Why HSPs Get So Stressed In Emotionally Demanding Situations & How To Get The Space You Need

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to recognize when your personal space has been crowded, and find your way back to peace.

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 a personal story of overwhelm after my father’s death and why it stayed with me. Why HSPs feel especially stressed when their space is invaded, even in subtle ways. How inner work helped me find peace from within and meet future moments with more clarity and strength.

This is an addition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. I like to pay attention to stress when it shows up for me, because I know from experience that I always learn something. And I also like to pay attention to it because it’s calling out to me.

Something needs attention and a part of me can’t let go of something. There’s somewhere I’m stuck and the stress is letting me know that. So when I look at the recent passing of my father and I look at the different areas that showed up for me, sometimes it’s a small thing. Seems like a very small thing that was.

Getting me looping, making me stressed. And so even though I had a good experience with my father, I think the whole thing was accepted. I feel a lot of love. It’s not acute grief. But yet there was a moment after he died and the under undertakers came to take his body where there was just a little moment in that exchange that I kept flashing back on, kept going to it.

My mind wouldn’t let go of it. And so this became a doorway for me to go in and do some inner work. And that’s what I wanna share with you today. So when my dad died, he died at home. It was peaceful. He had a peaceful expression on his face. It was really almost magical. We had like a half smile on his face and we were all really enjoying that.

And. When the undertaker came and they put him on the stretcher to take him away one of the undertakers asked me if they should take the pillow along with it. And of course, I’m not used to taking dead bodies away, so I was like why would you wanna take the pillow? Of course not. We’ll keep the pillow, but I said No very quickly.

Basically, I just acted and seemed like it made sense to me. I. But I realized quickly that there was something more that the undertaker was thinking about and that I wasn’t fully, aware of myself. And then I started feeling this little trap where I’d already committed and I’d said, no, pretty emphatically oh no, and I was just very clear about it.

And I’m maybe trying to be decisive, I don’t know. And and then I couldn’t really backtrack. I got to stuck in this place where I wasn’t really able to say what did you mean? And or I changed my mind. Like those were not options on the table. And so I just watched as what seemed to be what she was pointing at started to happen.

And that is. His head wasn’t supported on the stretcher, and I knew that probably it’s probably gonna change the expression on his face and it’s probably going to just, not look as good later. And so this, but this caught me, right? It just caught me and I was stuck in that. And what I noticed is that my mind kept going back to it, as I mentioned.

And then later when I went to to the crematorium to have his body cremated, I could see that his head, his face had expression has changed. And it was just not as peaceful looking. And that memory is like the last memory I have of my dad’s face. And so it started really sticking and started, I started really getting caught on that.

And so this is an example of how a moment, which seems very small, can. Can attach can get the mind caught for a long time and and needs processing. So I wanna mention why this kind of thing happens with HSPs. In this particular case, the thing I’d like to focus on is the feeling that I had, which was, I don’t think in reality what was happening, but the feeling that I had was that I was under pressure that this.

Undertaker was asking me a question and I should have a quick answer. I should know exactly how to answer. I’ve done this a hundred times before, and so this kind of situation where it almost feels like your space is being invaded even by a question sounds strange probably to most people, but as HSPs, this can be a very real thing where just a simple, direct question can make you freeze.

Because let’s look at why. Because HSPs process things deeply and we need time to do it. And so what happens is we often don’t ask for the time to do it, and we feel like we’ve been pushed a little bit and we feel caught. There’s nothing we can do. And then we go into that that response of just trying to.

Manage perception or trying to look good or trying to be nice or just somehow fading off into the distance. And but this is something that happens to HSPs in general. In this case, it was the undertaker asking me a question. In your case, it might be somebody just maybe asking you a question or doing something that just gets a little bit into your space and.

Maybe puts a little bit of pressure, time pressure on you when you’re a slow processor, then you need time for that. And for me it’s important to ask for that time and it’s not always easy to do. Also, fast decisions can feel unsafe to HSPs because we feel like we have to come up with the right answer right away.

And there are many factors involved in any decision. And being aware of that can also help in wanting to ask for more time. Another thing that was a major factor in this situation was that my nervous system was already dealing with the loss of my father Just happened that day. There was already some fatigue there from caring from him, some grief there.

And the combination of that with. The small demand that I was experiencing just this question with the need to say something quickly was enough to overwhelm me. It didn’t take as much to overwhelm me. So as HSPs, we can get stressed by space. Demands being like our space, being impinged on when we’re tired or overwhelmed already or already dealing with a lot.

The other thing that can happen, and I think this happened to me, was getting into the other person’s business a little bit, feeling like I needed to in this case look good to the other person. I wanted them to think well of me. And that is something that EH HSPs can fall into. It’s not something that we have to fall into, but it can happen and it can make it even more complicated.

We tend to think about everyone in the room. And how, what do we do affects them? And then finally, another HSP trait that lined up here and made the perfect storm for me is that trait of reflecting and processing over time. And so I can continued to reflect deeply on this moment, and it just became bigger and bigger in my mind until I did some work.

So the key here is to learn how to recognize this and then to step in and break this vicious cycle of seeing something dwelling on it, and then it becoming more and then more, and then going around in a circle. And the way I did that was to first of all, look at what started the feeling of stress for me.

What was it about that situation that got to me? And I often find, we look at ourselves first, we look at our, we tend to blame ourselves or judge ourselves, but often what’s really starting things is what something someone else is doing, what I think someone else is doing. And if you can get honest enough to find that, it can really get to the core of what was causing the stress.

So in this case, I looked at what this undertaker had done to me, quote unquote. And my feeling was that she didn’t give me time to think things through. And that was the offense. That was what locked me into having to come up with this quick decision and having to and then not being able to back out of it.

So if you can identify that’s already 50% of it right there. If you can identify what it is you think started this for you. Who did something to you? What did something to you? What is causing you to feel this tension? Then that’s a great start. And then the next part of it is to actually question the thought itself.

She didn’t gimme time to think things. True? Is that really true? And I used the work of Byron Katie, which is four questions and turnarounds. It’s a great way to question a stressful thought and find a different way of looking at it. And so I saw that when I believed that thought. It made me act as if I had to be really decisive and really quick, and it made me defensive and it made me dependent on her to have done things differently.

Problem is she already did. It is done. It’s in the past, but when you get stuck on that, you’re thinking that they should change in the past in order for me to be okay. And so that’s an impossible. Where it turned around to is I don’t need her to give me time to think things through. I need to give myself time to think things through.

And it’s obvious from a intellectual point of view from, but from an emotional point of view, which is where I’m doing this inner work, I started to discover that I did have a choice. I could ask for time and say, Hey, what do you mean by that? Or, why do you ask? Or is this important? Or is there’s anything I should consider like asking the expert instead of trying to be the expert myself.

And so when I saw that I didn’t give myself time to think things through, it brought me out of the victim mode and feeling like I was a victim of her not giving me space and put me back into my own power and realizing that there were a lot of options. Now, of course, that situation is passed. It’s done.

There’s nothing I can do about it. But just seeing it that way, seeing that I did have options and seeing that those possibilities were there and that they could be used in the future, gives me a lot of feeling of empowerment. And that breaks the cycle of me being a victim and wishing that they had done it differently so that I didn’t have to go through this and wishing I had done things differently.

This whole goes into a big circle if you find that I. You actually had power and that next time you could use that and now you’ve learned from this experience, it suddenly is wow, thank you. This is a really cool experience for me to have and it gives me options in the future. So the feeling I’m left with today is that it’s never too late to find options and that finding the options even after the fact is actually empowering.

In this episode, we looked at. A personal story of overwhelm after my father’s death and why it stayed with me. We looked at why HSPs feel especially stressed when their space is invaded, even in subtle ways, even just by a question. And that is because we process things different, differently or deeply, and we need more time to do that.

And so we need to ask for that time. And finally, we looked at how inner work helped me find peace from within, and to meet future moments with more clarity and strength by seeing that I was more in the driver’s seat than I thought. So thanks for listening. It’s fun to share with you. And this podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Join me next time for Self-Compassion Wednesdays where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people. By exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.