← 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
#296 | Why You'll Never Feel “Strong Enough” as an HSP (And It's Destroying Your Confidence)
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Are you a Highly Sensitive Person under stress? Find out—take the free test at https://trueinnerfreedom.com/ Are you tired of feeling like you're never enough compared to the people around you? If you're a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), chances are...
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover the comparison trap that's crushing your confidence. 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 comparing yourself to others always leaves you feeling weak, the hidden cost of measuring yourself by insensitive standards, and how the strength comparison is sabotaging your self worth. 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. When I was younger, I would visit my mom in New York City, and my stepdad was like, you have to go see everything in New York. I mean, he would just keep coming up with suggestions. You probably want us to be up at like 5 in the morning or 6 and out the door, like, let's. I want you to see Statue of Liberty. I want you to see every museum in the city. I want you to see this place. That place, it was. Was like insane for me from my perspective and my sister, who's kind of similar to me, I think also hsp. We just wanted to hang out, like, maybe go to a park and chat on a bench and like, spend the afternoon just chilling, watching people talking like that. But we used to feel bad. We used to feel judged, and we used to even kind of hide our preferences and actually make up places that we went, you know, be like, oh, yeah, we went here, here, here. And you know, just because we, we, we didn't. We couldn't go at that kind of pace. At my stepdad's dad's pace. In fact, we used to call him the shark, because, you know, like, sharks, they die if they stop swimming. So that's the way. That's the way he was. I came to love my stepdad, and we grew very close over time. But especially in those early days, it just felt like I was being judged. There was something wrong with me. And if you've ever felt that because of your sensitivity or because of how quickly you reach overwhelm or what your normal is, then you're not alone. Maybe, for example, your husband loves walking in the busiest part of town, and he loves the energy. And you're like, you know, I prefer the park. And he's like, oh, but it's so boring. It's hard not to feel judged. It's hard not to feel different. And that's something we face as highly sensitive people on a regular basis. Maybe you think it's hard not to feel like other people are stronger because they actually can handle more. So it's really hard to overcome this judgment. We actually buy into this judgment that they are stronger because of that. My mom, for example, she could go 247 with very little sleep. I mean, I've seen her pull all nighters and then just do it all over again. And like my whole life that's just the way she was. She'd wake up earlier than you no matter how early you got up. And I always felt like the loser, you know, like no matter what I do, it's just never going to be like her. So maybe you feel like, you know, like maybe it's like your husband is like, how do you live, right? How can you be okay with everything? And it doesn't bother him. Like maybe you're not okay, but he's okay. This is that constant comparison that happens between highly sensitive people and everyone else. So you can even watch. Maybe your husband has a health problem and doesn't even notice it while you're affected by everything else going on, including that health problem. So the problem is if you measure your worth by someone else's capacity, you always come up short. My sister is a super businesswoman from her 20s. Right after college, she just dove right in and was just working those long corporate hours like really strong flies all over the country. She gives talks. I mean, she's like, she's amazing and really hats off amazing. But look, when I see that comparison and I see my quiet life and how I live and the kind of quiet way that I run my business, I think, oh, there's something wrong with me. You know, this is the kind of thing we can fall into as highly sensitive people. What happens is your confidence starts to erode and you start to watch others handle things that you get overwhelmed by. And you can't help but start judging yourself and thinking that there's something wrong wrong with you instead of just seeing that you're different. We're wired differently. And then what happens is relationships start to suffer because you may start to resent the ease with which other people are living their lives. And you may start to feel ashamed of your struggle. The problem is you're using the wrong measuring stick. You're comparing. It's like comparing like a feature rich phone that drains a lot of battery quickly to a flip phone which like if you had the same battery could go on for, you know, these days, could probably go on for a year without charging, you know, if you had the same batteries as we did back in the day. So it's not fair. We as, as highly sensitive people have a feature rich phone. We have a lot of things that we process and, and so we have to go into low power mode. We have to charge sooner than other people. And that's just the reality of it. The problem is, if you start believing that you're weaker than other people because you can't handle what they can, in reality, you're not weaker. You're processing probably 10 times more information in every moment than everybody else. So that means your workload is necessarily way bigger than everyone else's and you do things differently. For example, my partner buys things and then he takes them back again, and then he buys another version and takes it back and does it a number of times until he gets what he wants. And that's a perfectly valid way of purchasing, buying and finding what you want. He has to see it and see it in the place and see that it works and then he's satisfied. But it actually does cost a lot of money because you have to return things. Sometimes you can't get the return, you have to sell it. Then you know, it's, it's complicated. Whereas my way, which is more of an HSP way, I research more deeply and I don't purchase until I'm actually clear that it will fit my needs in multiple situations and that it will continue to fit those needs into the future. So this is like what I mean by 10 times more processing. I'm taking time to make those decisions based on inference and deduction and intuition and thinking it through. Whereas other people just run in, make the purchase, and then they may have to do it multiple times. It's not that one is better than the other, but it's good to know who we are and that there's nothing wrong with being a slow processor. We do that for a reason. It's just like saying that a racehorse is not weaker than a plow horse. They're built for different purposes. A plow horse moves slowly, but it pulls a lot of weight. And that's more like the HSP trait. So your sensitivity isn't a sign of weakness. It's a sign of a highly sophisticated nervous system. A nervous system that was built for depth and built for getting to the bottom of things and avoiding any kinds of errors. That sometimes other people just learn more by trial. And error, and we learn by thinking first and then finding our way. True strength isn't about handling everything. It's about knowing what serves you and having the courage to choose it. This is so important for us because we can just end up caught forever in this trap of comparing ourselves with other people. So if you're exhausted from feeling weaker than everyone around you, if you're sick of being made to feel broken because you need different conditions than others and you're tired of apologizing for having a more sensitive system than the people in your life, but what you really want is to feel proud of your depth and confident in your uniqueness and powerful in your sensitivity. That's exactly why I created the HSP Inner Freedom program. If you're interested, go to the Show Notes, click the first link you find, or visit trueinnerfreedom.com Enter your details and we'll help you stop comparing and start celebrating. When what makes you different.