← 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
#267 | Why Learning to Process Overwhelm Is Your Key to a Happy, Productive Life as a Highly Sensitive Person
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Are you using rest as a remedy for stress—only to wake up still feeling overwhelmed? If you're a highly sensitive person (HSP), chances are you’ve tried unplugging, sleeping in, or retreating into nature—yet that deep tension remains. In this...
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Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll discover how overwhelm can actually unlock your hidden resilience. 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 rest alone isn't enough and how deeper overwhelm lingers without inner healing, how to recognize and process different types of overwhelm, from everyday stress to deeper emotional residue, and the powerful transformation that happens when HSPs learn to work with overwhelm instead of avoiding it. This is an addition of Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress. As a highly sensitive person, in a way, I think we all would be happy, productive, balanced, if there was just one thing missing from our lives, and that is overwhelm. Overwhelm means too much. I've had too much experience. Even if a good kind of experience, and if it's a more negative experience, then even a little bit of that can be overwhelming. Overwhelm is being out of my balanced state. Another way of thinking about it is stress. Stress is another way of talking about overwhelm. They're kind of two different words, but they point to the same basic idea. And so it's stress or it's overwhelm that clouds our judgment, that makes us feel bad, can lead to just all kinds of negativity on the inside as well as on the outside. And as a highly sensitive person, you know that your limits are less than other people. We have a narrow street to walk down, and we have to be mindful of where the boundaries are. Other people can go in a wider path. They can push the limits on either side and still be okay. We, as highly sensitive people, have to stay in the middle of the road. Otherwise, we end up overwhelmed much more quickly than others and everything starts to go downhill. So the key to processing overwhelm, the real antidote to overwhelm is rest. Rest is the antidote, and it is something that will help in any kind of situation. But there's different kinds of rests and there's different kinds of overwhelm. So we have to look at these in a little more detail. If you've been to a party, say, and you're overwhelmed by just the overstimulation of the event and the fatigue of all of that then a good night's sleep is perfect. It's the rest you need to refresh your body, cleanse your mind, and come back to a place of balance. You can begin again the next day. This is a typical kind of fatigue type of overwhelm. It involves mind also, but the mind and body are connected. And just getting some good rest downtime can be super helpful. Sometimes just going away from a situation to a quiet area, even if it's not involving sleep, can be enough of a rest to reduce overwhelm. So I mention this because rest is so valuable in counteracting the effect of too much activity, too much stimulation, too much processing. But have you ever had a good night's sleep, lot of sleep, you know, eight or nine hours, wake up and you still feel stressed, still feel overwhelmed? In a way, this is because there's a different kind of stress, a different kind of overwhelm that runs deeper than just the type of fatigue or temporary overwhelm that happens with overstimulation. These kinds of stresses are usually coming from some unresolved thing inside some unresolved experience. Something that has not fully been processed. Could be coming from a long, long, long time ago when you were young. Could be coming from a recent, recent experience. It could be something that was old, that got retriggered recently. These are the kinds of wounds that we have. We call them wounds, but it's like we have unprocessed material inside of ourselves. And the body or the mind or the emotions or the subconscious, whatever it is, is trying to process that. It's trying to finish, complete that process. But it's gotten caught in a loop because it doesn't see a clear way out. And so it just keeps trying again and trying again and trying again. And the effect is it uses up a lot of energy and it can make the physiology get cramped and stressed physically as well. So these come from deeper kinds of experiences of stress. Can come from things like shame or rejection or failure or grief. Loss of some kind can be many different ways that stress came in as an event, as a. As accumulation of events that led to a place where it was too much for you to process. And you didn't have a way. Like your mind just couldn't find a way to deal with it. And so it just keeps on going and going and going. And the problem with this is that it doesn't get better with sleep. It doesn't get better with rest of any kind. It's almost like those are too superficial for the kind of wounds that These are. I can think of an example in my life. When I was younger, I. I got into a relationship that I maintained in secret for a long time. And it felt shameful. Like I felt ashamed that I was not able to be open about the relationship. And it made me. It made me feel very closed down and actually made my back become tense and crimped. And it was something that, even though I was doing a lot of meditation, even though I was doing a lot of meditation and good deep rest, there was some part of me that was stuck. I was not able to get out of this shame feeling. And. And so what happened is my body became tenser. I ended up kind of losing my. Felt like I lost my way a little bit. In some ways. I used to say I rolled the car, that's what it felt like, and just rolled it at a fast speed. And this is coming from just an experience of shame. And so these things are deep, they're there on a deep level and they cause a lot of imbalance on all levels of your experience. Even affected my sleep. So how do you recognize these different types of overwhelm and how do you deal with them? Because different kinds of overwhelm, different kinds of stress, require different kinds of processing. As I mentioned, fatigue in the body, mental shutdown, just a little too much experience, exposure to too much that can be addressed with just some rest, just some quiet time, some time to recoup some time in nature, you know, nothing like getting immersed in water, you know, taking a bath or going into a lake to swim. These kinds of things can be super helpful when getting rid of that feeling of overwhelm that can come from day to day events. But when you start looking at the deep kinds of tensions in the body that don't go away, the kind of things that lead to depression or anxiety, the kinds of things that are just looping, as I say, just going on and on as a stressful experience that you keep replaying and trying to work out. These need some way of breaking that loop. If you're looping around and around and around and around and trying to figure it out again and again and going nowhere, it can become like a perpetual loop. And you just. Mind just keeps going. This can take up a huge amount of background energy in your, in your mind as well as in your body. So we need a way to break that cycle. It's a. It's a vicious cycle in a way, and it's a. It's something that needs to be actually broken through. So how do you do that what are some ways to do that? I think in essence it boils down to inner work. It boils down to finding out what it is that you are thinking and looking at it from a different point of view. This can be done in therapy and therapists are skilled at being able to help you identify what you're believing or what you're thinking and then direct you in a different way. And in that way break the loop. It can also be done with somatic work where people are working with your body in a way that is connected. It's like the body signature of that stress is showing up in the body. And when they work with your body, you can end up releasing this or breaking that cycle. Even deep meditation. If you're able to really settle deeply in meditation, you will start to unwind some of these deep rooted stresses that are sitting there and causing the kinds of problems that you're experiencing from deep, deep, kind of traumatic experiences. So deep, deep, deep rest can be super powerful in the form of meditation. And one of my favorite ways of doing inner work is called the work of Byron Katie. And it's a way of working with a thought connected to an experience of stress. And it's done in very specific situations. So you pick the situation where you got stressed, where you experience the stress, and then you identify what you were actually thinking in that moment. And because the mind and body are so connected, when you work with the thought, it starts to unravel the physical and the emotion. And this is very effective. I've been using it for almost two decades and I've worked through so many different stresses that have accumulated places where I've gotten stuck, some just recently and some from a long time ago. And when I have done that, the feeling is like, oh, that part that was working so hard to try to figure it out is now able to rest. And now I'm able to breathe, I'm able to see, and I'm starting to feel relaxed again. So it requires some kind of deeper process. And there are many ways to address deep rooted stresses, but this is different than your day to day stress of just accumulated fatigue. So the key in all of this is to listen to your overwhelm. Your overwhelm is letting you know that you need to stop, you need to take some rest, take some action, do some inner work, look a little deeper at what's going on and what you're thinking, what you're believing, and see if you can begin to address the need that is there. Overwhelm is not a bad Thing. I'm actually grateful that I'm a highly sensitive person because I become aware of overwhelm longer, or sorry, sooner than other people. I become aware of imbalance sooner than other people and so I'm able to catch it sooner. And as long as you keep doing your work, as long as you keep paying attention to your overwhelm, it will keep you on a very narrow balancing act. Like, you know, like think of a tightrope walker, they can walk on one wire. That's what we, as highly sensitive people are capable of doing because we can sense when the body's just moving slightly to the left or just moving slightly to the right and we can already bring in balance. It's a skill that can be developed, but we have that advantage. And so I'm grateful that I know what overwhelm is, that I experience it earlier than other people, because it's feedback that lets me know to recalibrate, to rebalance. And as long as I have the tools to be able to do that, that's actually a great thing. And I'm into that. So taking care of yourself, physically, taking care of yourself, mentally, doing deeper work when you need it, these are all the things that can keep you in a balanced state as a highly sensitive person. If you're able to pay attention to the feedback and instead of resisting it or trying to put it on, snooze, you know, and just like put it off until another time or try to drown it out with some other kind of thing to numb yourself. As long as you're not doing that, then that alarm is going to be heard and you're going to be able to take it and use your intelligence to begin to heal and take care of yourself. So it requires starting where you are. It requires listening to yourself and to your emotions, something we sometimes don't want to do. And then it requires letting it get processed on the level of the emotion itself so that it actually can transform and give you a different experience. So the feeling I'm left with here is that with the right tools you can process any experience. And that means that overwhelm is not a bad thing. It's not a one way street. It's something that you can go to the edge of and come back and it as long as you know how to do it. That's why I was so excited when I learned the work of Byron Katie, because it gave me a way to digest any experience. It gave me a way to go from a completely negative experience to feeling like it was fine and that is, that brings a lot of freedom. In this episode, we looked at why rest alone isn't enough and how deeper overwhelm lingers without inner healing. We looked at how to recognize and process different types of overwhelm from everyday stress to deeper emotional residue. And everyday stress responds wonderfully to sleep and downtime. And just being away from the noise going in nature and deeper emotional residue requires deeper work, inner work therapy, that kind of thing. And we also looked at the powerful transformation that happens when HSPs learn to work with overwhelm instead of avoiding it. You know, we can spend our lives hating the alarm clock. We can spend our lives thinking, oh, I wish it just wouldn't go ring and feeling bad about it and wishing we were different and all of that. Or we can use this built in alarm clock to our advantage. This alarm clock is giving us the early warning on imbalance and it tells us Take care of yourself. Find a way. Look inward. See what's going on. If you follow that call, you may find yourself grateful for the overwhelm. And you may find that you're able to maintain balance even better than people who are not highly sensitive. So thanks for listening. It's great to explore this with you. The podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. Tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@truinnerfreedom.com you'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, circulation, 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.