← 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
#283 | How to Know When to Break Your Own Rules for Stress Management as a Highly Sensitive Person
00:13:33
Are Your Stress Management Routines Helping—or Holding You Back? Feeling boxed in by your own self-care habits? Discover how even well-meaning stress management rules can become sources of stress for highly sensitive people—and what to do when...
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover how to know if you're being too rigid about your stress management rules and where to find the balance you're looking for.
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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 the advantages of setting up stress management guidelines in your life as an hsp, and how to know if a stress management rule may no longer be working for you, and how to explore and find new approaches to balance in your life. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. If you know me, you know that I love cold water. I tend to run hot, and so getting into cool water can be very refreshing for me. And so for years, I have taken cold showers in the morning. I love that. It makes me feel alive. It makes me feel great. And I love jumping into a cold lake. I just love cold water. So this, in a way, has become a kind of rule for me. And I don't even think about it, like, okay, get in the shower, turn it on cold, and have, have a nice experience. That's. That, for me, works. But I had a cool experience this weekend where I woke up, it was kind of a Sunday morning, I had slept a little later, and I was feeling relaxed. And the thought crossed my mind as I was walking into the shower, I was like, oh, I don't really feel like taking a cold shower. So what. That is the unexpected. And when I listened to that and followed that, I decided, oh, let's just take a, you know, warmer shower. And I found it. It was really nice. It was like, oh, I remember this feeling. It's been a long time. And I just relaxed into it and it felt great. So this made me think, well, does that mean I don't take cold showers anymore? Does that mean that I'm now a warm shower person? And as I sat with it and maybe even actually tested it one more morning, I realized that, no, I really do like cold water. It's. That's. That's my preference, except not always. And what I found is when I'm in a really relaxed mood or when I'm wanting to relax or just in feeling that, that desire for relaxation, then the warm water is perfect. And so it's not always that one way is the way. And I love that. So there are advantages to setting up balancing guidelines in our lives as highly sensitive. The main advantage is we don't have to make so many decisions every day. If I know that for me, taking a cold shower feels good and works for me in the morning, then I don't have to think about it, I don't have to debate about it. It's not a big discussion. I can save that brain power for something else. Same like if I just. We go to bed at before 10 every night and I don't have to think about that. It's not like, oh, I'm going to stay up a little later tonight. Like, no, I just go to bed at 10 because I love the sleep that I get when I go to bed early. And I like waking up earlier in the morning. I eat at set times, I work only so many hours a week, and I get exercise at certain times. So these are stress management guidelines, you could say, or rules even for me that I tend not to break. And there's a reason for that. They provide support for me. And as highly sensitive people, we can get out of balance easily. We can become overwhelmed easily, we can get over tired. And so we have to have some kind of guidelines in our life that support us to stay balanced. And this over time allows us to enjoy some external support. And over time, begin tweaking these little things, these little guidelines as we go. The problem with rules is that rules tend to be rigid and life is not rigid. So just because you have something that supports you doesn't mean you have to always abide by it. Let's look at what happens if a stress management rule no longer works for you. How do you know if it's no longer working for you? For me, the clue is I'm feeling stressed about it. And if I'm feeling stress, it's my clue that I need to look inward and see what's going on. Is there something that is blocking me here? Is there a problem with my. My routine itself or with just my thinking about my routine? Maybe I'm just tired because I've been doing the same thing and I just need a break from it. Maybe the routine works great, but I need a break. Or maybe the routine itself needs to be changed. So I need to look at these when I feel stress and reevaluate. So do I really have to do it? Am I required for my health? Is it going to make a big difference? Maybe it will and maybe it won't. Is there a better way to accomplish the same thing? Finding this can open new possibilities. But stress doesn't lie. Stress tells you like, oh, I don't want to do this, or this feels stressful. I don't like this anymore. It tells me something's off. Either the routine is no longer serving me, or I need to give myself some freedom and know that I'm choosing this routine and that I'm not being forced or coerced into it. So why not try adjusting each one of these? Try adjusting the rule and see if you like it. Like, I took a warm shower that day and I enjoyed it. And then I took a warm shower the next day and I realized, yeah, no, I'm kind of missing the cold shower again. So that's testing it. And you know that old saying, the exception makes the rule. And so by testing something, you prove to yourself that it is actually a rule, that it's something that's actually valuable to you. If you don't give yourself the freedom to test it, to break out of it, and then re establish the value of it again, then you can end up trying to force yourself and push yourself into rules that may even be good for you. But you start rebelling. And so giving yourself the freedom to break the rules every once in a while and then even recreate them or even discard them. But listening to yourself all the while, it gives you a chance to find where your truth is, where your true experience actually is. Now, the other side of this is you can also adjust your thinking. You can question your thinking. And this requires getting in touch with the emotion that is rebelling, getting in touch with the. The part of you that is saying, I don't want to do this. And it's kind of like that crying baby part and giving it time to be heard and to look at things objectively from its point of view and see if maybe it's not the routine itself, but this feeling of that you have to do it. So if you question your thinking, you may find that the routine is not the problem at all. And if you adjust the rule, you may find the same thing, that actually, I do want to keep doing this. But you may also find that the thing you thought was so important that you set up maybe a long time ago is no longer serving you. And that's the time to rethink your routines and see if there's an even better way to support yourself. I find that new routines build on old ones. There's a wealth of experience from all of the different routines that I've done and I've tweaked them over the years and I've changed them. And I've tried this way and I've tried that way. And over time, I gain a depth of experience over what works for me. And so when a new idea comes in, I can try that and I can compare it to all of the other approaches that I've had. And who knew, maybe sometimes this will be the one that just feels right for me. Maybe I just need a variation on what I was doing before. And when I find just gives me like a breath of fresh air. So I like to keep in mind that I'm the one that controls my routines, I can change them. And I have freedom, even though I'm putting some kind of restrictions on myself. To me, opposites go together and freedom and boundaries, they work well together. If I have the freedom to change my boundaries, they don't feel like boundaries. But if I have boundaries on my freedom, I have more structure to my freedom. And I can actually in many ways accomplish more things because of that structure. So if I can get the boundaries and the freedom to communicate with each other, that's where the deeper level of freedom comes and that's where boundaries can actually support me in so many ways. So how do you explore and find new approaches to balance in your life? First of all, keep an open mind. Maybe the rule that you've been following for so many years may need a little adjustment. Explore new ideas with curiosity if you can, and test them with your own experience. You're the judge. You're the one that gets to decide. Maybe a role was just outdated. Maybe it was based on some partial truth. Life is always evolving. Are you keeping up with it? So the feeling I'm left with today is that you can have freedom within rules. You can change rules, you can test your rules and the structure of self care. Rules are there to support you and not to control you. In this episode, we looked at the advantages of setting up balancing guidelines in our lives as highly sensitive people. And that is, it gives us structure and it protects us so that we don't get out of balance, which is easy to do when you're highly sensitive. And we looked at how to know if a stress management rule may no longer be working for you. You'll notice that there's a feeling of stress. Either it's a resistance to it, or you're just feeling like, ah, this doesn't work anymore and it's a sign to take a look at it and look a little more closely. And then finally we looked at how to explore and find new approaches to balance in your life by keeping an open mind and testing your rules and finding exceptions and exploring outside of the rigidity of those rules. In other words, there's a time for exploring and testing and reshaping and forming your rules, and there's a time for just going along with those rules. And so if you can open to that at certain times, you won't have to rediscuss it every single day. But from time to time it can be very helpful. 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 Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.
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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.
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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.