← 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
#356 | How to Tell Sensory Overwhelm from Emotional Stress as an HSP So You Can Find Relief Sooner
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover how to tell the difference between sensory overwhelm and emotional stress as a highly sensitive person so you can respond with the right kind of support and find relief sooner. In this episode, you'll discover what sensory overwhelm actually is for highly sensitive people, why it is often mistaken for emotional stress, and how to calm down faster by giving your body the right kind of support for what it is actually experiencing. 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. Let's look at two different scenarios. In the first scenario, you're driving home from the grocery store and you feel unusually drained and your mind is saying, hmm, maybe it was the music or the fluorescent lights or the noise. Yeah, it was probably too much input. So you go home and dim the lights and light a candle maybe, and turn on some white noise and lie down with an eye pillow and you wait for the calm to come. But it doesn't. And your body's still tense and your heart rate's still up and your mind starts to loop and you start to feel irritated, not overstimulated, more agitated, almost hurt. But by what? And then it hits you. It wasn't the store. It was the comment your partner made this morning, the one you brushed off but never really let land. You thought you had moved on, but your nervous system hadn't. You were tending to your senses when they needed. What really needed was tending to your heart. So the stillness only gave the emotional pain more space to echo. Now compare that with scenario number two. You're sitting at your desk and suddenly you feel off. You can't concentrate and your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched and you assume, oh, I must be anxious. Something emotional is bubbling up here. So you grab your journal and you try to name the feeling you write about your client call or your relationship or something from your past, searching for the root. But the more you write, the worse you feel. And then you realize what actually happened is you skipped lunch and the heater's on too high and you've had earbuds in all morning and you are multitasking and you're wearing that synthetic shirt that always makes your skin itch. By 2pm you were analyzing your thoughts when what needed in this case was what your what your was really needed was that your body get some relief. It didn't need insight. It needed quiet and it needed water. It needed food. It needed fresh air, even soft cotton so in both cases, your care was earnest, but it was misdirected. You weren't doing the wrong thing, you were doing the right thing, but for the wrong system. And that's why it didn't work. And why for hsps, knowing the difference changes everything. So what is sensory overwhelm for highly sensitive people? This is something that we are very. It happens very easily. For us, sensory overwhelm is when the environment becomes too much for our finely tuned nervous system. We can get overwhelmed very easily by too much going on around us, too much stimulation, too fast, without enough time or space to process it. And this can include loud noise or bright lights, or crowds or clutter. It can include strong smells, uncomfortable fabrics, temperature changes. Or it can include too many inputs at once, like multitasking or screens, or too many conversations, or too many people asking you to do something at the same time, or just too much noise. When we get overwhelmed through this kind of sensory overwhelm, as highly sensitive people, we may feel irritable or anxious for no reason. We may feel drained or disoriented or foggy, or we may suddenly feel desperate to escape or to shut down. And so even small tasks or requests can feel like they are too much. But strangely enough, this is not an emotional problem. It feels emotional because I'm irritable or there's some emotion connected there. But really the cause of it is a nervous system overload. And this is something that is very unique in a way to highly sensitive people. I say unique in a way because everyone can get overloaded and have this too much sensory input and reach their limits. There's, there's a limit for every single human being, but for highly sensitive people, we reach that limit way earlier than other people. And so it's a very common thing for us to be dealing with. And unless you treat this physically, not just mentally, then it doesn't resolve. So as highly sensitive people, our nervous system is like a high definition microphone, the kind that picks up every little sound, even the ones that others miss in a quiet room. It captures beautifully, it captures the nuance, it captures the texture, it captures depth. Drop the same microphone into a noisy restaurant and it doesn't just hear background chatter. It picks up every fork, clink, every phone buzz, everybody, every shifting chair at full volume. And that's what it's like to be an HSP in a busy world. Your system is brilliant at detection, but easily overloaded without the right environment. Sensory overwhelm is what happens when your nervous system says too many signals too fast. I can't filter this. And until you lower the volume at the source, no amount of deep breathing or inquiry will fix it. Sensory overwhelm is often mistaken, however, for emotional stress because the symptoms overlap. But the causes are completely different. The symptoms feel emotional even when the source is not. When you're in sensory overwhelm, you might feel irritable, or you might feel anxious or restless, or feeling like you want to cry or lash out, or you may feel foggy or fragile or emotionally off. This is sensory overwhelm, but it has an emotional feel to it. And so naturally you assume something emotional must be going on, but really your nervous system is just overloaded. And on top of that, HSPs are naturally introspective. So we tend to look inward first. This means that we're used to reflecting and analyzing and doing inner work. So when something feels wrong, we go inward and we look for psychological causes. But sometimes it's not a mindset issue at all. It's just too much light or too much sound, or too much smell, or too much touch or stimulation of any kind. And no amount of self inquiry will fix a system that is just overstimulated. Emotional tools may help a little, but they don't get to the root of the problem. So you may try journaling or inner work, or breath work, or having a good cry, but none of it really helps because the problem wasn't emotional, it was physical, it was sensory, and it was environmental. There's no substitute for physical rest, there's no substitute for good healthy food, and there's no substitute for a physical container to keep overstimulation at bay. On the other hand, when it's emotional stress, but you treat it like it's sensory overload, then again, it's a mismatch. You may go to a dark, quiet place and isolate yourself, but the thoughts keep looping or the discomfort keeps growing, because what you really needed was expression of those emotions, not stillness. Just the opposite. There's some stressful story going on, there's some hurt happening, some emotion that happened that needs to be held and looked at and met with understanding. And if you're just going to a quiet, dark place and isolating and kind of reducing the sensory input, it can feel like you're avoiding something because you are. There's emotional work that needs to be done that can be overlooked. So when it's sensory overload and you treat it like emotional stress, then you may analyze, reflect, journal, and do all the inner work, but feel even more drained because the Inner work was not what was needed. But if you are emotionally under stress and you treat it like sensory overload, then that doesn't work either. So it's really important to understand which is which. And of course, there's overlap as well. So sometimes just you can start by reducing the sensory input and reducing the external load. But you may end up still needing to do inner work. So when this is confused, you can end up losing hours or days chasing relief that never comes. And you may start to doubt yourself, like, am I regressing? Why is this still happening? And you may stop trusting your emotional signals, or you stop trusting your body and you begin to believe that nothing works, or that you're somehow too sensitive to be helped. And you may start thinking that you've done all this work, why am I still spiraling? I should be able to figure this out by now. Or you may start doubting that your tools don't work anymore. But the truth is, it's not that your tools don't work, it's that they're mismatched. Your body and mind are just sending different signals and you've been trying to fix one with the tools for the other. Relief isn't about effort, it's about fit. It's kind of like trying to fix dehydration with sleep. It's just not going to work. Or trying to fix on heartbreak with a snack. I know we've probably all tried that and it only goes so far. So you're tending, you're just not tending to the right system. What if you could know what your nervous system was actually asking for before the spiral? What if you stopped trying harder and just listened more clearly? What if you could finally feel the difference between a dysregulated body and a distressed heart and support the right one? This is where one on one sessions with me can be helpful. Each situation of stress is different. Learning to see the particular cause of the stress in each situation allows you to focus on creating balance where it is specifically lacking. So if you're tired of reaching for relief and not finding it, if you've tried every calming technique but still feel hijacked by stress, if you're doing your inner work and still wondering what's going wrong, this is exactly what we explore in one on one sessions together. Together, we slow down everything and we get clearer on what's actually happening in your nervous system. So you can stop guessing and start finding relief sooner. If you want personalized help reading your signals and responding with the right kind of support, go to the show notes and click on the first link you see, or visit trueinnerfreedom.com working together.