As highly sensitive people, we feel all emotions intensely, whether it’s joy and happiness or fear and anger. And because we feel so deeply, we can sometimes get stuck in a loop. We can overthink, and anxiety can become the shadow side of our experience.
Last year, I interviewed Connie L. Habash, the author of Awakening from Anxiety, a book I highly recommend if you are highly sensitive & experiencing anxiety. I wanted to re-share something from that interview.
As a highly sensitive person, are you having moments where you just want to disassociate and flee into your head?
I have had a lot of moments lately where I have felt like it’s all getting too much. I just want to flee into my head. It’s almost like some part of me wants to get away from my body, away from this physical experience I am having in the here and now and float into space.
“I don’t want to be here,” I can hear some part of me saying again and again.
It’s as if my attention has been trying to get-the-hell-out of my freaked out body and hang out in my head. But this doesn’t make me feel safe. It actually ends up making me feel even more anxious.
And there’s a reason for this.
In our interview, I asked Dr. Connie Habash about what happens to our nervous system when we are disassociated like this.
This is how she explained it.
“Here’s a metaphor to help understand what happens in our nervous system when we dissociate, or “leave” our body. We all dissociate from time to time, like when we drive down the freeway and can’t remember passing the last few exits. That means we were in our heads, thinking, planning, imaging, etc. That is a mild form of dissociation.
But when we start leaving our bodies and going into our heads, imaginations, or even into spiritual states of consciousness as a strategy to deal with life – when we’re doing it a lot, and not really present here in our physical selves and surroundings, the body pays the toll.
Imagine that you’re on a cruise liner, far out at sea. You’re having a great time, laying out on the deck, playing games, enjoying the buffet, and looking forward to the next port. But then you hear that no one is at the helm.
The captain is gone, the navigator isn’t there, no one is in there, whatever it is called where the ship’s wheel is. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you be scared? I’d be running to the rails, looking to see if we’re going to hit something.
Everyone would freak out. Because you know that there are dangers out there and someone needs to be paying attention and steering the ship.
That’s how your body feels when you’re not in it. It freaks out because no one is at the wheel. And so it goes on high alert. Your sympathetic nervous system, responsible for fight or flight, kicks in because SOMEBODY has to be watching out, and you, your Conscious Self, isn’t doing it, so the body has to.
Adrenaline kicks in. Tension arises. If you do this often, you start to see chronic stress, anxiety, tension, and possibly all manner of physical problems from the body being in that level of stress all the time.
The first step of the solution is becoming present in the moment, and the second step is to come back into the body. “
Of course, it’s completely normal if you are having moments where you just want to disappear into the thin air or leave your body.
It’s a signal that you are feeling extremely stressed out.
This has been a tough year.
But understanding what happens inside our body if we hang out in our head too much is really important for all of us right now, and especially for highly sensitive people who feel everything so intensely.
If you are feeling like this, try doing something gentle and simple to come back into your body like taking a walk in nature or sitting in your balcony and feeling the sun, anything that soothes your physical body and helps you feel safe in it. This feeling of safety in our bodies helps our awareness come back into it.
I hope you take good care! Your highly sensitive nervous system might be overloaded right now. Please know that many of us are feeling like this, and all we can do is take care of ourselves moment by moment.
With love,
Ritu
P.S. If you are highly sensitive and feeling like you want to float away, try the energetic practice of Centering, which I talk about here.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal stories with practical tools to help highly sensitive people channel their deep sensitivity. Sign up for Ritu’s newsletter for two free chapters of The Empath’s Journey.
You can find The Empath’s Journey here.
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