HSP Sensitivity vs. Reactivity: How to Stay Balanced Under Stress

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover the difference between sensitivity and reactivity, and why this is important for HSP stress management.

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 the difference between sensitivity and reactivity, the two different causes of overwhelm in highly sensitive people, and how to decrease reactivity while honoring sensitivity. 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.

As highly sensitive people, we sometimes mistakenly think that our sensitivity is the problem, or is a problem. And what we’re really saying is that, that overwhelm is a problem, that when we get stressed is a problem, that the reactive side is a problem. Sensitivity and reactivity are not the same thing.

It’s possible to be sensitive and not be reactive in a particular situation. It’s possible to be highly sensitive and not have a reaction at all. I’ve experienced this many times over the course of my life, and especially since doing the work of Byron Katie, where something that used to really bother me really overwhelm me no longer does and I’ve noticed that also through the process of many years of meditation, where something that would cause a reaction years ago will not get that reaction anymore. So we need to distinct, distinguish between sensitivity and reactivity. And basically what we’re saying is the distinction between HSP trait and our stress, our ability to process things so that we don’t have that stress reaction.

And it’s also important to think about the Different ways that reactivity can show up. Sensitivity itself is very neutral. It’s just an awareness of things. We can be aware of stimuli, we can be aware of emotions we can pay attention to subtle details. This is a natural ability to sense things.

Reactivity, on the other hand, can come from two different places. One is simple overwhelm. We just got too much input. It was too much for the system, and it shut down. And so that’s just a physical reality, and there are certainly limitations that we as HSPs have to think about and be able to work around in our lives.

But, there’s another area where reactivity can come from, and that is the mind’s tendency to exaggerate. And this is what we all do as human beings. We take a situation and then it might be a little bit stressful and then we start playing with it and start exaggerating it or start catastrophizing, making it bigger than it is.

This is a major factor in causing overwhelm for highly sensitive people. And so I want to make this distinction because That is something we can work with. The actual physical limits of the nervous system, that’s not anything we can really do too much with in terms of becoming more resilient.

We can in some ways, but there are actual limits to how much we can deal with as highly sensitive people. How we like our tendency to make it into something more, which is really just stressful thinking that is something that we can always work with. And as we reduce it, it can be an amazing, it can just open up an amazing area of resilience that we may not have even known was possible.

Let’s look more closely at the difference between the basic form of overwhelm, which is basically when too much input floods into the system at once and the brain and the body struggle to keep up. This is natural and it’s built into our system and this triggers flight and flight, flight or fight or freeze or fawn responses.

It’s purely a nervous system reaction, and it’s about too much stimulation, too fast, too many lights, too many smells, too many people, too many things going on, multitasking, too much physical activity, too much mental activity. or too much emotional stuff going on. There’s a limit to our capacity, and all of us are unique, but we as highly sensitive people tend to have just a smaller limit to how much of that we can take.

And the solution for that is to guardrail around it, to be aware of those limitations. and to take steps to prevent getting overwhelmed, to limit our exposure to highly arousing situations that will cause overwhelm for us, and to take breaks to use, grounding techniques and anything that can just allow us to stay more balanced and not be overstimulated.

Really, when it comes to simple overwhelm, it’s about limiting exposure. When it comes to the other area, which I talked about exaggeration of the mind, when the mind amplifies the perception, then this is where we can do something more than just avoid exposure. And what the mind does is it tends to add unnecessary meaning to situations.

When I’m doing the work of Byron Katie, for example, and I’m looking at a stressful moment, stressful situation, I look for what I call the emotional interpretation. And there’s a statement of fact, what actually happened, somebody did something to me, somebody said something, but then my emotional interpretation is what it means, what that means.

It means that, I’m a terrible person or it means that they don’t like me or it means something stressful. And so this kind of amplification that the mind does is what puts overwhelm through the roof. Somebody talking to me, in and of itself, is not stressed. Words, sounds, those sounds don’t cause any kind of actual stress unless they’re amplified to high decibels.

It’s the meaning that I put on it that causes me to have the reaction and have the experience of stress and overwhelm. And so the, this can show up, catastrophizing is one of them that I mentioned earlier. If I don’t reply to this message right away, then they’re going to think I don’t care.

And so you can end up putting this pressure on yourself. It’s like this is life or death. And I’m going to lose this client or something big is going to happen. I’m going to fail at this job. That’s catastrophizing. Another way that the mind does this is overgeneralizing. Always get overwhelmed.

I never handle stress well. I’m terrible at this. It’s like making it, As if this is what defines you, I’m a, you burn something on the stove, it’s like, Oh, I always burn things on the stove. I’m terrible at cooking. I can’t manage even the basics. It’s like this kind of overgeneralization is an exaggeration of the mind and it amplifies the stress response.

It gets a real kick out of it. And so noticing this is really helpful. Yeah. And then the other one where the mind puts unnecessary meaning onto things is this way of reasoning where it just makes this chain of logic that goes down a stressful road and it just follows that chain. I feel anxious, so therefore something must be wrong.

In fact, that anxiety, I feel a little pain in my, my chest, so I must be having a heart attack or, like it’s again moving towards Catastrophizing but it sounds logical. Oh, yeah. So I feel anxious therefore must be something wrong and probably something really big That’s wrong. So just being aware that the mind does this can be huge It just puts things back into perspective if you can catch it But a lot of times you can’t catch it, and what happens is you experience the stress, you feel the overwhelm, and the stress itself then becomes the alarm clock to say, Hey, wait a minute this is getting really strong now, I need to do something about it, what’s going on?

And if you’re like me, you’ll use this situation as an opportunity to do some inner work. And as I mentioned, my favorite way to do that is the work of Byron Katie because it allows you to take a stressful situation as the starting point for a meditation. And this is a really powerful approach because you can take everyday situations, burning something on the stove, for example, or your partner saying something that that got you to just zinger got me using that moment as the starting point for a meditation.

And when you do that. You basically wind back and unravel the stressful thinking and remove the meaning from what you were adding, what your mind was adding, and boil it back down to the simplest parts, the simplest reality of what was going on. And 99. 999 percent of the time it’s really safe and really not a problem and there’s nothing stressful.

And if you wanted to push the envelope and really be open minded, you can say 100 percent of the time. This takes some stillness, it takes some awareness, and it’s not called the work for nothing. But, I have watched this work in so many situations in my own life, with clients, and with people I love.

Just changing that added exaggeration of the mind by questioning it. The mind believes its own stories. It’s the creator of its stories, and then it’s also the believer of its stories. And so it can just go into this loop of creating and believing and creating and believing and just making this whole world out of nothing.

The antidote to that is questioning. When you question what your mind is believing, it makes it stop for a second and go, wait a minute, is that really true? And it starts to take the wind out of its it’s creative. Catastrophizing like process. And so as you question what you’re thinking, and usually you just take one thought in a specific situation and go through the four questions and turnarounds of the work, you can unravel what you thought was a terrible, overwhelming situation, bring it back down to size, and find that it’s something that you can absolutely handle and there’s no real issue at all.

This gives a lot of power to us as highly sensitive people. Just knowing this possibility exists, that I’m, my mind may be exaggerating or putting meaning onto something, gives me a chance to work with the mind and come back to just the basics. It does not, however, help with simple overwhelm. If I have just been overwhelmed by too many tasks, or too much activity, or too many things coming in at once, then that’s just the nature of being a highly sensitive person, and I need to take rest and regain balance and take care of myself.

But when you take these two hand in hand, You can handle pretty much anything because if you’re overwhelmed because of too much stuff going on, you just back off of those things. If you’re overwhelmed because the mind’s putting extra meaning and exaggerating on top of what’s happening, then you can question your thinking and come back to balance that way.

You can see why I love the work of Byron Katie, it’s just amazing how it allows you to re, not just reframe, but re experience any situation, and it’s done on the experiential level. I always say it’s a meditation, because it’s the deepest part of me that’s doing that work. And when it sees it differently, the experience changes on a deep level.

So this is how you can move from being a highly sensitive person who gets stressed a lot, to being a highly sensitive person who gets stressed less and less. and who is able to deal with stresses more and more. And this means that your sensitivity can be used for going into the subtleties of life, to going deep into what’s really valuable and interesting.

And this can bring out creative abilities, creative and very useful things as you apply your sensitivity to various different situations. So I hope this helps clarify a difference that I find is really important. The difference between sensitivity And reactivity. Reactivity being the fact that I’m getting stressed and overwhelmed.

And sensitivity just being that trait and ability to process things deeply and to experience the subtle in life and to contribute on that level. In this episode, we looked at the difference between sensitivity and reactivity. And as I’ve just said, there’s a difference here in our innate nature and ability to perceive versus our capacity to handle input.

And while that may be limited physically in some regards, it also can be limited by our thinking and the exaggeration that we put on it. So the other thing we looked at is these two different causes of overwhelm in highly sensitive people. And this is super important because it allows us to work with these in different ways, the first being that overwhelm can be caused by a simple overwhelm of too much stimuli coming in, and there’s just not enough to handle it.

And so the only way to deal with that is to give ourselves space, time to recover, and try to prevent that by pacing ourselves in a busy world. The other cause of overwhelm is the exaggeration that we have due to our thinking, catastrophizing and making things worse than they are in our mind. And this is something that we can work with directly by questioning our stressful thoughts My favorite way to do that is the work of Byron Katie.

We finally looked at how to decrease reactivity while honoring sensitivity, and it is just that. Knowing the difference makes a huge difference. Knowing that I am sensitive and my sensitivity can be used in beautiful ways that are productive and not stressful is it’s super important. And then, on top of that, Understanding that because of the sensitivity, I can’t just take my sensitivity out into a loud, noisy place and expect that I’m going to be fine.

You have to respect the instrument. It’s a very fine instrument that we have. And so it requires a certain amount of padding and protection to keep from being damaged. But we also have to watch out for our own a tendency to make things to be worse than they are. And if we can get the mind a little clearer then it can relax a little bit and the reactivity will be much less.

So I’m all for decreasing reactivity as much as possible, trying to stay in that optimal zone of arousal. but at the same time honoring sensitivity and not being afraid to get to push the limits and see where my limits actually are. So thanks for listening. It’s always fun to think about these things and I appreciate you listening.

I look forward to next time, and in the meantime, have a great rest of your day.