Why “Being Nice” Keeps HSPs Overwhelmed—And How Inner Work Can Break the Cycle

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why being nice can secretly fuel overwhelm for HSPs, and how inner work helps you set boundaries without losing your compassion.

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 what’s really behind the thought. I need to be nice, and how it shapes your energy. A gentle inquiry to loosen the grip of people pleasing. How to reconnect with your authentic kindness without self-sacrifice. This is an addition of guided Meditation Mondays, where I’ll be guiding you to do the work of Byron Katie.

As you listen, it’s easy to say. Just say no. People tell you all the time, you should just say, no. You should ask for what you want. You should take up more space. It’s easy to talk like that, but it’s hard to do. The reason for this is that you have to feel it. You have to, it has to be something that you see clearly.

Is something valuable, something real, something good. And that feeling can’t come from an intellectual understanding alone. Intellect can help point us in the right direction. To really find the no that is honest and real, and to be able to have, find the courage to say it requires inner work.

And inner work means finding out where you’re stuck and then working with that stuck part and seeing if you can help it find some wiggle room. Notice I’m focusing on the stuck part itself. I’m not focusing on. The wise part of me that understands already that you should say no or that you should ask for what you want.

I’m talking about a small, stuck part inside of myself that is unable to say no. It’s too scared to say no. It’s too scared to take up space. It’s afraid that part needs to be met. It needs to be discovered. It needs to be held, and. It has to be done in a very compassionate way, but also with some challenge being presented to that part as well.

In other words, we’re asking the stuck part to stretch a little bit, to expand a little bit and to see if it can see things from a new perspective. This is what inner work is about, and my favorite way of doing inner work is called the work of Byron Katie. It’s does just that you find a situation.

And the reason for a situation instead of just a generalization is that we’re doing inner work. And inner work requires that we be grounded in an experience, otherwise it becomes an intellectualization. So you start with a situation I’m gonna give you an example from my life where I was, listening to an audiobook with earbuds on, and my partner had his iPad right next to me and had the volume up without any earbuds, and it was distracting me. I did say turn down the volume, but there was that little bit of hesitation. There’s a little stuck part inside of me that was saying, oh, I shouldn’t be interfering.

He’s gonna get mad. I’m not. It’s, I should just. Be quiet, be nice, be gentle. So this is really important when you’re doing inner work, is to find a specific place or specific time where you actually got triggered, where that little stuck part of your self came up into the forefront. And for me, it just came up in the form of a thought or a little bit of a fear.

Once you’ve grounded yourself in that, then the next thing to do is to look for what are the thoughts that are showing up, coming out of that fear or coming out of that emotion that I’m experiencing in that moment. This is a connection between the underworld and the conscious world, and when I’m aware of the emotions which come from deep down underneath, and then I pay attention to the.

Actual thoughts that are connected with them, I bridge this gap and I can begin to work with this underworld. So the thoughts in that situation for me were things like I need to be nice. It really comes back to a thought almost of being a kid. Like children are seen but not heard. And in some ways I do treat myself like a child with my partner, there’s a certain.

Similarity there that happens in me. So these are the thoughts that are coming up connected to this emotion of, I shouldn’t ask him to turn down the volume. So underneath that is a fear, and the fear for me is he won’t like it. The fear for me is he will be angry with me. He will, will be upset and I don’t want that.

So these are the thoughts that I’m harvesting. They’re like the little fruits that are connected to the trunk of the tree of the emotion that I was feeling, which is a certain amount of fear. So I can pick any one of those thoughts. And the beauty of this work is that you take the thought which is connected to the emotion.

And when you work the thought, the emotion can shift. You can of course work from the opposite direction, taking emotion and working with that. And then the thoughts will shift. But I love this way of the work of Byron Katie, of taking the thought which is connected so intimately with the emotion and playing with that and watching the emotion change.

So I’m gonna do a very short version of this here just to give you a little taste. Of what it’s like. The thought I’m gonna work with is I need to be nice, and it comes from that feeling of I have an identity of being nice and I have that kind of childish quality of wanting to be seen but not heard and just going with the flow.

What I’ll do now is hold myself in that moment when I was asking my partner to turn down the volume or just thinking about it. And I’m gonna ask myself these four questions. So the first one is it true? I need to be nice and I have to sit with that. And what I find is, and this is really important, I’m not asking my mind, I’m asking my emotion.

I’m asking my. The part that’s caught on this, the part that’s stuck, is it really true that you need to be nice and I can hear its voice coming through me. It’s like I’m having a conversation with a part of myself that I don’t even control that side of the dialogue. And it’s saying yes, it’s saying yes.

I need to be nice. So I’m honoring that and I’m allowing that to be my answer. Then at question two, I’m gonna come back and challenge that part again and say, okay, can you absolutely know it’s true that you need to be nice? Are you sure? And I’m waiting for that response, and I see it hesitating. I see this little scared part of myself, hesitating and being well.

No, I can’t absolutely know that’s true. Where is this coming from? It’s not coming from my intellectual mind that knows what to do and what’s the right thing, and yes, you should stand up for yourself and all that stuff. No, it’s coming from this inner part of myself that is bought into and super scared of like it’s, it is bought into the idea of being nice and super scared of not being.

Liked or not being or having somebody be mad at me. And what I’m finding is that part of me is not a hundred percent sure that I need to be nice. So this is like that beginning of wiggle room that starts to happen. So then I go to the next question, which is, can I absolutely know it’s true that I need to be nice?

Oh no. Sorry, that’s the question we just asked. Next question number three is how do you react? What happens when you believe that you need to be nice? Now I’m asking that part inside of me, that emotional part that’s going, that’s fearful, that’s worried of repercussions. And what I’m finding is it has its own answers.

So I’m gonna listen as it shares its answers. So how do you react? What happens when you think you need to be nice and. The feeling is I shut down. I don’t say anything. I have a pretense that I am a nice person. I’m quiet, I’m gentle. I go with the flow. I’m an easygoing person. I like that. People like me for that.

It’s it’s one of the things that I am attached to. How do I react or think? I don’t I need to be nice. I hesitate to say these turned down the volume. And secondly, I imagine that if I do say, turn down the volume, there are gonna be repercussions. I’m not gonna be liked my partner will be upset something bad will happen.

So this is just a taste of the kinds of reactions and you can sit longer in this when you’re doing your own work. But let’s go to question four, which is a very interesting question. Who would you be without the thought that you need to be nice? So I’m asking this in myself and I’m sitting with this unknown.

What would that be like? Who would I be? Obviously I wouldn’t be the same person that I normally am ’cause that person is always trying to be nice. So who would I be like, really? Who would I be? And I have to hold the situation and imagine what it would be like when, if I didn’t think I need to be nice when I’m wanting him to turn down the volume, who would I be?

I would be really direct. Be like, that’s way too loud. Please turn it down. I notice a, like a fearlessness there. Almost I hesitate to say, but almost like we’re equals instead of me being the subordinate one in the relationship. So who would I be without the thought? I need to be nice. A lot freer to express what’s coming up inside of me, which is I want to be listening to this audio book and your volume is distracting me.

So all of this is just a preamble to the turnarounds, which are the last part of this inner work, which ground the experience of possibility of who I would be without the thought into some new reality. And that is we’re gonna look at opposites and see if they might actually be as true or truer and look for examples of that.

So in this case the turnaround instead of I need to be nice would be, I don’t need to be nice. And so I’m gonna look for why that could be just as true and try to balance it out. There’s always two sides to everything. And how could not being nice be actually. Good, actually better or as good as being nice in this situation?

First of all, I have to redefine what nice means to myself. For me, nice is not making any ripples, not making any waves, not rocking the boat. And that’s not always such a good thing. So I don’t need to be nice because if I am just nice in that way. I exclude myself from the situation. I actually exclude myself from the relationship when I do that.

So I don’t need to be nice. I need to be present. I need to show up, and I can still be gentle about that. I don’t have to be mean, but I, it’s not actually nice for me to exclude myself. In fact, we can go further with that. It’s not really that nice to the other person. In this case, my partner. For me to be hidden in the shadows, and sure, there’s no ruffles, but who is he in relationship with?

It’s like this enigma. There’s no person there. And in the meantime, I’m feeling alone. I’m in my own world and I feel separated and living in fear a little bit. So these are the painful outcomes of not. Of trying to be nice. And so I don’t need to be nice. I need to be not nice in the sense of I need to show up and be somebody rather than just going along with the flow.

Another way of saying this can be, I need to be courageous. So this is just a taste of the kinds of turnarounds, the opposite that you can play with just to challenge yourself. Then take time to see if you can make sense of that. See if you can find examples of why the opposite might also be true.

And this can blow your mind in so many ways. You think that things are one way, and then it turns out it’s the other, or it turns out that it’s both ways. But the caution here is don’t do this on an intellectual level. Keep it in the situation, keep it connected with the emotion. Let see if you can find genuine reasons why that makes sense to you and why it makes sense on an emotional level, not just that this is the right thing to do, I should or shouldn’t do that.

That doesn’t really touch the inner part of ourselves. And until that inner part of ourselves is touched and until it wakes up and finds a new truth that makes sense to it. Then it will just keep on doing it the old way, same as it always has. So my invitation to you is to look inward, find where you’re stuck, find what’s the thought that’s con, that’s causing you to stay stuck and then question it on its level and give it the space to stretch, to expand and to see new perspectives.

But. Don’t let your intellect take over and deprive yourself of the true inner work that can change you. In this episode, we looked at what’s really behind the thought. I need to be nice and how it shapes your energy. And what we found is that there’s a whole underworld here, an emotional world that is not rational, that works according to its own.

Experience and no matter how much we intellectualize on top of that, it doesn’t change the under the part underneath. We then looked at how inner work, in this case we were doing the work of Byron Katie as how it can be a way to loosen the grip of, in this case, people pleasing how we can loosen the grip of the emotional part of ourselves.

So that it gains more clarity, more options, more freedom. And we saw that the key to this is respecting the part that is stuck, directing the questions to it, allowing it to answer, giving space and energy and attention to the part of us that is holding onto this for dear life. It takes compassion towards ourselves and towards these parts of ourselves to do this kind of inner work, but it’s the only way that actually makes any real difference in our lives.

Otherwise, we can read a thousand books and we have a lot of wisdom, but we’re still acting in a way that is not in accordance with that wisdom. That’s because it’s coming from somewhere deeper inside of ourselves. And then finally we looked at how to reconnect with your authentic kindness without self-sacrifice.

And this is the interesting kind of oxymoron, if you will or coexistence of opposites maybe where saying no may actually end up being kinder than not saying no. Because what happens if I don’t say no, then I can get angry at some point. It can blow up at some point. Also when I’m in touch with my honest desire in this case to turn down the volume I, there, I can still be gentle about that.

I can still be kind about that. I can say, I can see how understandable it is for, in this case, my partner. Why he wouldn’t turn down the volume. He might not think of it. He might be just focused on what he was watching and. That’s normal. So a lot of compassion also can begin to come up, but it’s not compassion being used to shut myself down.

It’s compassion that’s there along with an authentic showing up for myself. And that’s that’s really an ideal way to live, and it becomes possible when I become more and more honest with myself. More and more courageous in my ability to share what is coming up for me with those around me. So thanks for listening.

I look forward to being with you again very soon. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.