← 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
#279 | How To Improve Your Self Worth & Accept Yourself As An HSP for Less Overwhelm in Your Life
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Are You “Too Sensitive”—Or Just Misunderstood? What if the emotional overwhelm and self-criticism you experience aren’t signs of weakness—but powerful signals from a part of you that’s been misunderstood? If you’re a highly sensitive...
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover how to get the emotional part of you on board with your overall desire for self acceptance.
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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.
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In this episode, you'll discover why understanding your sensitivity is the first step to genuine self acceptance, the surprising root of the overwhelm and self criticism you keep spiraling into, and a way to shift the part of you that still believes you're not enough so it stops draining your energy. This is an edition of Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person. Imagine you're a wildflower growing in a carefully manicured rose garden. From the moment you sprouted, you probably noticed that you were a little different. Roses stood tall, they bloomed on schedule, followed neat, expected patterns, and you, on the other hand, grew a little differently, more freely and with different colors, textures and needs. You may have first tried to imitate the roses, you know, bend forward towards their sunlight, trying to bloom like they did, trying to be less wild. And you may have thought, maybe if I bloom just right, I'll be accepted too. But the more you bent, the more you wilted because you weren't made to be a rose. Let's talk about sensitivity. Being a highly sensitive person is like being a wildflower in a garden full of roses. Have you ever had the thought that you're too sensitive? Maybe that you're too sensitive to sounds and smells? That you're too sensitive to electromagnetic frequencies? Have you ever thought that you're too sensitive for people's, or too sensitive to people's emotions? Or too sensitive about getting things right? Too particular? Have you ever thought that you're too sensitive to criticism, or too sensitive to disharmony? Or simply that you're not strong enough? If so, welcome to the club. It's easy to have low self worth when you're a highly sensitive person because you may have been told from a young age that you were too sensitive and you may have bought into this. In fact, you may have had no choice as a child to buy into the thinking that of the vast majority around you, highly sensitive people make up only about 15 to 20% of the world's population. And that means that you are in a minority and so if you start thinking that you're too sensitive or too much in some way as a highly sensitive person, you're not alone. There are a lot of us out there, though we are in the minority. The thing is, there's a reason for this sensitivity. And highly sensitive people have a special role to play. We spot danger way ahead of other people. We foresee outcomes that others don't. We have a great predictive ability. And we're great at promoting harmony among people, even opposite types of people. We are great at holding space for people to heal and to see themselves. And we have a lot to give, but we have needs too, and we can't only give. And so if we're giving from a full cup, that's joyful, that's our joy, that's what we're here to do. But if our cup gets empty in any way, then it can be painful to give. And so it's nothing wrong with taking time for ourselves. Nothing wrong with needing more downtime than other people, needing more alone time than other people. We give more, so we need more. So understanding who we are, understanding this trait, and I'm just scratching the surface here, what it means to be a highly sensitive person, that it's normal, that there's nothing wrong with you for being highly sensitive, that it is an inherited trait that has an evolutionary purpose and we are here to serve in a very special way. Seeing this, understanding, this can begin to allow us to accept ourselves as different. But actually, nothing wrong, but it's still just the first step. Because intellectual understanding, contextual understanding, as powerful as it is, is still not getting to the root of where the overwhelm and self criticism comes from. When we start attacking ourselves for being too sensitive, you would think that self criticism comes from ourselves. After all, we're criticizing ourselves. But when you look at it more closely, I find that it comes from taking on someone else's point of view and then looking back at ourselves from there. This is not exactly us judging ourselves all in a vacuum. In fact, I've often noticed that when I'm in a complete vacuum, when I'm alone, when I'm in a place where I'm not comparing myself to others, when I'm not around others, when I'm not aware of what others may be thinking about me, I am in a much more peaceful position. I see myself as just what I am. I have curiosity. I love to do things, I love to perceive things. I love to create. These are just my natural, this is just my nature. But when I get around someone else who may be a little bit judgmental, then what happens is I tend to take on their point of view and then I look at myself as if through their eyes. And when I do that, that's when I start to fall short. That's when I judge that there's something wrong with me or I'm too sensitive or I need to change in some way, I need to toughen up or become stronger. This is how I'm imagining they're seeing me, and they may be seeing me that way, but I've literally taken on their point of view. Now this is a funny thing because we as highly sensitive people are naturally good at taking on other people's points of view. And that is actually one of our super strengths because it's what allows us to empathize. We can put ourselves in other person's shoes. We can see how they see the world. We can feel what it would be like to be them. And this allows us to understand and to communicate with them and to allow people who are very different to meet through us as kind of almost an interpreter. So this ability to take on other points of view, to see other people's points of view is one of our strengths. However, we can inadvertently use it to judge ourselves. And so just being aware of that is I find super helpful. Ultimately, self criticism comes down to comparison. I'm comparing me well, especially if I'm seeing it from someone else's point of view. And I'm thinking that one way is better and the other way is not as good. And I judge things using the gauge that most people judge things on. So a lot of people judge, especially non. Like if you're not highly sensitive people judge things based on effectiveness. They judge things on, on strength and power. They judge, judge things on ability to get things done or, or on a level of wealth or on some ability, some practical thing that they can do that shows results in the outer world. And the problem is when we compare ourselves as highly sensitive people to these standards, we may start to look a little bit short, like we're falling short, because our values are actually subtler than that. We may be interested in doing things well, we may be interested in efficiency and accomplishment and all of those things, but we're also interested in our inner experience and we're interested in how we, how we live in the world, how we experience the world and how others do too. And so our emotions, our inner world, that's also very important to us. And because that's important to us, we put more attention on that. And we may not have as much attention or even just natural inclination or even skill in some of the ways that other people are skillful. So this comparison is what can end up making me feel like I'm too sensitive. But in reality, it's a very relative thing. Too sensitive? Too sensitive according to what. According to what scale? Too sensitive for someone else's scale may be just right for me. And so maturation as individuals means that we're paying less attention to what others think and more attention to what we think. We're asking ourselves, what is our experience instead of constantly checking to see if we're fitting in right with other people's experiences. So how do you shift the part of you that still believes you're not enough? See, we're still talking intellectually right now, and that's helpful, and it is, but it's not enough. And when I'm still believing I'm not enough, when I'm still believing that there's something wrong with me or that I'm too sensitive or there's something that needs to be changed about me, then I end up feeling drained. I feel weak, I feel like giving up. I feel like running away. And this is not the way I want to live. This is not how I want to feel on the inside. So how do you shift that emotional piece? Because this is core. I always say there's two parts of me. There's the kind of wise part of me that gets it, that is, you know, intellectually understands that, oh, yeah, we're all different, and it's okay to be sensitive and all that. And then there's an emotional part of me that is stuck. And that part of me, it is not giving up. It's not just gonna. Just because I see things intellectually is not just going to change on a whim. It has to feel it. It has to see it for itself. And so to start to shift this emotional experience, we have to start with where we are. We have to walk with the slowest part of ourselves, which often is this emotional peace. It's almost like a child that is just learning how to walk. And you can't just go running along expecting it to keep up. You have to slow down, you have to walk with it. You have to catch it when it falls. You have to be with it when it cries. Like, this is the beginning of listening to the part of me that is still holding on. And so that is the first step. And then listening to what it's actually saying, actually asking it what it feels, what Is it, what is it afraid of? What is it believing? What is it stressed about? This is allowing that stuck part of you to begin to be seen instead of constantly being suppressed and pushed away. So the process that I love to do this with is called the work of Byron Katie. And the first step of that is to literally identify what are the thoughts that I'm thinking and what am I thinking and feeling from this deep level to make this more experiential. I like to find a specific situation. So let's say I'm thinking I'm too sensitive. You could work that in general. You could listen to your, even your emotional part saying, oh yeah, I really don't like it. I feel like I, I'm just too sensitive and, and I don't like it and, and all of that. That's fine. But that's very different from finding a specific moment where you were feeling like you were too sensitive. Where were you? Who was there? Who you, who were you reflecting off of in that moment? When you get clear about a specific situation and then you begin to look at what this little stressed part inside of you is thinking and believing, it's going to tell you very specific things. It's going to talk to you about what's really on its mind. And there's a lot of subtlety there. It's not covered in generalities. Then you can begin to invite that part of you that stuck emotional part of you to question its own beliefs, to question its own thoughts. Instead of sort of trying to impose some kind of wisdom on it from the mind, it's saying, hey, I want to hear what you think, you know, is it really true that you're too sensitive? I want you to tell me on a feeling level in this particular situation, what's your actual experience? And I want to hear that and how do you react? And who would you be without this thought? Like, I'm asking very interesting questions and I'm directing them to the slowest part of me, the part of me that believes still that I'm not enough in that situation. The part of me that is feeling emotional and stuck when I do that, it's super respectful to that part of me. It's super empowering to that part of me. And when I even challenge it to say, could the opposite of what you're thinking be true? And I challenge it to find examples of how it could be that the opposite is true, it starts to wake up. This little child, this crying part of me starts to say, wait a minute, I see something. Oh, what about that. Oh, I see that. And little by little, it starts to change its experience. And now that little one is growing up and that little one is no longer holding on so tightly to this idea that it's not enough, that I'm not enough. And that's when energy starts coming in again. So it has to happen on an emotional level. It has to happen on a feeling level so that I can have a change of experience, not just a change of mind. So the feeling I'm left with today is that if you really want to shift your experience of self worth, you have to do inner work. Intellectual understanding is not enough to shift emotions. You have to also give space for your emotions to speak and to be heard and to be met with understanding and to open to new possibilities or ways of seeing things. It has to happen there on the emotional level. In this episode, we looked at why understanding your sensitivity is the first step to genuine self acceptance. And just knowing that you're an HSP and knowing that you're not alone and knowing that it's normal can be very helpful. We also looked at the surprising root of the overwhelm and self criticism you may keep spiraling into. And that root is often not from ourselves, but other people. We're bouncing things off of other people all the time and we're taking on the perspectives of other people and then sometimes using that to judge ourselves. And then finally we looked at a way to shift the part of you that still believes you're not enough so that it stops draining your energy. And that is through giving space for the emotions to be heard and giving space for those same emotions to be challenged on the level of the emotions itself. So it's not a top down kind of information situation where we're trying to tell ourselves what we should be doing, what we should be feeling. We're stopping down on the level of the child and we're actually asking, what do you feel? And then just challenging, gently, is that all of it? Is there anything more? Are you missing anything? Is it even true? And could the opposite be true? And then respectfully listening instead of trying to change it or move it in any direction. This provides safety and this provides the possibility for real transformation. So thanks for listening. It's great to explore with you. This program 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.
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Tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test at truinnerfreedom.com youm'll also find a link in the show notes.
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The test will reveal your unique sensitivity.
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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.