← 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
#381 | Why Helping Others Can Leave Highly Sensitive People Feeling Drained and How to Protect Your Energy
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By the end of this episode, you'll see why helping others can sometimes leave highly sensitive people feeling drained. And what begins to change when you stay connected to yourself while you care. In this episode, you'll discover what's happening beneath the surface when helping someone leaves you feeling drained. Why this pattern repeats even when your intention is simply to care. And what begins to change when you approach these moments in a different way. 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. Many highly sensitive people care deeply about others. It comes with a trait. We listen, we support, and we show up. And in many ways, this is our superpower as highly sensitive people. But there's a subtle shift that often goes unnoticed. At some point, caring can turn into carrying. Not because you decided to take it on, but because your system doesn't always know the difference. You might recognize this. You're talking to someone, maybe a partner, a friend, or a client, and they're stressed or they're overwhelmed, or they're trying to figure something out. And you're just listening. You're not fixing, you're not interrupting. You're just being there. But as the conversation goes on, something starts to change inside of you. Your body starts to tighten, your mind starts working a little harder, and you start doing more than it was actually your job to do. Because you care. By the end of the conversation, they may actually feel better, but you may not. You may feel drained or heavy or a little foggy, and you may not even know why. When this keeps happening, it starts to add up. You begin to feel tired after interactions that are supposed to be normal. You may start avoiding certain conversations or certain people. Or you find yourself needing more time than usual to be alone to recover. Sometimes you even start questioning whether you have the capacity for relationships at all. And it's not because you don't care. It's because your nervous system never seems to get a break. When this pattern shows up, HSPs often try to solve it in ways that that don't quite address the root. For example, trying to care less. So you end up pulling back emotionally. But that also doesn't feel natural, because as HSPs, we are wired to care. We do care. It's natural for us to care, and it's natural for us to care deeply. So when we pull back, we can go in the opposite direction. And maybe we go a little too far with that and it doesn't feel right. Or we try to fix the other person Better, like if I do a better job, do it a little faster, get to the transformation more quickly, then you'll be able to get back to your life again. And so the emphasis then goes into problem solving and trying to help them better or quicker so that you can get out of your discomfort. But this isn't really it either, because you're still going headlong into the issue of carrying more than is actually yours to carry. Another thing that can happen is taking responsibility for how they feel. And this is a big one because common one for highly sensitive people. We do notice how people feel, we do notice what's going on for them. And you may start subtly trying to regulate their experience so that you can relax. And this is very common. So noticing that and just being aware of that tendency can help with it. But trying to take responsibility and help them feel better so that you can feel better is, is what keeps this pattern alive, actually. And then another thing that can happen is you may find yourself trying to push through the exhaustion. And so you stay present externally while your system becomes more and more taxed internally. And this obviously is not a long term solution. Here's what's actually happening. Your nervous system is designed to attune to other people. That's exactly what the HSP nervous system is made for. But attunement doesn't require absorption. These are two different things. And sometimes it's confusing. The exhaustion isn't coming from caring. It's not coming from that impulse to care, to give, to nourish, to listen, to hold space. The exhaustion isn't coming from that. It's coming from losing your sense of healthy separation. While you're caring, while you're listening, while you're being present for someone, if you stay connected to yourself, then the giving feels natural, it feels free, it feels energizing. But if you lose that sense and lose that sense of separation, then you can end up giving. Getting stressed and overwhelmed, it's like slipping out of your own body into someone else's experience. Slipping out of your own emotions and focusing so much on the other person. And when that happens repeatedly, your system stays in a kind of low level alert even when nothing is wrong. It's kind of like listening to music with headphones on where you can hear it clearly and you can appreciate it and you can stay aware of it and it's still kind of separate from you. You enjoy the music, but then compared that to turning up the volume all the way and pressing the speakers against your body. And so you're not just Hearing it, you're feeling it. And it's inside your system and you're. You're completely. You're just completely taken over by that sound. That's the difference between being empathetic, just having presence, being empathetically present, versus being empathetically entangled. One is natural and feels good, the other feels stressful. So the difference is not about caring less. It's about learning how to stay connected to yourself. And while you're with someone else, to remain in your own body while being present with theirs, to notice what am I actually feeling right now and what might not be mine. That awareness alone starts to create space. And in that space, your system can begin to breathe again, can begin to feel some spaciousness opening up inside, and that allows it to settle. Because this is something many highly sensitive people experience, I created a simple set of tools to help you in real time. It's called the Empath Survival Kit and it's a short guide with five body based practices you can use whenever you start to feel overwhelmed by someone else's emotions. They're not mindset techniques. They're simple ways to come back into your body and reset your nervous system and restore a sense of natural separation without disconnecting from the other person. So if you often feel yourself being drained after conversations, and if you take on more than you realize when someone else is struggling and you want a way to stay present without losing yourself, this is exactly why I created the Empath Survival Kit. It's a simple, free set of tools to help you come back to yourself in those moments so that you can care without carrying. Just go to the show notes and click on the first link you see or visit trueinnerfreedom.com empath Survival Kit, enter your details and I'll send it right over.