← 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
#363 | 7 Ways to Get Out of Decision Paralysis as an HSP So You Can Move Forward with More Confidence
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover why HSPs often see so many angles when making a decision that choosing can feel impossible. And how to make decisions with more clarity. In this episode, you'll discover why HSPs often see so many angles when making a decision that choosing can feel impossible. The difference between healthy reflection and anxious looping in decision making and how to stop stalling in your decisions and find a way to choose without betraying yourself. This is an edition of Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress. As a highly sensitive person, you're trying to decide whether to say yes to a new opportunity. It looks really good on paper and it pays well. And other people would say, why are you even thinking this hard? But your mind isn't just asking, do I want this? It's asking, will this drain me? Will I disappoint someone if I say no? How will this fit into everything else I'm planning with my life? What will this mean for my weekends? What if I regret turning it down or regret saying yes? Who will I become if I step into this and 20 minutes later, nothing has changed? On the outside, but inside you've already lived six possible futures and now you feel tired before you've even chosen. This is what happens with highly sensitive people very easily. We see so many angles that choosing can feel impossible. And we can think of this as decision paralysis and it can make us feel stuck and frustrated. But what's really going on is that we as highly sensitive people don't process decisions on just a surface level speed. We actually get into the depth of it, because that's our nature. We simulate what the outcomes will be and then we compare those simulated versions to see which one seems better. We track the emotional impact of whatever decision it is that we're going to make and we consider the consequences on relationships involved. Not only our relationships with people, but relationships with people with other people. And we imagine what the long term meaning would be of decisions that we make. So we don't just ask, what should I do? That's the simple way of doing it. In some ways it's great to just to be that simple. But that's not who we are. We're not built for that as highly sensitive people. And when we make decisions, we take our time with it and we go and look very deeply at it. We ask things like, what will this cost? And who will this affect? And and who will I become? This is called depth of processing. And that is the hallmark of being a highly sensitive person or one of the hallmarks. We take in information, we process it very deeply, and then we come to conclusions based on that. But it's not a quick process. The problem isn't that you think too much, which a lot of people say, oh, yeah, you're in decision paralysis. You just think too much. A common label that we get as highly sensitive people. Oh, you think too much. That's not actually what's happening. We are doing what we were born to do, which is to process things deeply. But it just doesn't happen on a timetable that others expect, or even that we expect often. The problem is that we're trying to process everything at once, and that's what makes it feel impossible. If we can slow that down a little bit, it could make a difference. So what is the difference between healthy reflection and anxious looping? Depth, again, is not the enemy. But depth can tip into anxiety, and here's how to tell the difference. Healthy reflection feels steady. It expands clarity. It's like, oh, I'm seeing new vistas in this area area, and I'm beginning to understand the implications more clearly. Like, you're connecting dots. It feels invigorating, it feels enlivening, it feels intelligent. It brings new understanding. This is the purpose of healthy reflection, and this is what depth of processing accomplishes. On the other hand, compare that to anxious looping, which can start to happen as well, where the same thoughts start repeating. You start analyzing the same thing. You just analyzed that and now you're just analyzing it again, and it's coming to the same result. And it's like you're caught on a little bit of a loop. There's also a feeling of urgency, like, I gotta make this right away. I've gotta figure this out. There's a pressure that we're putting on ourselves, and the body is constricted. So if that's happening, then something more than just decision making is at play here. It is some emotional triggering that is happening underneath the surface that's getting in the mix and messing up the depth of processing that would naturally run its course. So you can ask yourself, am I discovering something new in this? Am I exploring and discovering? Is that the feeling I'm getting or am I circling? Is there a fear? Is your breath tight or is there no insight emerging? Are you looping? Looping doesn't produce clarity. So what you'll notice is that when you're in the anxious looping area, you're going to feel stress in one form or another. It Might be constriction in your body, it might be just some getting caught on something. You're going to feel different emotions inside of yourself. This is the wake up call that this is not just depth of processing, but this is stress interfering on top of depth of processing, which is bringing things to a standstill. That always is a call for inner work. And that's where you can just take the decision making to the side, do some inner work, question some beliefs that are causing the anxiety, and then come back to decision making with a clearer emotional palette and then begin to make decision more easily. So in addition to separating the stress from the actual decision making, what are some other ways that we can get out of decision paralysis? As an hsp, here are seven ways you can try. One is reduce the decision to one layer at a time. HSPs don't just decide which job should I do. They decide, is it aligned? What will it cost me emotionally? How will it affect others? What does this mean long term? What if I regret it? Who will I become if I choose this? That's like six different decisions all stacked into one. So instead separate them out. What is the next smallest decision? What information do I actually need right now and what can wait? Clarity comes sequentially, not all at once. And this gives permission to slow it down and take each of these layers, each of which may be important, and take them one at a time so that you can give yourself a slower and more space, more possibility for processing more thoroughly. The next way to slow down this decision paralysis, to get out of this decision paralysis, is to stop trying to guarantee the outcome. Decision paralysis is sometimes disguised as control. So you're trying to prevent something, trying to prevent regret, or trying to prevent discomfort or conflict or loss of any kind. So the thing is, no decision is going to remove uncertainty completely. And if you get caught in trying to guarantee the outcome, that's when it actually does become impossible to make a decision. We can't control the future. The future is the future. We can control what we do now, we can control how we decide, but we can't control all the outcomes of what that decision will entail. So another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking that the decision has to eliminate risk, try thinking about it in terms of the decision. Just needs to reflect who I am right now. That's all I really know, that's all I can really control. And if it's as aligned as I can get in this moment, then that's good enough. That is something I can stand by and Then I will naturally want to adjust and make changes in the future. But I've made a decision based on who I am, and that feels good. A third way to get out of this problem of getting stuck trying to make a decision is make it a directional choice, not a permanent identity. HSPs often feel like if I choose this, then I become this. And so the decision can feel existential. Instead, you can try, I'm choosing this for now, or I'm testing this out. Many decisions are adjustable and very few are actually irreversible. So if you know that this is just something that you're exploring, then the nervous system can relax and take some of the pressure off. This is not signing a lifelong contract. Another thing that can help is to check with your body, not just with your mind. HSP decision paralysis often means mental overload. You know, when I imagine choosing A, what happens there? And so if you get caught in the mind and divorced from your feeling or from your body, it can start looping very quickly. But if you go and connect it to your body, the opposite happens. Okay, so if I choose A, what happens in my chest right now? If I imagine choosing B, what happens in my stomach? Which option feels quieter? Which one feels more subtle? Which one allows me to breathe more easily? These are the kinds of questions you can ask yourself without having to understand all of the details of the implications. It can simplify and just give a little bit of guidance. You're not looking for fireworks, you're just looking for a little less contraction inside. So the fifth way I've been not counting these, but the fifth way that you can get out of decision analysis over analysis, is to set a containment structure and just make a good enough decision by that time. HSPs, like containers, appreciate containers. We thrive in containers. Without containers, decisions can float indefinitely and can become we can go down in the rabbit hole forever. So having some kind of container, like, I'm going to make this decision by Friday at 5pm or I'm going to reflect for 30 minutes and then stop, or I'm going to sleep on it once and not 10 times, and I'm just going to go ahead and make the best decision I can based on where I am at that point, this clear kind of boundary for ourselves can reduce the rumination a bit and can make it just a little bit easier to get out of that analysis. Paralysis, on the other hand, in contrast to this idea that I just said, number six, is let some decisions sit. So just as having a boundary can be helpful to just say, okay, I'M going to do the best I can within that time frame. It also can be equally helpful to not rush a decision. And some decisions don't need to be made right now. When we rush ourselves, when we push ourselves, that's when we freeze up. That's when the mind just shuts down and we can't even think clearly. This is a common HSP experience. So if you give the decision some space and you don't really realize you don't really need to make that decision at all right now, that takes the pressure off and it allows for some freedom and often some clarity emerges because the pressure is gone. And then finally, number seven is accept that there may be some regret in any decision that you make. We often look as HSPs for the clean choice. It's a little bit of perfectionism jumping in, but every decision actually includes loss of the other option. So we're forking in the road. We're going from having all possibilities to landing on one and it means we're not landing on the other. There's a loss there. It also includes unknowns. There's too many unknowns. We cannot know them all. And so it's quite possible that some things are going to go not the way we would naturally want them to. And imperfection is going to be a part of whichever decision that we choose. So just accepting that this is normal, that there's going to be a downside to even the best option that we choose, can just relax and help us be in a place of just like, not perfection, like normal human worldly life, which, yeah, there's some decisions better than others. But in the, in the end, it may not matter as much as we think because there's an up and a down to every decision or to every choice. So decision paralysis in highly sensitive people is usually not about inability. We're actually really good at making decisions. We make very good decisions when given the time. It's more about over responsibility and over processing and fear of impact and fear of being wrong and fear of losing harmony. So the real way out is less pressure and more structure and less perfectionism and inner work around the thoughts that say, if I choose wrong, I won't recover, or I have to make a decision right now or I can't get this wrong or this decision will define me. Anytime there's a stressful story mixed in and you'll feel that stress, find the thought, question the thought, free yourself of some of the emotion and then come back to making the decision. So the feeling I'm left with today is that slowing it down makes all the difference when it comes to decision making, the pressure we put on ourselves is often what causes us to get overwhelmed. In this episode, we looked at why HSPs often see so many angles when making a decision that choosing can feel impossible. The difference between healthy reflection and anxious looping in decision making and how to tell the difference. There's an emotion connected with the anxious looping as opposed to healthy reflection feels like exploration and then finally how to stop stalling in your decisions and find a way to choose without betraying yourself. And we looked at seven different reasons for doing how you can do this by reducing the decision to one layer at a time by stopping trying to guarantee an outcome by making it a directional choice, not a permanent identity. By checking your body, not just your mind by setting a containment structure and making a good enough decision within it, and by letting some decisions sit and realizing you don't have to make a decision right now and then accepting that there may be some regret in any decision that you make. So thanks for listening. It's always great to think these things through with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. 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. The test will reveal your unique sensitivity 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. SA.