Rebecca Hunter (0:00)

In today's Takeout Therapy episode, you'll discover why being a highly sensitive person isn't a flaw at all. It's just different wiring. And I'll help you understand how to live more peacefully in this super overwhelming world we're living in. Welcome to Takeout Therapy, the podcast for empathic high achievers who are done with overworking, overthinking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety expert and therapist helping busy, big hearted people like you learn practical skills to quiet quiet your racing mind, overcome self doubt and actually be present in your life. If that sounds good to you, you're in the right place. Visit takeouttherapy.com for more helpful resources, workshops and classes. Thanks for listening. Let's get to work. Well, hello there. I'm so happy for today's session. In this episode, I'm hoping to teach you about what it means to be a highly sensitive person and how that makes you different, not dysfunctional, and a few ways to make life just a little bit easier. Recently I did a project for Takeout Therapy and I learned a lot about my listeners. Hello there. Thank you so much for listening and if you participated in my survey, thank you for that too. It led me to a discovery, hearing from you of a pattern in the people that I work with and who I serve through the podcast. I know you people. I work with you every day. You're highly successful, you're very driven, incredibly busy, and you have a giant heart. You might be sensitive or consider yourself perceptive. Maybe you do a little too much, don't say quite enough on your own behalf and would benefit from understanding a very nuanced way of existing. Today. I'm not talking about a diagnosis, but a special feature that lots and lots of people share, including most of my listeners. You know I'm here to help you understand yourself, which honestly is the way that we heal. Healing meaning a way that we find peace in this utterly chaotic life. Peace with the past, peace with the future, and most importantly, when we understand ourselves, we find peace in ourselves. So today I want to teach you about what it means to be a highly sensitive person. And by the way, my inspiration for this episode wasn't just my marketing project, but a therapist friend of mine who I met in a podcasting community. Her name is MJ and she has a wonderful podcast called Creating Midlife Calm. I recently, recently went on her podcast and we talked about highly sensitive people. So thank you mj for inspiring me to also do a little bit of education right here about this really Important subset of our population. In 1989, a woman named Elaine Aaron was a therapist, actually a clinician, but also an excellent researcher with a lot of good resources. And she started seeing some similarities in her client population. So she did a bunch of research and lo and behold, 30 years ago, we identified brain and nervous system differences in an estimated 20% of the population. And the difference that was noticed was that these people seem to be more sensitive. And that's kind of a broad way to put it. I'll give you a little bit of nuance on that. Elaine saw the vast difficulty that people experienced when they tended towards increased sensitivity, or what I like to call perceptiveness, and was helpful enough to identify four differences in this subset of the population that people who are highly sensitive, this is the way they experience life. So one thing is that people who we consider to be highly sensitive are deep processors. They don't just have conversations, they then bring the conversation back and redo it and really think deeply about it and potentially overthink and overanalyze it, right? They tend to be over stimulated. People that are highly sensitive don't ignore things like lights and sounds and feels. They feel and see and hear and smell everything actually. And this is actually because there's a part of our brain which just fires more. In this subset of the population, highly sensitive people tend to feel emotion very deeply, but not only of their own, other people's as well. And that's also because a feature of the brain fires more. When I say fires more, I just mean like the brain is really active and picks up on emotional cues, subtleties and stimulating sights very, very easily, which is super interesting. Right? So these are the people that are sensitive to the subtleties of life. They see everything. Right? These people are deep. They, they self describe as like, I don't really do small talk. And although it was super helpful to identify all of these differences in highly sensitive people, one of the things that Elaine also had to contend with and the reason for her research was because life is really flipping hard when you're a highly perceptive, highly sensitive person. Right? It can be very difficult. These people are deep processors who don't just think about things simply or from one angle. So like that's a major project. They notice everything and that can be really distracting and overstimulated way to go through the world. Their high level of empathy can get really complicated at work and in relationships and also to find a balance with. And their strong inner world of the highly perceptive person is like a non stop Background music when sometimes you just really want quiet. If you're relating to this, I'll go on a little further to explain some of the problems that we see in the therapy office. When people are highly sensitive. Sensitive, frankly, all that processing is a lot of overanalyzing, overthinking, and tends to lead to self doubt, which causes quite a bit of disconnection in relationships. When people are highly sensitive. Highly sensitive people tend to want to avoid situations that other people think are fun, like parties and malls and like chaotic places like Hooters and whatnot, which honestly, that limits life a lot and causes quite a bit of anxiety because when we start to avoid, we start to get anxiety. When you're sensitive, you might find that you're always responding to other people's needs in front of your own. This leads to burnout in people that are considered to be highly sensitive. And frankly, when you're constantly overstimulated and perceptive, it just makes life feel like chaos most of the time. So typically when I come across people like this, and hopefully you're relating to this and it feels validating and helpful for you, but I know you, like many of my clients, probably feel like you can handle it because you've been doing this a long time. Ever met a highly perceptive kid? Yeah. If you're a highly sensitive adult, very likely you were like that in your childhood. Right. There's a complexity to living this way that I think really gets understated. I know you probably really want to be able to filter the overstimulation and that will help you to be present with the people in your life. I think it's easy to overlook self doubt instead of feeling confident actually in what you know, you need and think and take up more space instead of always being pushed out by the giant empathy cloud hanging over your head. And I think most people who experience this way of living just want a less noisy, calm and peaceful life. And those are words that I hear repeated to me in my office. Too much overthinking and overanalyzing leads to anxiety. And this feeling that something is always wrong, and I hear this a lot too, is like, I have everything I need, I have everything I want. I don't know what's wrong. So I'll be honest with you. I'm a highly sensitive person. I absolutely consider myself an empath and an incredibly perceptive human being. People have called me an old soul my whole life. And this is a really common way that people tend to categorize these traits. When you're calling a kid an old soul, that child might just be incredibly sensitive and perceptive. We know everything. And I don't mean to sound like a know it all, but, like, we know what's up and we hold a lot of it. Throughout the course of my life, I've struggled with boundaries, right? Thinking that other people's emotions were my responsibilities. I have been told by my family, by my parents, blah, blah, by people that I'm too sensitive. I don't look at it that way. But I will say that I have always been very sensitive to stimulation, to lights, to noises, and I have a supersonic sniffer. In our house, we use humor, and so this is one of the things that we laugh about, because if there's something smelling bad, I will sniff it out. Raising kids, sometimes it brought me to my knees with the overstimulation that I felt. And I hear this from a lot of parents. Like, it's really hard with the noise and the body fluids and the constant need for contact. It's really difficult place to be if you're a highly sensitive person. I also have incredibly sensitive mirror neurons. Do you know what mirror neurons are? It means when someone else has emotion, you can feel it. And I can feel in my office over zoom, which is nutty. When my clients have emotions, sometimes before they do, I consider myself a space holder, but it doesn't mean that I'm feeling less. I hold space for the feelings, and we both feel what's going around the room. Not dysfunctionally with boundaries. This is kind of how people in my family can be. I can see a lineage of it. I got this from my ancestors, but also my family dynamics massaged it into place, right. Because I grew up in chaos. And so, of course, I was always looking for cues. So I became a professional, and it's a gift to me. I consider being a highly perceptive person to be a gift, to be honest. Really, if you need to know if somebody's lying, you just call your friend Rebecca, because I got their number. I've always been able to read people like, I know what's up with them. One funny example, that's a little bit high schoolish, but there was a woman that came into a group of friends that I was hanging out with, and I said, like, she's got problems. She's going to cause a bunch of drama and problems here. And lo and behold, friends, she did. And everybody was like, I can't believe it. And I'm like, I told you guys that the second she walked in here. Anyways, I have skills in chaotic environments, I have boundaries around my work and the amount of client time that I do. And my emotions are typically in check. I am aware of them and they are acceptable to me and the people in my life. I had to learn to exist in the way I wanted to and to filter the content of this bananas situation. So there have been about three things that changed my life in this regard and quickly I'm going to share them. So hopefully I'll support you a little. If you're a highly perceptive, deep feeling person like me. I think what helped me the most is just to do some education. I read Elaine Aaron's book. I think it's really good. It's super interesting, but it's very validating if you're a highly sensitive person. Her book is called Highly Sensitive Person and I highly recommend it. You'll be like, oh my gosh, yes, yes, yes, yes, this is me. Accept yourself. That is so important. Once you learn that, yeah, maybe my brain fires a little bit differently. Okay, accept it. It's not a diagnostic. I'm not gonna label you as highly sensitive. Although if you go to therapists, you can totally get a diagnosis. What are you gonna do with it? Right? Like there isn't any announcement to be made or any judgment to be had. So learn how you are and accept it. That will help you to gain skills. So what you wanna do is just look in your life at the areas that are causing you problems. Are you, do you get over stimulated or you just get to Friday and you just go crash and burn and then you're mean to yourself about it instead of being like, well of course it's Friday and you're crashing and burning because look at all the things that you were exposed to this week. So we want to start to work towards just understanding ourselves and gaining some skills in the areas that cause us some problems. So if you see a problem, then seek different results through changed action on your part. That'll be really helpful. Just try different ways of dealing with the same situation until you come up with a solution. But make room for yourself because if you don't, you're just going to be completely burned out. And then I'll say, the third thing that really, really helped me was learn mindfulness. It's why I teach it to all my clients. It's why I just jump up and down saying presence is important. Because to practice mindfulness radically in a committed fashion will help you to be less over stimulated. It will help you to stop over analyzing and overthinking and over empathizing. Otherwise, it's that thing that I always say is like, yeah, you gotta put your mask on first on the airplane because otherwise you're gasping for air and trying to deal with the utter overwhelm and over stimulation of this life and it's too much. And don't forget the gift, because I think you and I could just sit around and talk for a whole episode about all of the gifts that being a highly perceptive and sensitive person brings to us. I am literally always explaining to the people in my life that they should have listened to me the whole time about that situation, or the sketchy person, or the detail they miss because I already knew it all the way from the beginning. I'm just kidding, but I'm kind of not. I hope this episode helped. If you're a highly sensitive person or you love someone who is, it isn't an easy way to exist in this chaos. But you can learn to. And if you have kids which also have these traits, perhaps you can start to see them a little differently and offer a hand on their backs of validation and understanding as well. And I ask you to please share this episode. And I'll tell you when my interview with MJ comes out too, on the Creating Midlife Calm podcast. She really inspired me to talk about this subject a little bit more. And you know what? I A review of my podcast lets me know that you like the content and you want more of it and a share just texting the episode to a friend or your kid that does the same thing. So thank you for always participating in my project to help people have a better relationship with themselves and others through mental health education. In this episode you learned that your sensitivity is real and valid and it's not too much, it's just totally different wiring. That awareness of how your brain and body processes the world can change everything, and that small, intentional shifts in how you care for yourself can create real calm, even in a really loud world. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. I really appreciate you being here and doing your work. New sessions are released on Fridays and I've recently added the mini sesh on Monday mornings. I hope that's helping. And by the way, if you've not taken my free, newly revamped overthinking class, that thing will help you stop overthinking things to death. You can grab it@takeouttherapy.com I'm happy to teach you what I know and remember. While takeout therapy is a great educational resource. Always get the level of support that you need for your situation. Head to takeouttherapy.com to stay in the loop until next time. Take really good care of yourself, friend.