How to Stop Feeling So Overwhelmed as a Highly Sensitive Person.

At the foundation of the trait of high sensitivity is the deep processing of information that our nervous system does. As a highly sensitive person, being tuned in to nuances means that we have a tendency to get overwhelmed quickly.

If we are unaware that we are an HSP, we might interpret this tendency like other people might do. We may think it’s a weakness. But if you’ve become aware that you are a Highly Sensitive Person, you know that the underlying reason for your overwhelm is because you are processing information more deeply.

Overwhelm and depth of processing are two sides of the same coin.

So, what can we do about it? This week, I want to re-look at a few tools and ideas that I have learnt that can help us manage overwhelm as Highly Sensitive People.

Tools and Strategies for Highly Sensitive People to Manage Overwhelm.

• Lots of articles talk about meditating and how that can help HSPs. But meditation is a practice that takes time to build up. If you are looking for an easy entryway into a calmer state of mind, then check out this post about music that can help your mind be in the Alpha state, the brainwaves associated with daydreaming and calm. (Normally, in day-to-day, we are mostly in Beta. In Beta, we are getting things done but we don’t have access to a flow state of mind where intuition and creativity are more accessible. )
• As HSPs, we might have internalized the message that we are “too sensitive.” Maybe, like me, you find crying and letting it out hard at times. But in this piece, Dr. Judith Orloff talks about something the health benefits of something called reflex tears, emotional tears that help clear out the gunk that we are accumulating in our emotional lives.
• As a Highly Sensitive Person, if we are always comparing ourselves to others and trying to match time to their music, then that becomes another reason for overwhelm and getting overstimulated. As an HSP, you likely have a different set of needs than others. In this post, I talk about Ane Axford’s Inverted Hierarchy of Needs Model, which is a fabulous tool for highly sensitive people. In it, the wonderful Ane Axford talks about how the order in which HSPs satisfy their needs is the opposite of most other people.
• If you are overwhelmed because you tend to take on other people’s feelings and feel responsible for their needs, you might like this piece on Emotional Empaths and Overactive Empathy. In it, I talk about my own journey of realizing that too-much empathy can also be inappropriate.
• We live in a hyper-connected, overstimulating world in which technology often nudges us in a specific direction. For example, I recently realized that while reading ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite, I was being told that a certain number of people had highlighted certain paragraphs (It appeared as things like “26 other Highlighters” for some paragraphs). This was the default mode. I had to go and manually change the settings myself to get rid of this information. Maybe, this feature is helpful for some people, but why do a majority of people need to know what other people think or find important while they are doing something as private as reading a book? In a similar vein, we are being nudged all the time by technology. In this post, I talk about how how Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallow: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains inspired me to reduce my Facebook use considerably.

These are just a few ways that might help you reduce overwhelm as a Highly Sensitive Person. Which one tip did you like? Which one did you resonate with the most?