Why Work-Life Balance Feels So Hard for Highly Sensitive People — And What the Overwhelm Is Teaching Us

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why work life balance feels so overwhelming for HSPs and what that overwhelm may be trying to teach you.

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 work-life balance is especially tricky for highly sensitive people, and not because you’re doing it wrong, how the overwhelm you feel may be a signal, not a flaw. How doing less, more intentionally can create more emotional freedom for highly sensitive people. Welcome to this edition of Self-Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.

Work-life balance is a challenge for everyone in our modern world. I remember first running into this when I was in college and. There were so many demands to just keep up with the assignments from different teachers, different professors, that it was very easy to get out of balance. And it certainly happened to me.

And I remember the contrast because I took a semester and went to Costa Rica and studied there in a very much less strenuous way. I was living in an indigenous village studying the traditional medicine there, and I would walk. In the hills with a 70-year-old man, and he would tell me about all the plants they used, and it was a lot of fun.

I was outdoors, it was slow paced. We didn’t have a big agenda going. And I remember the feeling of, wow, this feels really good. This feels really relaxed. And I love that feeling. In our modern lives, we have to balance many things. We have to balance work, which takes up a lot of time. We have to balance family, which also takes time.

We also have physical needs. Physical self-care is essential. Taking care of our rest, that we get enough time for rest, taking care of that we’re getting good food, making sure we’re getting exercise. These are also part of life that contribute to a balance of life. Then you have friendships, hobbies, and interests social obligations, and the list can go on and on.

So in our modern world, we’re trying to balance a lot of things. And then when you add in the fact that as highly sensitive people, we do things more slowly, we need more time to process. We, learn things at our own pace. We take our time just by nature. We actually need more rest than other people. And then we need more sleep.

We need more time alone to decompress. We may need time for meditation that maybe other people don’t. We have less tolerance for bad food. And we also can see things into the future. We’re visionaries in a way. We can see very interesting things that we’d like to pursue that are more long-term interests and that take time to develop.

And so all of these things contribute to the challenge of having a good work life balance because any one of these things could take us full time and and then where’s the time for everything else? So while everybody has a challenge when dealing with work life balance. I think as highly sensitive people, we have even more of a challenge, and as a result, we tend to experience more overwhelm as a result of that.

So the good news is that overwhelm is not a flaw. It’s not that we’re doing something wrong. It’s a signal. It’s like a feedback and it’s saying, okay, something is out of balance here. Something could be improved. Something could allow you to come back to a more normal state or to a more ideal state of balance and peace.

However, most of us hear that alarm and we think, oh my gosh, I need to do something. But we tend to do everything but the real solution. We’re human beings and we have our interests, our desires, our attachments. We tend to try to fix it by going, doing things faster. I’ll just go faster. My mom’s a great example of that.

She learned to fly like an airplane because she wanted to get places faster so she could get things done more and she could fit more in and all that. So yeah, it’s a solution but it’s not really addressing the root of the problem. Another version of that is becoming more efficient.

We try to do things more quickly, more efficiently, do them in a better way. That takes less time, that’s great. But getting more and more efficient still doesn’t bring about this work-life balance. Or we can, may think that we need to earn more or be able to hire more people to help. All these things are, yeah, helpful.

They’re a little bit interesting, but. In the end, they can actually add to the workload because the more efficient you become, the easier it is to take on more jobs, and then you end up getting overwhelmed at a higher level. But it’s the same problem. So efficiency only goes so far.

Next, we can cut out things that we love in favor of what we should do. This is something that we often do. I think everybody does this and I think highly sensitive people fall into this quite easily. I know I do where I’ll just cut out my hobbies or I’ll cut out my rest, or I’ll cut out family time or I’ll cut out fun.

And I’ll sacrifice that for work or for responsibility or for some social pressures of some kind. So here I am trying to, I get this signal that there’s something outta balance. I’m feeling overwhelmed and so I cut something, but I’m not cutting the thing that is most important to cut. The problem is we tend to focus on outside things.

All of us do. We were grow, we grew up that way. We were taught to pay attention to our parents, pay attention to our teachers, to take care of others. And these are good things. It’s part of coming into the world, but we sometimes go too far with that, and we focus more on outside things than on listening to our own intuition.

It’s easy to get caught by this because of this focus on the outside and for on others. So how can we do less, more intentionally and create more emotional freedom? The question comes, what are my real values and interests? For me, it’s inner experience, restfulness. Happiness meditation. These are things that I love.

This is what interests me in life, and I also am interested in outer things as well. But if I’m really honest with myself, business is secondary. So why would I make it a bigger job than it needs to be? Why would I, go to the moon when it’s not necessary? Why? Put the emphasis on the outside and we’ve already seen because we’re so used to looking out there.

You can also get caught in perfectionism where I want to do a really good job at everything I do, and this is a common thing for us, HSPs. We can do things really well and so we love to do things really well and we try to do things really well, and that’s great when you’re doing one thing, but when you’re doing 10 things, it becomes stressful.

So the way I turn this around is I look at what is the thing that I want to do a really good job at, and what things would I be happy to do a mediocre job at? And this is very radical for me as a perfectionist, you could say. To slow down and say, you know what, I’m just gonna do on this job, I’m just gonna do eh, just okay on this job and I’m not gonna spend more time than I actually have allocated for it.

And that’s as far as it’s gonna be. I’ve done that with our dog training. We have a challenging dog that’s hard to train and I could spend hours training that dog. But, I do my best maybe 15 minutes here and there, not even every day. And it’s good enough. I can live with not a perfectly trained dog.

Same with pickleball. I could play pickleball and put in a lot of hours and probably get a lot better, but I like just the simple pace a couple times a week and that’s it. And where it comes in a little closer to home is in my business. My business could take up a lot of time. It already takes up a lot of time.

It could take up even more time, but I’m finding myself looking at it more objectively and saying, how good does it need to be? How big does it need to be? How strong, how perfect does it need to be? And I find myself saying, it doesn’t have to be super, it can be good enough. So this is what leads me back to, okay, what is most important?

How do I really wanna spend my time? And what does balance look like? That’s actually doable. One thing that holds us all up is attachment. And so when I want something, when I need something, when I believe I want something, or I believe I need something, then I get attached to that thing. And to question your wants or question your needs can be extremely freeing.

I want this business, for example, to be so big, or I want it to have, make this much money, or I want it to be having this much impact or all these things. These are good wants, but there’s an attachment that comes with them. If I can question that and come back to. Oh, maybe I don’t want that, or I only want it a little bit.

I don’t want it that much. Then I can start finding a little more balance inside. This also goes for wanting other people’s approval. I found even recently that even though my mom’s been dead for 15 years, I was still trying to please her by trying to. Go like bigger with my business and I just realized, you know what?

I don’t need to, this is an old habit of trying to please someone else. This kind of insight can come fleetingly through, but if you want to do it in a more methodical way, in a more systematic way. This is where I use the work of Byron Katie as a way to question these thoughts and these attachments and loosen them and loosen my hold on them.

And from there I began to experience more freedom, more options, and I can start to simplify. In this episode, we looked at why work-life balance is especially tricky for highly sensitive people. And it’s not that we’re doing anything wrong, it’s that we have an even more challenge than other people.

We’re all focused outward and we also as highly sensitive people have more needs than people who don’t have this trait. We also looked at how overwhelm that you feel can actually be a signal, not a flaw, but something that indicates, okay, there’s an imbalance here and I need to look at it. And we also saw all the ways that we try to work with that imbalance and.

And don’t actually address the root issue. And finally, we looked at how doing less, more intentionally can create more emotional freedom for highly sensitive people. And intentionally means listening to ourselves, actually paying attention to what we want, what is coming up from inside, rather than just doing what we can to complete something that we’ve started or taking on the values of others.

Just either trying to please them or trying to do a good job for them. So the feeling I’m coming away from with this session is the idea of simplicity. Simplicity on the inside that comes from listening to my intuition about what do I really wanna do, what do, how do I really wanna spend my time?

Because trying to balance everything is just not possible. Balance of life from that point of view is an illusion, but balance of life through simplification is possible. I just have to listen to myself as to what is that I’m most interested in focusing my attention on. So thanks for listening.

It’s always fun to explore with you. This podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

In this episode, we looked at why work-life balance is especially tricky for highly sensitive people. And it’s not that we’re doing anything wrong, it’s that we have an even more challenge than other people all focused outward and we also as highly sensitive people have more needs than people who don’t have this trade.

We also looked at how overwhelm that you feel can actually be a signal, not a flaw, but something that indicates, okay, there’s an imbalance here. And I need to look at it. And we also saw all the ways that we try to work with that imbalance and don’t actually address the root issue. And finally, we looked at how doing less, more intentionally can create more emotional freedom for highly sensitive people.

And intentionally means listening to ourselves, actually paying attention to what we want, what is coming up from inside. Rather than just doing what we can to complete something that we’ve started or taking on the values of others and just either trying to please them or trying to do a good job for them.

So the feeling I’m coming away from with this session is the idea of simplicity. Simplicity on the inside that comes from listening to my intuition about. What do I really wanna do? What do, how do I really wanna spend my time? Because trying to balance everything is just not possible. Balance of life from that point of view is an illusion, but balance of life through simplification is possible.

I just have to listen to myself as to what is that I’m most interested in focusing my attention on. So thanks for listening. It’s always fun to explore with you. This podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.