By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to overcome time pressure, find balance, and create a sense of infinite time as a highly sensitive person.
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 why HSPs have trouble with time limits, how to rethink time limits to remove the feeling of pressure they give, and how to fit cumbersome jobs into finite work time. 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.
Highly sensitive people. are typically stressed by time limitations. And I know in my experience that is true. And so let’s look at that together. What’s going on? Why is that the case? And is there anything we can do to work with that? I think the main reason that highly sensitive people have trouble with time limits is that we pay attention to every aspect of a job.
We’re not there just to do the job well. We’re there also to do it by the end of a certain time. So if the job is to do one thing if I have to do it by the end of a certain amount of time, then that job is now more complex. And so we pay attention to all of these complexities and we try to do all of it well, including the deadline.
And it’s very easy to get overwhelmed because of that. We also. At least based on my experience, to let the job tell us how much time it needs to take. This is actually how to get things done really is to pay attention so much to the job at hand that you’re not trying to fit it into any external or preconceived notion of what the job entails.
And this allows the job to speak to us to for unexpected things to come up and for there to be time to go and explore those. Find out what is really at the heart of things, and that brings us pleasure as HSPs. Another reason why I think time limits are challenging for us is that we HSPs tend to work slowly.
We consider every nuance as we work. We are thorough. We don’t just skim over things. We tend to do the deeper work, and that takes time. So when deadlines are put on us. That tends to cramp our style because we like to do things deeply and and we tend to work slowly as a result. These are just my theories of why HSPs have trouble with time limits.
There may be other reasons but this makes sense to me, and it’s something that I’m not going to change as an HSP. I’m always going to do things slowly. I’m always going to be methodical, as my grandmother used to call it. And I’ll want to be conscientious about doing everything well, including the deadline.
So it’s very easy for me to overwhelmed feel pressure by deadlines. So the question is, how can we rethink time limits to remove that feeling of pressure that they give? It’s a stressful thing when you’re under pressure, when you have to perform under pressure, that’s stressful. And unfortunately, our higher functioning of our brain kind of shuts down when we feel that kind of pressure.
And so creativity is less and our inspiration is less and we actually do not as good of a job as a result. So is there any way to remove that feeling of pressure that time limits give? I was going through something similar in my whole transition these days in my business. And I was thinking, I wish this client would give me infinite time.
That was really my thought. And. I could immediately feel the relief that if they would just give me this infinite time just take as much time as you need, if they would literally say that, I would feel this ease and I’m like, okay, now I can really dive in and I’ll make some progress.
Obviously, I love doing the work and I questioned that thought and I turned it around to myself and I realized that I can give myself. Infinite time. I can say that to myself, literally. Hey, you know what? Todd, take as much time as you like. There is no pressure here. You just, we’ll extend deadline.
We’ll just give you as much time as you need. And my God, every cell in my body starts to relax as I think that way. And what’s amazing is it doesn’t matter if it comes from a client or whether it comes from myself, that experience of expansion, relax relaxing and the pressure falling away that happens inside of myself.
And when that happens, my creativity engages, my enthusiasm comes back, and it’s amazing how quickly I can actually get some jobs done when I’m in that kind of place instead of paralyzed by a deadline that has got me, basically in writer’s block. My teacher, Maharshi Mahesh Yogi called it freedom within boundaries.
And I love this idea, giving myself internal freedom, even when I’m working within finite boundaries. So what I like to think of is that I have infinite time, even though I also have deadlines. And I keep it in my mind that I can have a coexistence of finite boundaries and infinity at the same time. In my experience, That is possible, and it just depends on how you think about it.
For example, if I have just one hour to work on a project, or ten minutes to work on a project I can think I can focus on the deadline and then just get cramped up and frozen, or I can think, Okay, within these 10 minutes, I have an infinity of time, I have this infinite creativity that I can go in all directions, I can explore absolutely anything.
And and in fact, if. I’ve run out of time for whatever reason. I’ll find another 10 minutes or another hour in another part of my week or my day that I can pick this up. Suddenly I can daisy chain these One hours or 10 minutes here and there, I can daisy chain them together, and it really is an infinite amount of time.
Then when you add in the fact that everything is a work in progress, and even projects that have deadlines are really a work in progress, then you can just be doing the next step of it and do as much of that as you can in the time frame allowed. and then continue with the next progression in the next phase of the project or the next next time period allowed.
So it depends on how you think about it. I used to do this when I started doing the work of Byron Katie and there’s, you could do the work every day, all day, if you wanted to, there’d never be enough time. And I started just looking at my half hour a day and going, Oh yeah, I’m going to do as much as I can in that time and whatever I don’t finish, I’ll pick up.
In the next day, and then the next day, and the next day, and it adds up to feeling of infinity. And that’s what I’m looking for, that feeling of infinity, infinite time within limited boundaries. This is something that you can play with, and it’s something that’s very real, I use it all the time in my life, and if you can think in terms of the amount, the infinite amount of time you have.
Even while there are boundaries around it, it can slow you down. It can allow you to relax, and it can allow you to go as slow as you want to in taking care of yourself. each aspect of the job. So what this actually does is that it brings you into the now. It brings you into just the moment. And what is the moment?
The moment is the next word that I’m about to speak, right? That’s the moment. There’s no more moments than that. And if I’m really focused on each word and each thought as it comes out, I’m really present. And it also feels like time slows down. There’s an input and amount of it. Even though this little episode is going to come to an end, right?
So I’m working within limits, but within those limits, there’s a freedom. And that’s, it can make a huge difference in terms of how you experience time pressure. So one last thing to think about is how to fit big, cumbersome, unwieldy jobs into finite work time. My stepdad used to say that a job expands to fill the available space.
And I thought that was brilliant. It’s certainly my experience. If I have two hours to do something, I will take two hours. If I have five hours to do it, I will take five hours. If I have two years to do it, I will take two years to do it. Maybe that’s an HSP trait. But I think it’s also fairly universal.
So the reverse is also true that time that a job can also contract to fill a smaller space. So I’ve also noticed that if I need, think I need two hours to do something, and then I really only have one hour. If I’m not thinking about deadlines and I’m just focused on, let’s just see what we can do, often can do this same job in half the time.
And it can even become smaller. Let’s say I had five minutes, I may not be able to do the whole job, but I can do the main part of it in five minutes. So this is really key. There’s always the most important thing to do. And then there are other lesser important things to do in any job. If you think about it, it’s the main thing, which is like the whole big picture.
That’s the most important thing. And then the details that it can be elaborated to infinity. But if you have the big picture, the main idea, then you’ve really accomplished the most important thing. Even if you only have five minutes to do it. Again, this analogy I love of an artist, the way they draw and they sketch very roughly at first, face, ears and nose, but it’s more rough.
You can hardly even tell what it is. At first, that’s the most important thing and we can already say that it’s a portrait within two minutes. Then we can elaborate and get a little more tone and definition and clarity about the different features on the face. And that’s great. That takes more time and that if the time is there, we can elaborate.
And if there’s even more time, it could take hours, days, weeks. Fine tuning the color and the shading and the shapes of that portrait. But, if the artist only had five minutes, they can draw a portrait. If the artist had 15 minutes, they could draw one. If the artist had an hour, two hours, two days, two weeks.
In all of those cases, the artist can draw a complete portrait and can hand it over and say, yes, I did the job within the time that I needed. It just meant that there were less details in the job that was done in shorter amount of time. So hold that in mind when you’re working through complex jobs, cumbersome jobs.
Keep in mind, there’s always the most important thing, like the core of it. Can you do that first? Can you get that done? So that if you have to present, You’ve got at least that, and then they’ll say, you know what? That’s really good, but we need you to go back and do more details. I’m like, great. Okay. I need some more time for that.
And then you can bring in the details as well. This gives me a lot of freedom. And again, if I use both of these ideas that have infinite amount of time, as well as that, I can do even the whole job in a nutshell, in a short amount of time, then it gives me a lot of flexibility to work with deadlines. In this episode, we looked at why HSPs have trouble with time limits.
or deadlines. And we saw that it has a lot to do with how much attention we pay to every aspect of a job and how well we like to do things and how it takes time to do things well. We also looked at how to rethink time limits to remove the feeling of pressure they give. Fact is, we all have to live with time limits and it’s a matter of perspective how you hold those.
And My favorite way of doing that is to consider that I have infinite time, even within a limited time frame. And then finally, we looked at how to fit big, cumbersome jobs into a finite amount of work time. And we saw that jobs expand to fill the available space, but they can also contract to fill a smaller space, depending on what you focus on.
And there’s always a most important part of a job, the core of the job the essential part. And we, if we do that first. Then we’ll, we can have as much time to fill in the details as we have time left. So thanks for listening and thinking about time with me. It’s an important part of life, and we, along with, whether we’re HSPs or non HSPs, we all have to deal with it.
And I hope this helps to Make it possibly a little less stressful for you. Thanks for listening, and have a great rest of your day.
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