← 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
#376 | What That Constant Low-Level Exhaustion Actually Means for Highly Sensitive People
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By the end of this episode, you'll see what your constant low level exhaustion is pointing to and what begins to shift when you stop trying to push through it. In this episode, you'll discover why highly sensitive people can feel constantly low level exhausted even when they're getting rest. What's actually happening in your system that keeps you from fully recovering? And what begins to change when you stop pushing through and start working with your natural recovery cycle. 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. If you're a highly sensitive person, you may recognize this pattern. You go through the day, you get some rest, at night, you sleep, and yet something still feels off. You're not completely drained, but you're not fully restored either. There's a kind of low level fatigue that stays with you in the background, and over time it can start to feel normal, like this is just how life is. But often it's less about how much you're doing and more about how well your recovery is working. As highly sensitive people, we process more, we take in more detail from our environment, we think things through more deeply, we think about the repercussions of everything, and we feel things more strongly. What's going on for other people and how it affects them and how it affects us. So even small interactions can stay active in our systems much longer than for those who don't share this highly sensitive trait. So a conversation, a decision, a subtle tension with someone, and what happens is your system keeps working on, doesn't just disappear because the moment has passed, because part of you is still replaying it, still trying to understand it, still trying to resolve it. And that uses energy even when you're not actively thinking about it. So by the end of the day, you're not just tired from what happened, you're also carrying what hasn't fully settled yet. And when that doesn't get the space it needs to resolve, you go into the next day already feeling partially loaded. So the cycle continues. You move through the day, you rest a bit, but the system never fully recovers. It never fully resets. And over time, that incomplete recovery starts to stack. What's happening here has to do with recovery cycles. Every experience your system processes needs a certain amount of space to complete. There's an activation and then there's a settling. If the settling doesn't happen, the system stays slightly activated. And that can be very subtle. You can stop working, you can sit down, you can even sleep, and your system can still Be active, still processing, still holding tension, still carrying unresolved input. So on the surface, it looks like rest, and it is to a certain degree. But underneath, the cycle hasn't fully completed. And when that happens repeatedly, your baseline can start to shift. You're carrying a small amount of activation from the past moment into the next moment, and then into the next, and then into the next. And this can start to snowball. And because it's subtle, it's also very easy to miss. It can take a long time before it builds up enough that you really start to notice. Doesn't always feel like a clear overload. It just feels like you're slightly behind or slightly tight or slightly tired most of the time. And that's what creates that feeling of, I'm kind of tired all the time, not exhausted, just never fully reset. And that's when you start craving vacation, or craving time alone, or craving some kind of way to reset. One of the reasons this happens is that many highly sensitive people have learned to override their natural rhythm. You stay a little longer, you take on a bit more, you just work it in. You push past the point where your system would naturally pause. And in the moment it works. You get through the situation, but the recovery gets shortened or delayed, and then the next thing begins. So instead of full cycles of activation and settling, you get partial cycles, and those partial cycles accumulate. Imagine a simple day. You have a conversation in the morning, and maybe it's slightly off, something early, nothing major, but something about it lingers in your mind. And then you move into your work and you focus and you get things done. But that earlier interaction is still there, quietly running in the background, just carrying with it a bit of tension in your body, a slight mental pull, and you notice it, but you keep going. And then maybe later, you take a break. Maybe you check your phone or you scroll a little bit, or maybe you sit down for. For a few minutes, and it looks like rest, and it is, but your system is still actually processing on the inside. That conversation from early in the morning still hasn't fully settled. So when you return to your day again, you're not starting from zero. You're starting partway in, and that becomes your new normal. Starting a little behind, catching up as you go, never quite getting back to zero. And then, of course, more gets added. And then by the evening, you feel tired. So maybe you relax or try to relax, maybe you watch something, or maybe you distract yourself, and eventually you fall asleep. But parts of the day haven't fully completed. So the next Morning, you wake up not fully drained, but not fully restored either. But it doesn't have to be this way, because once you start to see this pattern, you realize you don't have to keep running the same cycle. There are basically two directions this can go. The first is in how you structure your day. You can begin to leave more space between things, have more of a buffer between things, more room for your system to settle. Because after each thing that you do, there's going to be a little bit of processing. And so if you build that into your schedule, then you may be able to let that settle before you move into the next thing. It can help. Even just having some kind of downtime, that is not something where you have to be productive. It's not productive in a work kind of way, and it's not productive in a social kind of way or even a family kind of way. If you can build some of that into your routine, it can help. So much for resetting. And another key here is making time for meditation so that your mind can really settle. This can be one of the greatest ways to find a way, find a reset in your day. I meditate in the morning and I meditate again in the afternoon. And this gives space for that completion and settling of unresolved things. Of course, this can mean that you may have to do fewer things in a day, and that's not always easy to do. And sometimes it takes some work to release attachment to what we're wanting to do. We want to do it all. And saying no to some things can be what is necessary to allow yourself to have the time to process. Letting go of a sense that you need to handle everything and to be available for everything. This is such a common HSP pattern I see all the time, not only in myself, but in my clients, of wanting to do everything and wanting to do everything well. And some of that has to be let go, not as a rule, but as a way of giving your system the space that it already needs. So the second direction, the first direction is building some space into your routine. The second is more internal. Instead of carrying experiences forward, you begin to process them as they arise. And this is where a practice like the work of Byron Katie can be very helpful. When something stacks, maybe it's a conversation or a reaction or a moment that lingers. You can take a few minutes to look at it, to question what you're believing about it, and to allow your system to move through it more fully. So in that way, it doesn't stay active in the background. And there's nothing. I love this practice because it really can neutralize the emotional charge on any situation, no matter what. So as these two things come together, more space in your day and more completion internally, your system starts to return closer and closer to baseline and you start to feel clearer and more settled and more creative and you start to be more fun to be around and you start to enjoy your own activities more and that constant low level exhaustion begins to lift. So the feeling I'm left with today is that Recovery happens for HSPs when we build more space into our routines for relaxing and use tools for processing stressful experiences. In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people can feel constantly low level exhausted even when they're getting rest. And that's because recovery cycles aren't allowed to fully complete. And we looked at what's actually happening in your system that keeps you from fully recovering. And that is that we're still processing experiences. And as HSPs, it takes us longer. And so we have to work with that if we want to optimize our recovery cycles. And finally we looked at what begins to change when you stop pushing through and start working with your natural recovery cycle and you start to reverse the trend and start getting more and more rested instead of less and less rested. So thank you for listening. It's always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Join me next time for Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@TrueInnerfreedom.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. Sam.