← 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
#338 | Why Your Inner Work Might Be Burning You Out & How to Heal Without Pushing as an HSP
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover why your inner work might be leaving you more drained than healed, and how to reset your approach so it nourishes you instead of depleting you. 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 pressure that turns healing into another source of stress, why highly sensitive people are especially prone to burnout in personal growth, and a simple way to reset your approach so your inner work becomes energizing again. 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. I learned to meditate when I was a kid, and I remember when I was probably 11 or 12, going to an advanced lecture and learning about the idea of enlightenment, and I was like, oh, my God, that's what I want. And I remember thinking, like, I'm gonna go do this and then. Then come back and, like, you know, show it off in a way, like, I'm gonna get there. And so that's kind of colored my whole life in a way. It was a young experience, and my dad was into meditation. I wanted to be like my dad, so it. It all made sense. And that became a. An overarching goal for my life. And as much as I love meditating every day, I've been doing that for almost 50 years. And I also do inner work with the work of Byron Katie. Sometimes I think of these things as a kind of a job, and it starts to feel a little more like a burden than a pleasure. So the hidden motive underlying this is I need to get enlightened. And when that's active, it becomes easy to start pushing a little bit. Many highly sensitive people start their personal growth journey with real intention. And that may be journaling, that may be processing, meditating, reflecting. But over time, these once nourishing tools can begin to feel like a chore or a pressure or even a judgment. And that's because somewhere along the way, we confuse inner work with inner performance. You know, when I've unpacked that for myself with this whole idea of enlightenment, I've sometimes actually compared it to almost like the. A materialistic kind of goal. It sounds funny because it's purely spiritual. I want to be enlightened. But just substitute the word enlightened for like, you know, Maserati or Jaguar. It's the same thing. I want a Maserati, okay? So I want to get enlightened on a. On an emotional level. It's the same kind of idea where I'm trying to get to something that I'm not. In other words, I need to perform to get there. And so what happens is, if you're trying to perform on a spiritual level, you end up starting to push for breakthroughs, and you start treating emotions like they're problems to solve. Or you try to heal faster so that you can feel okay, like, oh, I'm making good progress. And that pressure starts to feel like failure. Just little bits of it. Oh, I'm not meditating as well. I'm not going as deep. Something's wrong. And like, you can end up getting down on yourself, just like you can get down on yourself for not making enough money or not doing something else that you're striving to do. So instead of feeling supported, you start feeling like you're behind. And instead of feeling peace, you start feeling guilt. And instead of healing, you start feeling more fractured. So if you ignore this, then what happens is that inner work starts to become another stressor in your life. And yes, you may still have deep insights sometimes, but then you may start to get frustrated with it when they don't come. And you may start to get exhausted from pushing so hard. You may start resenting the very tools that are there to help you. And you may start feeling like you're doing everything right, but still not getting better. So this is a kind of self pressure that we can put on ourselves. And it's easy for us as highly sensitive people to fall into this. You can end up losing trust in your intuition and yourself because you're so focused on getting somewhere and being productive in a way, with spiritual work. And you can also begin thinking that there's something wrong with you for not arriving. Why am I not enlightened yet? Why am I not free? Why is that pain still there? Why is this emotion still there? And all of this can end up making you lose the joy and the softness and the self compassion that makes healing worth it in the first place. Healing is something beautiful, but if we turn it into some kind of a performance, it can be literally another stressor. This can lead to spiritual fatigue. It can lead to cynicism about personal growth. It can lead to emotional shutdown or avoidance of inner work altogether. So here's how the pressure can sneak in. Even with the best of intentions. You can start using inner work to try to fix emotions instead of just noticing emotions. Emotions are not a problem. They are messengers. They are an alarm clock saying, hey, there's something going on in here. You might want to take a look. If you treat them like problems, then you miss the point. It's kind of like hearing a fire alarm and then trying to smash the alarm instead of checking for fire. We see this mentality a lot in health and around medicine. Okay, I've got a symptom. Let me just cover up the symptom and then. Okay, I don't feel that symptom anymore. Great. But we, as HSPs, we like to get to the bottom of things. So noticing emotions and then looking at what's actually going on there to cause those, those emotions is where it starts to get interesting and actually where you'll start to find you're making more inroads. So another easy mistake to fall into is pushing for breakthroughs instead of allowing insight. Insight is something that comes. It comes from inside. You know, when I'm doing the work of Byron, Katie, I'm asking questions and then I'm listening for what comes up from inside to meet those questions. It's something that I received from inside. You can't force that, and pushing actually chases it away. So if you're in the mode of pushing and like we do in the world when we're pushing to get something, sometimes that works in the world because the world is a little different on the outside. But when you go inside, pushing just doesn't work at all. It actually chases the very results you're looking for away. Another thing that you can end up doing is turning spiritual practices into a pressure. You know, meditation becomes a kind of a checkbox, or journaling becomes some kind of a test, or your healing just loses its soul because you've mechanized it too much, you know, become too rigid in your routines. Another thing that can go wrong is believing that more effort equals more healing. But the problem is that healing doesn't respond to pushing. It just doesn't. It backfires. What healing responds to is presence, safety, rest, space. It's like if you have a flower in your garden that you see is budding and you're excited for it to bloom. If you go and start pulling on the petals, then you're going to just wreck the flower. It's never going to bloom. But if you give it space, you give it, give it plenty of room to do what it does, then it will naturally bloom. And that's going to be where you're going to experience the most fulfillment. One last thing that can go wrong for us as HSP is when we're doing inner work is measuring our progress too much, like with a kind of a shame, or like we can start shaming ourselves for thinking, I should be over this by now, or oh, I've already done this work that shouldn't be bothering me anymore, or why am I back here again? And this gets in the way of the natural process of deepening. You know, they always talk about spiritual practice as a peeling of the onion. You know, so one layer you peel off and then that reveals another layer. And then when you're ready, you peel that and another layer and another layer. And so you may be working on the same issue for a long time. There's some issues that I've worked on for 20 years and each time another layer of insight comes, another layer of understanding, and another layer of easiness comes in. So this is a process. And if we mark our progress and judge ourselves by this, some kind of a physical progress, then we can end up shaming ourselves and causing us to not really be interested in doing that work. So there's nothing wrong with your tools and there's definitely nothing wrong with you. But if you're using inner work in a way that is subtly self critical, and all these things I've been talking about, they're subtly self critical, then it's going to backfire. You can't bully yourself to peace and you can't hustle your way into wholeness, but what you can do is reset the tone of your healing journey. And that, that starts with basically asking yourself a question, is my healing process nourishing me or depleting me? And you have to get really honest. You may be very attached to your healing process, but just stop for a moment and ask yourself, is that nourishing you or is it depleting you? If it's depleting you, you don't have to stop it. You just need to start relating to your growth differently. When you stop striving to be better and do it better and start relating to yourself with honesty and kindness and pacing that actually fits your system, then your nervous system finally starts to relax and that's when the healing actually begins. So I want to bring up the difference between nourishing inner work and performative inner work. Nourishing work is slow, it's soft, it's kind. There's no pressure, there's no agenda. It's plenty of space for that flower to just grow, you know, for the bud to grow into a flower in a very natural way, as much time as it takes. And maybe not every bud flowers. Like, there's an easiness with how things go. Now if you contrast that with performative inner work, where it's pressured or it's fixated or it's driven by shame, you get the idea of that is not going to be very effective. That is going to be draining for you and it's going to end up making you turn away from inner work, which is really beautiful and important part of life and especially for highly sensitive people. So nourishing inner work gives you energy and performative inner work takes that energy away. So let's think about why highly sensitive people are more prone to overachieving in this healing domain. And that is, first of all, we're interested in it. We tend to feel stress more than other people, so we're motivated to work through that stress. And secondly, we like to do things well. We like to get to the bottom of things. We tend towards perfectionism. And so we can bring those same attitudes into our inner work and we can add pressure to ourselves without even knowing it. So how can you tell if, if this is starting to happen to you? Here are a couple three warning signs that may be showing up. One is if you start feeling worse after doing your inner work, like, okay, that's a sign you may be pushing, you may be putting too much effort into this, or you may be judging yourself in some way. Another is if you're measuring your healing by how quickly you're improving. Healing is a non linear kind of experience. And so if you think it's just, okay, I'm going to start this today and this is going to start ratcheting up and it's going to be, you know, just this smooth growth curve. It may not look like that. It could go like, doesn't look like anything's happening and then, and then suddenly something happens. And so it can be a very organic process. And if you're measuring it too linearly, you can end up getting stressed about it. And then another sign that your, your, your growth tool is kind of working against you is if you keep switching tools or doubling down too much, like, you know, oh, I'm gonna try this, oh, I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try this. And then nothing works. And they're like, oh, it doesn't work, or I'm gonna really try this one now. And just Go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. And then it's like, ah. See? Nothing. It didn't work. So something wrong with me or something's wrong with the tool. This is that pressure, that idea of trying to perform and putting pressure on yourself to get somewhere. So I've created a simple tool to help you with this. It's called the Inner Work Reset Ritual. And it's just a simple PDF you can download. It's a five step process to reset your relationship with personal growth. So it energizes you again without pressure, without guilt, or without any emotional whiplash. And you can use this whenever your self reflection or your journaling or your inner work or your meditation starts. Feeling heavy or stressed in any way. And these five steps will help you pause the performance mindset, just interrupt that, soften the inner pressure to get it right, return to presence instead of pushing. And it will help you reconnect with the parts of you that need kindness instead of correction. And it will also help you choose healing that feels like home to you instead of something that you're having to constantly be doing well at. We have enough things in life that we need to do well. At least healing should be feeling like a place to come back to a refuge or something that is enjoyable. And it may involve work. Of course it's not like we're just sitting watching tv, but at the same time there should be something alluring, something drawing us to our inner work. Something because we enjoy it. So if you've been doing all the right things, journaling, meditating, reading, processing, healing, but it still feels like a job, or worse, like you're failing at that job. And what you really want is a way to relate to your inner world that feels soft and honest and real. That's exactly why I created the Inner Work Reset Ritual. It's a simple five step process to help you stop pushing and reconnect with yourself and start healing in a way that fits your nervous system. Remember, you're a highly sensitive person, so just go to the Show Notes and click on the first link or visit truinnerfreedom.com inner work reset and enter your details and I'll send you the ritual as soon as I can.