← 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
#254 | The Real Reasons You're So Sensitive, That Have Nothing To Do With Trauma
00:17:58
Have you ever wondered if your sensitivity is a strength, a stress response, or something else entirely? For many highly sensitive people, emotional overwhelm is a familiar struggle—but what if the root of your sensitivity isn't what you think? In...
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Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll discover five surprising causes of sensitivity and why it's helpful to be aware of them. 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 the five most common causes of sensitivity and why only two are linked to stress or trauma. How sensitivity can feel like both a gift and a burden, and how to tell which you're dealing with and why. Recognizing the source of your sensitivity can lead to more grounded self care and less emotional confusion. Welcome to this edition of Self Compassion Wednesdays where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. In this episode, you'll discover the five most common causes of sensitivity and why only two are linked to stress or trauma. How sensitivity can feel like both a gift and a burden, and how to tell which you're dealing with and why. Recognizing the source of your sensitivity can lead to more grounded self care and less emotional confusion. Welcome to this edition of Self Compassion Wednesdays where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Many people assume that sensitivity equals trauma. In other words, if you're sensitive, then there's something wrong with you, there's something broken. But sensitivity can arise from many different sources and not all of them are negative. This misunderstanding can often lead to shame and confusion. And that's why I want to spend a little time looking at different sources of sensitivity. Where does it come from? I've come up with five different sources. There may be others, but this is a good general framework for understanding sensitivity. The first one is innate wiring, which means this is how you were born. The trait called the HSP trait, or highly sensitive person traitor. Scientifically understood as sensory processing. Sensitivity is something that you're. You're born with. It's genetic and there's been a lot of research done on it if you want to look more closely into it. Get any of Elaine Aaron's books. She was the pioneering research on this and you'll find a lot of deep understanding of what this trait actually is. It's not just limited to human beings either. There have been over a hundred studies, sorry, 100 different species where this trait has been recognized to exist in other species. So what it looks like is by nature highly sensitive people have deeper processing. They have stronger emotional reactions, higher empathy, and stronger response to subtleties in their environment or within themselves. This is not a disorder, and it's simply a way of processing experiences. So if that's the case, then there's nothing that needs to be changed. There's nothing off, there's nothing broken. There's nothing that needs to be fixed. There's no. There's nothing. You can just understand that trait and live within the limitations of that, that trait. And a lot of stress can be reduced if you can accept that this is actually a good thing. And there are a lot of great, we call them superpowers that come with being highly sensitive. So the first, as I said, is innate wiring. The second, obviously is trauma or chronic stress. And this is the one that confuses everybody because we think that everything's caused by stress or everything's caused by trauma. But these are two very different things. One is nature, my nature. The other is my imbalance. And these are very different. Sensitivity can come from repeated exposure to overwhelming or unsafe experiences that are somewhat traumatic. And so we will become hyper vigilant, hyper alert, so that we can avoid those kinds of experiences. This is a survival type of sensitivity. And we become hyper attuned to threat. We become more people pleasing. There may be emotional scanning. All of these things are adaptive survival strategies. And they are not inborn nature. They are the result of trauma or stress. The problem is these can often be mistaken as the highly sensitive person trait, HSP trait. But the cause is completely different. One is rooted in protection. The other is just a natural way of processing information. So this brings us to the third way that sensitivity can be increased or can be caused in life. And that is through spiritual development or expansion of consciousness. Increased sensitivity comes from deepening spiritual work, comes from meditation, can come from inner healing. And these are all really good things. What happens is there may be a heightened attunement to subtle energy or emotional nuance or interconnectedness. And this can be both a beautiful thing and possibly a destabilizing thing if it's not grounded or integrated. But it is a source of sensitivity. And so if you've been on a spiritual path for a long time and you've done a lot of inner work or meditation, you may find a lot of sensitivity there. That may not have to do with the high HSP trait, and it may not have to do with a stress response either. It's a separate source of sensitivity. Then the fourth category is skill Based sensitivity, which is something that is deliberately developed. People like therapists or coaches or healers or artists or caretakers often train their nervous systems to pick up emotional and relational cues. These aren't wired in. These aren't just naturally what's there, for example, in the HSP trade, but it's a skill that's developed and it's cultivated through repetition and intentional practice. And so sensitivity could be coming just from that. The one challenge of this particular approach is that sometimes if boundaries aren't maintained, it can cause people to get into stress responses where they're getting exhausted working with people because they're not maintaining the difference between themselves and the other person. So this leads to the fifth area, which is full on identity based patterns where we take too much responsibility for other people, we get enmeshed with other people. And sensitivity can come out of this, can come out of over merging, blurring the boundary between ourselves and another person, or becoming extremely conscientious to this to a degree of imbalance. And these again are learned or kind of developed, you can say skills, but they're a little bit closer to the stress response type of skill where there's a fear of conflict, or there's a fear of rejection, or there's a fear of disconnection. And so this one would be stress related. This often masquerades as kindness or selflessness. And it looks good on the outside, but it depletes the internal, it depletes the personal reserves. And it doesn't feel good, it feels like stress. So why is it hard to know which sensitivity you're experiencing? The reason is that different forms of sensitivity, different causes of sensitivity overlap. And it can just be difficult to tell the difference. And sometimes it's almost impossible to tell the difference. So what can happen is that the nervous system may be responding to something in the present moment, or it may be responding to something that is unprocessed from the past. And the same physical sensation of overwhelm or fatigue can come up, but coming from very different sources. And my key for noticing the difference between the overwhelm of just being beyond my capacity as a highly sensitive person versus the overwhelm that can happen when I'm dealing with a sensitivity related to stress or sorry to yes to stress, is that the stress usually has more of an edge. It's the difference between just being tired after dancing too much versus being tired after getting into some more imbalanced kind of connection with somebody where it didn't feel right. There is a subtlety to the Stress reaction that you can often perceive. So recognizing the source can be helpful, even just thinking about it for a second, like where is this coming from? And maybe it's coming from trauma. In that case, it needs healing, it needs safety work, it needs support. If it's coming from a spiritual kind of development, then grounding and integration may be what's needed. If it's coming from just being a highly sensitive person you're wiring, then it may need nervous system support, just more breaks, more downtime, more alone time, more or sensory regulation. And if it's coming from blurred boundaries, identity patterns, then inner work and getting clear on boundaries is going to be the most helpful thing to do. So the real work is developing discernment and compassion towards your sensitivity. The question isn't how do I stop being so sensitive. The question is what kind of sensitivity am I experiencing and what does it need from me? So the feeling I'm left with is one of curiosity. There's a distinction between sensitivity caused by stress and sensitivity as a trait or as a result of self development. In this episode, we looked at the five most common causes of sensitivity as far as I can tell, and why only two are linked to stress or trauma. And we found that just spiritual development itself can lead to sensitivity. Skill development can lead to sensitivity. And then the inborn trait of the sensory processing sensitivity, which we call the HSP trait, is a natural form of sensitivity. We also looked at how sensitivity can feel like both a gift and a burden, and how to tell which you're dealing with. And for me, the difference is in the feeling of stress. When sensitivity comes with a feeling of stress, then I want to check it out. I want to see if maybe there's something that I need to adjust. And if it comes with a feeling of just openness, then it's not something I want to change. And even if I reach overwhelm, which happens easily with the HSP trait, that overwhelm can be something that's very strong, something that is full of emotion, and can be something that I can adjust simply by giving myself rest. But if it persists, then I know I'm dealing with something deeper, something more stress related, something to do with maybe even trauma. And that's something that I want to look into more closely and work with. And finally we looked at why recognizing the source of your sensitivity can lead to more grounded self care and less emotional confusion. And we saw that when you can tell that your sensitivity is natural by its nature, then you can simply accept it. Whereas if you think it's something that is caused by stress, then you can work on your stress. And the good news is, even if you're not sure the difference, you can always work on your stress and you can always work on acceptance. Both things can be done simultaneously. So thanks for listening. It's fun to explore with you as always, and this podcast comes out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress. As a highly sensitive person, so the feeling I'm left with is one of curiosity. There's a distinction between sensitivity caused by stress and sensitivity as a trait or as a result of self development. In this episode we looked at the five most common causes of sensitivity as far as I can tell, and why only two are linked to stress or trauma. And we found that just spiritual development itself can lead to sensitivity. Skill development can lead to sensitivity. And then the inborn trait of the sensory processing sensitivity, which we call the HSP trait, is a natural form of sensitivity. We also looked at how sensitivity can feel like both a gift and a burden, and how to tell which you're dealing with. And for me, the difference is in the feeling of stress. When sensitivity comes with a feeling of stress, then I want to check it out. I want to see if maybe there's something that I need to adjust. And if it comes with a feeling of just openness, then it's not something I want to change. And even if I reach overwhelm, which happens easily with the HSP trait, that overwhelm can be something that's very strong, something that is full of emotion and can be something that I can adjust simply by giving myself rest. But if it persists, then I know I'm dealing with something deeper, something more stress related, something to do with maybe even trauma. And that's something that I want to look into more closely and work with. And finally, we looked at why recognizing the source of your sensitivity can lead to more grounded self care and less emotional confusion. And we saw that when you can tell that your sensitivity is natural by its true nature, then you can simply accept it. Whereas if you think it's something that is caused by stress, then you can work on your stress. And the good news is, even if you're not sure the difference, you can always work on your stress and you can always work on acceptance. Both things can be done simultaneously. So thanks for listening. It's fun to explore with you as always, and this podcast comes out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person 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.