How Solitude Can Help Highly Sensitive People Heal from Burnout and Feel Joy Again

 By the end of this episode, you’ll see why regular solitude isn’t just a luxury for highly sensitive people. It’s a lifeline back to clarity, calm, and joy.

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 how one Quiet Sunday alone helped me reconnect with myself in a way I didn’t even know I needed. Why? Solitude can be deeply restorative for HSPs, even if you’re not an introvert. A gentle way to start reclaiming time alone without guilt shutdown down or isolation. 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.

Life piles one thing on top of another, it’s just the way it goes. When I look back for the last, I don’t know, three, four months, I see how there was some work stress, then I had to go care for my dad before he died. Then there was death and dealing with that. Then travel and catching up on work again when I got home.

And all this, while my business is going through some growth and changes that require a lot of creativity and deep thinking, what can happen and what happened to me is that a little bit of burnout starts to come in. If you’re a highly sensitive person, it’s easy to reach the point of burnout, and as I mentioned in the last episode, number two 70, burnout starts by showing subtle signs.

It’s not always like the full on thing. It gives you clues before it actually arrives. You might notice, for example, that you’re just constantly tired even after you rest or small things start to feel overwhelming. Or you start snapping or withdrawing from loved ones, or your creativity starts to dry up, or you feel like you want to get away, keep fantasizing about escaping, and then even the things that you love may start to feel heavy or just not as interesting.

These are all the little subtle signs and maybe not so subtle signs that burnout is starting to happen. And like I said, as HSPs, we have a lower T threshold. So that means that we reach the state of burnout much quicker than other people. And it’s not our fault. There’s nothing wrong with getting to that point.

It just means that life came at us really hard and we got overwhelmed and it happens to the best of us. When we think about escaping and fantasize about escaping. We’re really not that far off the mark if you think about it. What I did recently was escape for a day, and it was somehow just lucky the stars somehow aligned.

It was hot, there was too hot for the dog to walk after lunch. I had just gotten a new book and it was actually a physical book. I usually read audio books. I usually read in like 30 minute stints while I’m doing other things, preparing breakfast or decompressing at the end of the day.

But I had a book that I wanted to read and it just felt like a, somehow, like a treat that I wanted to explore. And so what I did is just after lunch, I went and got on my little daybed and. Started reading and it was amazing. I was just turning pages and getting deeper and deeper into it, and I could see that I had the whole afternoon and a lot of times I have things planned.

There’s little interruptions. There’s a lot of things that I would like to be doing or that other people would like me to do. And I somehow just dove in and it was magical. It reminded me of being in college where I would spend the day in the library reading and studying, and it just felt like I, I love to learn and I love to go deep, and I love to be in a an environment like that.

And it just gives me energy. So this was my way of being alone, of escaping, if you will, but I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t have to spend any money. I didn’t have to do anything. I just went into my room and escaped there. And then what happened is I felt refreshed. I felt like more like myself afterwards.

The end of that day, I was like, oh, I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. I didn’t even remember that. I wanted that because. It’s something that’s so rare that I would have a block of time, like 4, 3, 4, 5 hours for myself as opposed to just a, short little bit here and there. So when I did that, it felt like I went into another universe and I wasn’t having to make decisions.

I was having to balance people. I wasn’t having to balance opposing things or fit things together, competing. Compete comp, things that were competing for my time or just complex ideas. There’s none of that was on my plate. It was me going in another direction. And what happened was a part of me rested, a part of me relaxed.

A part of me that was on duty for many months started to let go. And this is important for highly sensitive people because. We all need solitude. You don’t have to be an introvert to need solitude. HSPs, 30% of HSPs are extrovert, but because of the depth of processing that we have just naturally as highly sensitive people, we need restorative time and solitude is one of the best ways to get that.

Basically overwhelm is caused by too much activity, too much thinking, too many decisions to make, even too much creativity. If you’re always thinking about how to optimize something and how to do something in a really good way, it can use up a lot of bandwidth. It can use up a lot of energy.

Your brain can actually get tired and your body as well. Same with people. If there’re too many people, too many interactions, too many roles to play, these take energy. And especially as highly sensitive people, we want to do a good job. We’re tuned into the subtleties of these interactions with other people.

And so for us to be playing these roles and interacting with people. We often use more energy than other people, and that’s just our nature. And it’s not a bad thing because we actually do really well. We actually can excel in the subtle aspects of human interaction. But all of this can add up to overwhelm because it’s too much, too many things, too many moving parts.

And so the opposite of complexity and the opposite of too much. Is simplicity or just doing one thing or just being with one person, and that one person ultimately is you. If you are just with you, there is a simplicity built into that. You’re not just thinking what you think and then seeing how that interacts with somebody else and then finding a compromise and then deciding whether you’re, how.

Much of a compromise you’re gonna give. Like none of that is there when you’re alone, when you’re with yourself, it’s just you. And there may be fatigue there. There may be need for balance there, but you’re able to listen more to what that is. You may have interests there, and those start to surface when there’s no one around that you have to bounce it off of.

There’s no one that you have to get approval from. And sure it’s great if you can be with other people and not be seeking approval. That’s like the ultimate, but if that’s not where you’re at, then having time alone will give you a chance to be back in the space where you don’t have to seek approval for a while.

And that is so restful. That is nourishing and it is the antidote to overwhelm and burnout.

So I also like to think of solitude, for me means not working. It’s like not the time for projects or doing something that where I have to be making a lot of decisions. Again, I’m engaged in the outer world, whereas. When I’m alone, if I’m really going with the idea of being alone, I’m going to be quieter.

I’m gonna be with myself doing something simple, probably. And so a gentle way to start reclaiming alone time is to think about how can you just take a few hours, maybe just one day, maybe just one afternoon. And for me it was just four or five hours. It wasn’t completely un uninterrupted. I still had a couple interruptions, but I just came right back to it.

That’s a nice amount of time to get a feeling of connection with yourself again. So what I encourage you to do is decide on what you wanna do. What is it something that you would like to enjoy doing? Maybe be in nature. Maybe you go to the beach or maybe you go for a hike alone. Or maybe you just.

Have a little cabin that you can go to and be in for a day or for half a day, or maybe it’s just to be in your room, have with a door closed, and just having time alone by yourself there. Maybe you like to go to a library somewhere where you enjoy being, where it’s quiet, where the whole ambiance is around.

Study or quietness or being, doing individual alone things. So whatever it is, ask yourself like what draws you, what would feel balancing to you, what would be interesting to you, and then see if you can create it. Then equally important is to negotiate a time where you can do this so that you can feel free to be alone.

Obviously we live with other people, we interact with other people. There’s other people in our lives in different ways, even if you live alone. And so you may need to just carve out some time by talking with somebody and saying, Hey this is what I’m thinking to do. Would this be a good time? Can I hand over some of my responsibilities to you for this time?

And create a time where you are actually free to enjoy yourself? I also find like screens are not my favorite way of spending alone time. They draw me out or draw me into their world and it often feels like I’m getting drawn out again instead of coming back to myself. And as I mentioned, doing projects or doing work that just is more decision making, which is the same feeling of the things that contribute to overwhelm.

So I like to think of this as a time for rest. I may be doing some quiet activity, but basically I’m resting. Rest is what uncovers your joy. Again, the more you rest, the more you accumulate rest, the more in touch with the joy that is naturally there, you will be. The opposite of burnout is rest. So favoring that and doing it in a way that can be sustainable.

Even if it’s for a short amount of time, that gives you a full taste of it, but allows you to be alone, allows you to really dive in and listen to yourself. This is what I find to be super nourishing as a highly sensitive person. So the feeling I’m left with today is that it’s not impossible to create some alone time for yourself.

I think we as HSPs naturally are drawn to alone time. But life plays tug of war with us, and it may seem like the rope is getting pulled in the opposite direction, but it’s not impossible. I think first of all, we just have to see the value of it. It is the antidote to overwhelm, and we have to carve out time for it.

We have to talk with others and ask for support for that. In this episode, we looked at how one Quiet Sunday alone helped me reconnect with myself in a way I didn’t know that I even needed. And sometimes by just doing it, you find out, oh, that’s what I needed, and that was my experience. We also looked at why solitude can be deeply restorative for highly sensitive people, even if you’re an introvert, because solitude allows for more rest, and rest is the antidote.

For overwhelm, for burnout, and the more you can give that to yourself, small ways is great, but even bigger chunks can be super helpful. And finally, we looked at a gentle way to start reclaiming time without guilt and shut down or isolation. And we saw that even just taking an afternoon can make a big difference in the feeling.

If you’ve ever been on a vacation where you went away. And it’s like you forget what you were doing when you were there. You know when you’re, before you went on vacation and when you come back it’s like you have a different perspective. Even a short vacation, half a day can give a taste of that feeling, let alone you of course could do longer periods of time as well.

So thanks for listening. It’s great to explore this important concept for us as HSPs. And I am walking in the same path with you, and it’s nice to know that we’re not alone in this. 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.