← 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
#334 | How to Support Your Loved Ones WITHOUT Taking On Their Stress and Feeling Overwhelmed as an HSP
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover the invisible line between empathy and entanglement, and how to stay grounded even when someone else is falling apart. 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 hidden reason HSPs feel emotionally tangled in other people's stress. Why trying to help can actually make you feel worse, and them as well. And a simple mental shift that instantly creates space without disconnecting. 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. Imagine a friend calls you in tears. They just had a fight with their partner and they're unraveling on. On the phone. They're panicked, they're hurt, they're spiraling. You're listening. But more than that, you feel everything. Their pain fills your chest like it's your own. Your heart rate spikes, your stomach tightens. You start searching for the right thing to say. You rack your brain for ways to help, to fix it, to calm them down. Because deep down, you're absorbed in an unspoken rule. If they're suffering, I can't relax. And even after the call ends, their pain stays with you. You replay it and you feel responsible and your whole system is flooded. Most HSPs believe that they get overwhelmed because they're too sensitive, or that they get overwhelmed because they're too emotional or not strong enough around stressed people. But the real issue isn't sensitivity. It's blurring emotional boundaries. Without realizing it, HSPs unconsciously slip into someone else's emotional world, thinking, I need to help them calm down. If they're upset, I can't relax, or I need them to feel better for me to feel okay, or I can't stand to see someone suffering. I once learned that an old classmate had become a hoarder. And I remember thinking it was like, instinctive, like, I should rush in, I should help, there's something I should do. And this person lived, you know, many thousands of miles away. But that didn't stop me from rushing in, but emotionally and eventually, I didn't end up doing anything. But I remember that feeling of like, oh, my gosh, this is my responsibility somehow. And this is empathy on the one hand, but it can be a kind of hidden entanglement that begins as well, which makes the stress, the other people's stress, feel like it's our responsibility. And the problem with that is that our nervous system ends up paying the price. So what happens if you ignore this kind of entanglement that we're talking about? When HSPs absorb someone else's stress, it affects us deeply. We can end up spending hours or even days recovering after one difficult interaction. You can end up avoiding people that you actually care about because you're afraid you're going to get sucked down the drain with their emotional turmoil. You can end up feeling drained or overstimulated, or just kind of emotionally tight on edge. You may lose clarity and your mind may end up getting foggy or overreactive. You may even feel responsible for fixing things that you can't control. And that's always a formula for stress. And the worst part is you may end up turning against yourself, believing that something's wrong with you for not being able to fix them, or for feeling overwhelmed. Over time, this can lead to burnout from trying to carry what was never actually yours. It can lead to emotional shutdown as your system tries to protect itself. It can lead to pulling away from relationships, not because you don't care, but because it feels like too much. And it can even lead to a kind of resentment that can build in these kinds of situations. And the way that works is first of all you care deeply. And so that's why you want to help and soothe and be there for the other person. And then you take on too much, unconsciously assuming emotional responsibility for their state. And then you get overwhelmed because your nervous system wasn't built to carry someone else's pain on top of your own. And then you don't express it because you want to be kind, supportive, and not make it about you. And then you turn it inward, blaming yourself for not being able to fix things, or for feeling exhausted. And then resentment creeps in, not necessarily towards the other person, but towards the dynamic and often towards yourself for constantly over giving. It's that quiet frustration of why am I the one who's always holding it all? Or why do I feel guilty for having needs when they're the one in crisis? Resentment is often the red flag that your inner boundary has been crossed by you. So here are some common mistakes. Trying to calm them down so that you can relax. This reverses the natural order of emotional responsibility. The natural order looks like this. Each person is responsible for their own emotional state. That doesn't mean we don't care for or support each other. It means that we hold space without absorbing, or we offer support without over offering, over functioning, and we empathize without merging. In contrast, many HSPs reverse this order, especially in close relationships. And it starts to look like they're upset, so it's my job to fix it. If they're anxious, I need to be calm for them. And until they feel okay, I can't relax. That's where things go off track, because you're now working harder on someone else's emotions than they are, which is actually unsustainable, disempowering for them and overwhelming for you. Are you mistaking empathy for emotional merging? Being caring towards someone is healthy. Carrying them is overwhelming. There's a big difference between caring and carrying. Or are you trying to fix what isn't yours to fix? This is a guaranteed path to depletion. Another common mistake is believing that being overwhelmed means that you're weak, when it often means that you've just rowed too far away from your own shore. You've gotten out of your area of where you should be, and you've gotten over into their side too much. So you can't stop being sensitive, and you shouldn't. Your sensitivity is what makes you perceptive, compassionate, intuitive, and incredibly supportive. But without healthy emotional separation, your system goes into a kind of survival mode. And the longer that continues, the more reactive, drained and overstretched you become. This is not about becoming tougher. It's about learning to ask the one question that immediately restores clarity. And that question is, whose business am I in right now? Once you've seen that you've jumped into their emotional world, you can gently bring yourself back home. Just asking that question will show you, and you will naturally want to come back into your own business. That shift alone can cut overwhelm in half instantly. You know, if you think of an kind of an analogy of two ways to be supporting of someone. One is to be a lighthouse, and the other is to be a lifeboat. If you're a lifeboat, then you're rowing out into the crashing waves to try to save someone and you risk going down with them, because maybe you're not able to do that. It's like you're going out of your way, whereas a lighthouse is also serving protection, but it's staying rooted on its own ground. So, you know, analogies aren't perfect, but this gives just the sense of me staying in my own business. Kind of like being a mirror instead of being a sponge or making sure that you can actually, if someone's drowning in the water, making sure that you actually can swim before jumping in, and then having two drowning people in the water. So how can you tell when you've slipped into someone else's emotional territory? You can tell by one clear experience, and that is stress. You'll feel it, it will feel off. You'll feel tense, you'll feel overwhelmed, you'll feel insecure. The whole thing starts to feel off as soon as you step into an area that is beyond your business. Now, what is your business? What is my business? My business is what I can actually control. And then your business is what you control. But what I don't control. So anything that I can't control is not my business. And if I'm trying to control something that I can't control, it's a perfect formula for stress, feeling disempowered and frustration on all sides. So how do you step back into your own emotional shoreline? By simply asking yourself, whose business am I in? So what we're looking for is real empathy. Real empathy is a real thing. Doesn't mean you don't care. Real empathy is our strength as HSPs. But real empathy does not merge. It just supports from the stability of your own side, like your own, where you're standing on solid ground and then you're helping that swimmer in the water. But you're not merging in and drowning with them. It's not carrying someone's pain for them, it's being present with them as they go through their own experience. It's not sacrificing your well being to help, but standing as a calm, clear witness who holds space while staying rooted. This is where HSPs can actually truly shine once they're no longer drowning in someone else's sea. So look, if you're around stressed people and being around them sends your system into overdrive and if you find yourself absorbing their mood and trying to fix what isn't yours, or losing your center the moment someone else spirals. And you really just want to be able to stay grounded and compassionate and calm without disconnecting and without numbing out. This is why I created the Whose Business Is It? Reflection cards. They're simple pocket sized prompts you can use in the moment to get out of someone else's emotional world, to come back to your own energy and to support others without sacrificing yourself. Just go to the Show Notes and click the first link. You can go to trueinnerfreedom.com whose business cards enter your details and I'll send you this powerful tool for emotional clarity.