you be without the thought that you need to be nice? So I'm asking this of myself, and I'm sitting with this unknown. What would that be like? Who would I be? Obviously, I wouldn't be the same person that I normally am because that person is always trying to be nice. So who would I be? Like, really, who would I be? And I have to hold this situation and imagine what it would be like if I didn't think I need to be nice. When I'm wanting him to turn down the volume, who would I be? I would be really direct. Be like, that's way too loud. Please turn it down. I notice a. Like a fearlessness there. Almost like I hesitate to say, but almost like we're equals instead of me being the subordinate one in the relationship. So who would I be without the thought I need to be nice A lot freer to express what's coming up inside of me, which is I want to be listening to this audiobook and your volume is distracting me. So all of this is just a preamble to the turnarounds, which are the last part of this inner work, which ground the. The experience of possibility of who I would be without the thought into some new reality. And that is we're going to look at opposites and see if they might actually be as true or truer and look for examples of that. So in this case, the turnaround instead of I need to be nice would be I don't need to be nice. And so I'm going to look for why that could be just as true and try to balance it out. There's always two sides to everything. And how could not being nice be actually good, actually better, or as good as being nice in this situation? First of all, I have to redefine what nice means to myself. For me, nice is not making any ripples, not making any waves, not rocking the boat. And that's not always such a good thing. So I don't need to be nice, because if I am just nice in that way, I exclude myself from the situation. I actually exclude myself from the relationship when I do that. So I don't need to be nice. I need to be present, I need to show up. And I can still be gentle about that. I don't have to be mean. But I. It's not actually nice for me to exclude myself. In fact, we can go further with that. It's not really that nice to the other person, in this case my partner, for me to be kind of hidden in the shadows. And sure, there's no ruffles, but who's he in relationship with? It's like this enigma. There's no. There's no person there. And in the meantime, I'm feeling alone. I'm in my own world, and I feel separated and living in fear a little bit. So these are the. These are the painful outcomes of not of trying to be nice. And so I don't need to be nice. I need to be not nice in the sense of I need to show up and be somebody rather than just going along with the flow. Another way of saying this could be I need to be courageous. So this is just a taste of the kinds of turnarounds, the kind of. Kind of opposite that you can play with just to challenge yourself and then take time to see if you can make sense of that, see if you can find examples of why the opposite might also be true. And this can blow your mind in so many ways. You think that things are one way, and then it turns out it's the other and. Or it turns out that it's both ways. But the caution here is don't do this on an intellectual level. Keep it in the situation, keep it connected with the emotion. Let see if you can find genuine reasons why that makes sense to you and why it makes sense on an emotional level. Not just that you know, this is the right thing to do, I should or shouldn't do that. That doesn't really touch the inner part of ourselves. And until that inner part of ourselves is touched, and until it wakes up and finds a new truth that makes sense to it, then it will just keep on doing it the old way, same as it always has. So my invitation to you is to look inward, find where you're stuck, find what's the thought that's con. That's causing you to stay stuck, and then question it on its level and give it the space to. To stretch, to expand and to see new perspectives. But don't let your intellect take over and deprive yourself of the true inner work that can change you. In this episode, we looked at what's really behind the thought I need to be nice and how it shapes your energy. And what we found is that there's a whole underworld here, an emotional world that is not rational, that works according to its own experience. And no matter how much we intellectualize on top of that, it doesn't change the under the part underneath. We then looked at how inner work, in this case, we were doing the work of Byron Katie, as how it can be a way to loosen the grip of, in this case, people pleasing. How it can loosen the grip of the emotional part of ourselves so that it gains more clarity, more options, more freedom. And we saw that the key to this is respecting the part that is stuck, directing the questions to it, allowing it to answer, giving space and energy and attention to the part of us that is holding onto this for dear life. It takes compassion towards ourselves and towards these parts of ourselves to do this kind of inner work. But it's the only way that actually makes any real difference in our lives. Otherwise we can read a thousand books and, you know, we have a lot of wisdom, but we're still acting in a way that is not in accordance with that wisdom. That's because it's coming from somewhere deeper inside of ourselves. And then finally we looked at how to reconnect with your authentic kindness without self sacrifice. And this is the interesting kind of oxymoron, if you will, or coexistence of opposites maybe, where saying no may actually end up being kinder than not saying no. Because what happens if I don't say no? Then I can get angry at some point. It can blow up at point some. At some point also, when I'm in touch with my honest desire, in this case to turn down the volume, I can still be gentle about that. I can still be kind about that. I can see how understandable it is for, in this case, my partner, why he wouldn't turn down the volume. He might not think of it. He might be just focused on what he was watching and that's normal. So a lot of compassion also can begin to come up. But it's not compassion being used to shut myself down. It's compassion that's there along with an authentic showing up for myself. And that's really an ideal way to live. And it becomes possible when I become more and more honest with myself and more and more courageous in my ability to share what is coming up for me with those around me. So thanks for listening. I look forward to being with you again very soon. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful 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.

Podcast Summary: Episode #229 | Why “Being Nice” Keeps HSPs Overwhelmed—And How Inner Work Can Break the Cycle

Podcast Information:

Title: Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
Host/Author: Todd Smith, founder of True Inner Freedom
Release Date: May 12, 2025
Episode Title: Why “Being Nice” Keeps HSPs Overwhelmed—And How Inner Work Can Break the Cycle

Introduction

In Episode #229 of Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, Todd Smith delves into the nuanced relationship between niceness and overwhelm in Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs). Drawing from his extensive experience and the transformative principles of Byron Katie's The Work, Todd explores how the innate desire to be nice can inadvertently lead to increased stress and emotional turmoil. This episode offers profound insights and practical strategies for HSPs to navigate their sensitivities towards achieving true inner freedom.

The Paradox of Niceness for HSPs

Todd begins by addressing the common advice given to HSPs: “Just say no,” “Ask for what you want,” and “Take up more space.” While intellectually sound, these suggestions often fall short because they don't resonate emotionally with HSPs. Todd emphasizes the importance of feeling the need to change rather than merely understanding it on a cognitive level.

Todd Smith [00:01:30]: "You know, people tell you all the time you should just say no. It's easy to talk like that, but it's hard to do. The reason for this is that you have to feel it."

Understanding Inner Work and Stuck Parts

Central to Todd’s discussion is the concept of inner work, specifically utilizing Byron Katie’s method. Inner work involves identifying and addressing the "stuck parts" within oneself that resist setting boundaries or asserting needs. These parts often stem from deep-seated fears and childhood conditioning, such as the belief that being nice means suppressing one’s own desires to avoid conflict.

Todd Smith [00:02:15]: "Inner work means finding out where you're stuck and then working with that stuck part and seeing if you can help it find some wiggle room."

Practical Application: The Work of Byron Katie

Todd provides a practical demonstration of Byron Katie’s four-question method using a personal example. He recounts a scenario where his partner’s loud iPad disrupted his audiobook listening, leading to internal conflict between his desire to speak up and the ingrained belief that he should remain nice and unobtrusive.

Identify the Thought: "I need to be nice."
Is It True? Todd observes his emotional response, recognizing the voice of the stuck part affirming the thought.
Can You Absolutely Know It's True? He notices hesitation, indicating the beginning of "wiggle room."
How Do You React When You Believe That Thought? Todd identifies behaviors like shutting down and avoiding confrontation.
Who Would You Be Without the Thought? Imagines a more direct and authentic expression of his needs without sacrificing kindness.

Todd Smith [00:10:45]: "Who would I be without the thought that I need to be nice? I would be really direct. I would tell him, 'That's way too loud. Please turn it down.'"

The Power of Turnarounds

Following the four questions, Todd introduces the concept of turnarounds, which challenge the original belief by considering its opposite. In this case, transforming "I need to be nice" to "I don't need to be nice" reveals that not asserting oneself can lead to feelings of exclusion and increased stress.

Todd Smith [00:15:30]: "I don't need to be nice, because if I am just nice in that way, I exclude myself from the situation. I actually exclude myself from the relationship when I do that."

Embracing Authentic Kindness

Todd concludes by highlighting that authentic kindness doesn't require self-sacrifice. By setting boundaries and expressing genuine needs, HSPs can maintain their compassionate nature without becoming overwhelmed. This balance fosters healthier relationships and personal well-being.

Todd Smith [00:25:50]: "Saying no may actually end up being kinder than not saying no. I can still be gentle about that. I can still be kind about that."

Key Takeaways and Strategies

Recognize Emotional Resistance: Understand that simply knowing what to do intellectually isn't enough. Emotional alignment is crucial for lasting change.
Identify Stuck Parts: Pinpoint the internal beliefs and fears that hinder boundary-setting and assertiveness.
Engage in Inner Work: Utilize Byron Katie’s four-question method to challenge and transform limiting beliefs.
Implement Turnarounds: Explore the validity of opposing beliefs to broaden perspectives and reduce stress.
Practice Authentic Kindness: Balance compassion for others with self-respect by expressing genuine needs without guilt.

Conclusion

Todd Smith's insightful exploration into the dynamics of niceness and overwhelm offers HSPs a pathway to reclaim their authentic selves. By engaging in inner work and challenging deeply held beliefs, HSPs can establish healthier boundaries, reduce stress, and cultivate genuine kindness that honors both themselves and others. This episode serves as a valuable guide for anyone seeking to navigate the complexities of high sensitivity with grace and resilience.

Additional Resources:

Website: trueinnerfreedom.com
HSP Stress Survey: Gain clarity on your stress triggers.
Free Offer: Enjoy a free 15-minute inner freedom call designed to guide you towards lasting inner peace and fulfillment.

This summary is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of Episode #229 for those who haven't listened. For deeper insights and practical exercises, tuning into the full episode is highly recommended.