← 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
#247 | Why Spending Money Can Feel So Stressful as an HSP & How to Overcome Financial Overanalysis So You Can Enjoy Money Again
00:15:13
Have you ever found yourself paralyzed by a seemingly simple decision—like whether or not to spend $50—and wondered, “Why is this so hard?” If you’re a highly sensitive person (HSP), even small choices can trigger overwhelming emotions. This...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll see why even a $50 decision can feel overwhelming. And how your sensitivity, far from being the problem, can actually point the way to freedom. 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 why highly sensitive people tend to spiral over small spending decisions and what's really underneath the stress. How over analysis becomes a hidden form of self protection and how to gently interrupt the pattern and a simple mindset shift to help you make everyday choices with more ease, clarity and self trust. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path toward inner freedom. Last night I got an email from a trusted teacher that I've taken classes from before. And it was a $50 offer to buy a particular PDF book that I thought would be very useful. And it was something that I had been working on myself, had to do with my website and how to do some of the pages there. And I found myself debating, should I buy this? Should I not buy this? I was really kind of caught and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Kept going back and forth and it felt like the question that came up for me is why is this such a big deal? $50. And on the one hand, $50 is not a small thing. $50, if you do a lot of $50, it can add up. And I know I have a tendency to spend and so I can end up spending on good things, but getting into trouble if I don't watch myself, if I don't budget myself. But I just noticed this little indecision going on and it was like bigger than just the actual decision, practical decision. So I started thinking, what's going on here? Why is this moving in the direction of overwhelm? It wasn't really an overwhelm, but, you know, like it was moving in that direction. So when I thought about it, what I realized is that there was something else going on and it was not about the money itself. Yeah, that's a factor. But the. The real issue was more of an emotional issue, like an emotional effect. I was afraid of emotional discomfort. I was afraid of regret, or I was afraid of feeling like a failure or that I had made a mistake. And so When I noticed that, I realized that there were two components here. One component was the actual decision making. Is this practical? Is this something I will use? Is it something that I want to invest in? Just comes down to practicalities. That was one side, but that was probably like, I don't know, 20% of it. The other 80% was me sitting in this emotion of like, oh, my gosh, I don't want to fail. And the image that came to mind is I had bought another more expensive course from the same teacher, and I had never actually watched it, never actually did anything with it. And recently, this was like years ago. Recently, I went to go find it on my computer because I actually did want to listen to it. I couldn't even find it because, you know, I've changed computers a few times and it was gone. So I felt kind of like a fool and I didn't want to have that feeling again. So same teacher, similar idea. And it. It brought this up. So it's just interesting to notice how the emotional side comes into play. And it's so quiet. It's so. You don't even know it's happening, but you feel it. And it was happening here for me. So the insight for me is that this wasn't about the purchase. It was about the fear of being wrong. And I started thinking about that more deeply, and I realized that we, as highly sensitive people, process information deeply, and we do this even more so when the stakes feel personal or when it feels like it's going to mean something about me, you know, like I made a mistake. And so, interestingly, from just a point of view of, of, like, psychology, the way the mind works is that spending decisions can trigger the same systems we use to predict emotional safety. And so we're not necessarily being indecisive. We're scanning for hidden consequences. We're like, oh, this is a important decision. Am I going to regret this? Is this going to be a problem? And perfectionism can often show up here. You know, if I make the perfect choice, I'll be safe, I'll be free from regret, shame, judgment. You know, it's funny, it's not the, the, the. The tiger that's out to get us. It's the emotion that is out to get us. We're afraid of experiencing some negative emotion like regret or shame or judgment. And so the system goes into a little bit of alert and can make. Make me, in this case, just be a little more vigilant and a little more careful, a little bit unnerved or even like I said slightly moving towards overwhelm. So the nervous system interprets this uncertainty as a kind of threat, even with just $50. But what I'm seeing as I look at it more objectively, you know, now, today, is that the, the overthinking is not a failure. It's just a strategy that the mind uses to try to keep itself safe. Now, that may not be fully based in reality. And it leads into the next thing of what can you do about this? Which is to look more closely at what you. You're thinking and believing. So for me, the thought was something like spending money means I'm irresponsible, and especially if I make a poor choice, if I waste money, then it means I'm irresponsible, and so therefore I need to make the perfect choice. So when I looked at that, and the way I like to look at it is using the work of Byron Katie, which is a way to question any thought that is connected to an emotion. What I saw is that it's not necessarily irresponsible to spend money and not fully utilize the money you spend. Like you don't have to do it perfectly, that it's okay to make mistakes, quote, unquote. And the place that I found in this is that it's life is lived kind of spontaneously. And yes, there are things where I need to be extra vigilant, but there are also times where I'm allowed a little bit of room for error. And even when I make errors in a large scale, it's something that I can adjust with. I remember last summer I was looking at a new URL for my business and I spent, oh my gosh, almost $5,000 on it. And turned out it was not the URL I wanted after all. And I'm stuck with this expensive loss. It took me a long time to pay off on my credit card and you know, that's a big loss. But even that was not the end of the world. Didn't completely put me out of business. It didn't shut me down. It wasn't a huge, huge, huge mistake, although I do regret it. So this put it a little more in perspective for me of how spending money can be done and mistakes can be made in that process. Because whenever I do make a mistake, I learn something and I'm more careful about spending money, a large amount of money, something like I did last summer, I'm much more quick to stop that. But with $50, yeah, I'm aware, but it doesn't have to go into a total spiral. So, you know, the question that comes to me is what would I choose if I had already was trusting myself? And if I trust myself, I can't actually make a mistake from a certain point of view. If I'm trusting myself, I'm taking the next step that feels correct to me and it's the best I can do at this stage. And then of course I can change course, correct course as I go. But for me, this is a change of instead of referring to a perfect outcome, I'm referring more and more to an internal place where I feel this is the next step I'd like to take. And who knows what the outcome will be. For me, this builds a kind of self trust and it allows me to live with good enough decisions and just observe how they work out, observe how I feel, and keep tuning in to my intuition rather than trying to rigidly control myself and try to avoid mistakes at all costs. So it's more like training me as an internal sensitive instrument than on trying to have the perfect outcome. Because whenever we're learning something, we always are going to make mistakes. When we took our first steps as kids, we fell down, and that was part of the learning process. So it's allowing myself to experiment that feels like the place that I like to actually be. So the path to clarity isn't in analyzing more, it's in trusting my ability to respond with kindness towards myself no matter what happens. If I can be as okay with making a mistake as I am with making the perfect choice, then there's some freedom there. Then I can experiment with a lot less pressure. In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people tend to spiral over small spending decisions and what's really underneath the stress. And what we found is that it's the emotional component, taking it personally, the worry of regret that is really driving the indecision more than the actual analysis of whether this is going to practically work or not. We also looked at how over analysis can become a hidden form of self protection and how to gently interrupt that pattern. And we saw that this can be interrupted by, first of all, being gentle with ourselves and seeing that this is just the way the mind works. It's trying to keep us safe, it's trying to do its job. And you can kind of, I sometimes think I kind of pat that little mind on the head and say, okay, I see what you're trying to do, and I don't have to follow it, but I can appreciate at least its good intentions. And then the other thing that can really help is doing some inner work, questioning those stressful thoughts that the mind is producing in that moment and seeing if there's another side to the story. And then finally we looked at a simple mindset shift to help you make everyday choices with more ease, clarity and self trust. And that is simply tuning into yourself, learning by listening to your intuition and then testing it, allowing yourself to make mistakes as you go. This is like training yourself to become more and more in touch with your intuition instead of trying to get a perfect result every time. And I love that way of turning it around because it feels like it's something I want to do anyway. And so having some mistakes or poor decisions along the way is just the cost of doing business, if you will. Of me learning how to trust my intuition more so the feeling I'm left with after our time here is a feeling of wanting to explore that spirit of exploration and wanting to move in a direction that is new for me. Instead of looking objectively only, I'm looking at how I'm building my own internal ability to use my intuition. So that changes the feeling for me. And as always, thank you for listening. It's great to think about these things, share with you and this podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So join me next time for Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@trueinnerfreedom.com youm'll also find a link in the show notes. The test will reveal your unique sensitivity profile, including how your nervous system naturally responds to stimulation, emotions, social energy, and more. You'll also gain a clearer picture of how stress might be amplifying that sensitivity. Take the HSP Stress Test now. It's a powerful first step on your journey to true inner freedom. Sam.