7 Little Triggers That Overwhelm Highly Sensitive People & How To Handle Them

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover seven unexpected, sneaky stressors that are triggering your overwhelm.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover seven small everyday triggers that most people overlook, but that can completely derail an HSPs nervous system. The surprising reason, something as simple as too many open tabs or vague instructions. Can lead to emotional overload and simple practical strategies to help you stay calm, focused, and grounded, even when life feels noisy and chaotic.

This is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress As a highly sensitive person, when someone said, don’t sweat the small stuff, they obviously didn’t understand what it’s like to be a highly sensitive person. We can’t help sweating the small stuff.

We pay attention to detail because we’re wired that way. So let’s look at some situations that others may pass over or not notice, but are something that is, that can be an issue for us that can cause actual overwhelm or stress as a result of it. The first one is probably something you encounter on a regular basis.

That is simply too many open browser tabs in your browser, or too many apps running at once on your computer or your phone. Too much stuff going on in your immediate working environment. This can even exclude go out to your actual physical desk and too many things piled up or too many little jobs sitting in your inbox or anything like this.

What I like to do is to do a kind of tidy up, like a digital tidy up or some kind of actual physical tidy up at least once a day. Like I shut my computer down at night and I close all my tabs. I start fresh and if there’s something I need to save, I put it in Evernote, which is where I keep all of my things that I wanna reference later for research, but to have a certain kind of cleanliness or.

That’s not really the right word. There’s like simplicity to my working environment makes a huge difference. Another thing that really helps for me is to mute any kind of notifications, and in my case, I actually just don’t allow notifications on my computer at all. It sounds crazy, but I would rather.

I would rather miss an appointment in a way than be constantly bombarded with messages interrupting me and driving me crazy. So what I do instead is I go to my calendar regularly and I check what’s coming up. Oh, okay. I’ve got an appointment in a half hour, and then I’m thinking for the next half hour I’m gonna work on this.

And. If you can keep it simple, it can cut down a lot on overwhelm when you’re working. The second little trigger that can get highly sensitive people, and certainly one that gets me is unclear or vague instructions if you give me unclear or vague instructions. I am gonna start going crazy because I see all the different ways that I could do that, or I’m not quite sure what the intention was when the instructions were given.

I can see conflicting ways of doing the same thing. There’s a lot going on and this is natural for highly sensitive people because we look deeply at anything we’re given. We process deeply. We’re paying attention to outcomes on many levels, often simultaneously. And so if the instructions are not clear or conflicting or just strange, it can be stressful.

And the solution is actually really simple, although it takes maybe a little bit of nerve or courage, is to simply give yourself permission to ask again. What did you mean? Could you say that a little more clearly? And a lot of times we do have the ability to do that or the courage to do that, but sometimes we don’t.

And so if that is you and you feel like you’re having trouble actually saying that you need more clarity, then think of creative ways of doing that. Maybe you have to go in a more private situation and ask somebody. So it’s less of a shaming thing in a larger group. Or maybe it, maybe it’s like you have a.

Belief that’s interrupting you from asking and you may want to question the thought like they’re gonna think I’m stupid, or I should already understand, or something like that. Do a little bit of inner work and come back with a little more clarity and ability to ask. Most times people are very happy to repeat their instructions and if they’re not, then that’s the next thing you have to work with. So life keeps on giving it, and why not give it a chance? Because you may end up getting clarity. The third little trigger that can come up, which is not such a little thing, but it can actually cause overwhelm quite quickly, is the need to make a quick decision on the spot.

Somebody says I need you to decide right now. My brain freezes. I can’t make that decision very quickly unless I’ve already am prepared for it. And so what I like to do is ask hold on. Can you just gimme a minute? I need to think about that. This is gonna take me a second, or can you gimme 10 minutes?

I’d like to get back to you on that and negotiate about the immediacy of needing the decision. It’s not that you’re being irresponsible. It’s that your brain needs time to process. We are deep processors by nature, and to honor that, we need a little bit of time. The fourth little trigger would be having too many errands or small tasks piling up.

This can really get us down as HSPs, and it’s that a part of our mind is thinking about that task needs to be done and that task needs to be done. And that one. And. It’s obvious how quickly that can lead to overwhelm. The solution is to do a brain dump, like just clear your mind, get it all out onto paper or onto a digital list, and just clear all of that out of your memory and put it onto something external.

Then sort through it and prioritize the one or two things that must be done first. And then let the rest wait one at a time. If you’re multitasking, first of all, no one multitask that well, people say they do, but it’s not really the case. And when you are trying to multitask, especially as a highly sensitive person, you can at best divide your attention.

And it’s just not effective, but worse than anything, it leads to overwhelm. So you can even just hold yourself saying, okay, right now I’m focusing on this email and just make that your focus. Or I’m focusing on clearing my inbox, or right now I’m focusing on writing this this paragraph or this chapter, or whatever it is you’re working on.

Then move to the next item with intention to minimize. Any kind of multitasking can be a huge help for for anyone, especially for highly sensitive people. The fifth little trigger would be someone’s like feeling someone else’s tension or irritation, even if it’s unspoken, we pick up on these things or we’re tuned into people’s emotions.

It’s easy to get sucked in when someone’s ranting or fuming or not settled, especially if they’re irritated with us, which is the hardest one to deal with. If that happens, take a breath ground into your body if you can, and remind yourself that their emotion is not yours, and that’s a shortcut.

The long version of this would be. Write down the actual stressful thoughts that you’re believing. They they are being they are, I don’t want them to be angry. I want them to be calm. I need them to relax. Whatever your stressful thoughts are, write ’em down, kind of brain dump again and pick one of them and go through the work of Byron Katie and question those that thought.

Is it true? And who would I be without that thought? And what would a turnaround be? And see if you can explore all sides of it. You may find that it helps you gain a distance between what’s their business and what’s your business, and their tension can be theirs. And even though you’re aware of it, it doesn’t have to be as overwhelming.

Another one may seem minor, but it’s not minor for highly sensitive people. This is number six, minor criticism or offhand comments. These little tiny gestures or bits of speech can really affect us because we take it and then we start thinking about what it means and we go deep with it. So if that happens, like again, pause and look at is it really true that this comment means something bad about me?

Is it really? Are you sure of that? Do a little bit of the work. Question what you’re believing and see if you can find another perspective that may give you a little bit more breathing room. Another thing that can help is journaling, just writing those stressful thoughts. But my favorite way to journal is to journal, blurt out all your stressful thoughts, and then pick one and question it using the work of Byron Katie.

Then finally, number seven little trigger that can get to us is getting interrupted repeatedly during a task. This one can actually cause me to blow my cork, and I’m a lot better at it than I used to be, but it is one of those things where I’m like, I’m trying to go deep. I’m trying to focus, I’m trying to get something done, and then here comes another interruption and here comes another one.

And just when I thought I was ready to go again, here comes another one. So one of the things that helps here is to just set some clear boundaries. I’m gonna be working for the next 25 minutes. Can we talk after that or use a timer and. And use that to stay focused and make that a protected time.

Put a sign on your door. Talk to people who tend to interrupt you and say, this is really important. I need to focus. And it’s a general thing for me. I need, when I am focusing to not be interrupted. People learn. People respect that. And over time you will get less interruptions if you do get interrupted and you start getting upset.

Here again, you can notice the stressful thought that is there and question it, and you may find that it becomes less irritating. I want them to leave me alone. They don’t respect me. These things can be questioned and you may start softening. It’s still an interruption. It’s still a bother. It still interrupts your flow.

It doesn’t have to go above and beyond that because what happens is the mind will escalate it and escalate it, and it can turn into something that is bigger than the actual reality. It’s more okay, I got interrupted that did distract me, and now what can I do? Can I tell them? Please don’t interrupt.

I’m working on something important, and then can I go back into doing it and just begin again? So these are just a few little things that come up in daily life. I thought I’d share them with you and some thoughts on how to play with them. There are many more of course, but this is just a little taste of how to come back to yourself when little things annoy you.

In this episode, we looked at seven small everyday triggers that most people overlook, but that can completely derail an HSPs nervous system. And we saw that they ranged from having too many browser tabs open to getting unclear instructions to needing to make a quick decision on the spot or having too many tasks piling up.

And they included. Noticing other people’s irritations or tensions dealing with criticism or offhand com comments and getting interrupted repeatedly during a task. We also looked at the surprising reason that something as simple as something like too many tabs open or vague instructions can lead to emotional overload.

And we saw that it’s because we as HSPs process things deeply. We need time to process things. We think about the repercussions, the subtleties, and when there are too many things to process in our immediate environment, we have too much going on inside our brain and it causes overwhelm. And when there’s too much vagueness or too much lack of clarity, it leads to too many possibilities that can confuse us and overload us.

We also looked at simple, practical strategies to help you stay calm, focused and grounded, even when life feels noisy and chaotic and some of those things meant simply like doing a brain dump, that can be so helpful just to get it out from my brain into something external so that I can look at it more objectively.

I don’t have to keep going over it. Or asking for time to make a decision. Why, who says that? I have to make the decision on the spot. Even if the person says that I do, it’s okay, thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’ll get back to you in 10 minutes and and then see where that goes.

So there’s always wiggle room. There’s always room to, to be yourself and to find ways of. Lessening the impact of these kinds of triggers. One of the big ones that I always love is the work of Byron Katie, because it’s just so effective at identifying a stressful situation and a thought, questioning it, and often finding something that is unexpected and a new way of seeing it.

So thanks for listening, and I look forward to being with you in another episode soon. In the meantime, have a great rest of your day.