Why It Feels Hard to Keep Up for Highly Sensitive People and How to Find Your Rhythm

 By the end of this episode, you’ll see why highly sensitive people can feel like they’re falling behind, and what begins to change when you move at a pace that actually works for you. In this episode, you’ll discover why the feeling of being behind is so common for highly sensitive people. What keeps that feeling in place, even when you’re doing a lot, and what begins to change when you start seeing how your system actually works?

This is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person. As you look around, it may seem like other people are moving through life more easily. They’re getting more done, they’re handling more, and they’re moving faster.

And somewhere along the way, a quiet comparison starts to form. I should be able to keep up. Why does it feel harder for me? Why am I falling behind? And the strange part is you might actually be doing a lot. In fact, most highly sensitive, sensitive people are, that’s what comes with the territory of being a highly sensitive person.

You think deeply, you’re being thorough and you’re considering things carefully. Often it doesn’t register that way because what stands out is the pace. Things take longer for highly sensitive people. You need more space between things and you feel the impact of situations more strongly. So you need more time to process those.

And when you’re in environments that move quickly, the difference becomes more noticeable. Over time, it can start to feel like I’m slower than I should be, and that feeling can carry a lot of weight. It can also become something you start organizing your life around. You measure yourself against what others seem to handle, and this comparison is not actually fair.

You set expectations based on what looks normal around you. Even when it doesn’t match how your system actually works, and this can lead to pushing yourself to go faster, trying to match the pace around you, trying to keep up with others, with what others seem to handle, even when your system is already working at capacity.

What’s happening here has less to do with ability and more to do with how your system processes. Highly sensitive people take in more information. That’s just a given. They notice nuance, and that’s what our nervous systems are designed to do. I often say that you ask an average person to count from one to 10, they’ll just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

But if you ask a highly sensitive person to do so, they’ll go 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. In other words, there’s a lot more detail being seen. When you have a highly sensitive nervous system, you notice more. And on top of that, you process things more deeply. This is part of what is described in the DOES model DOES, which was coined by Lane Aaron and it, who she was the primary or uh, original researcher on, um, this HSP trade.

So D stands for depth of processing is the first one, first letter there. And it means that not only are we taking more information in, but we’re processing it more deeply. We’re looking at the connections between all the pieces of information. We’re trying to draw conclusions, look at implications, see what’s missing from the data set, and try to integrate what that means.

Try to connect it to old pieces of information, other experiences. What other people have said. These are the kinds of connections that highly sensitive people naturally do, and it gives us a certain superpower to be able to analyze things very deeply and to come to conclusions that others would miss because we’re so thorough.

In addition, we tend to feel things very fully, so we’re not only taking informa more information in, more data in. And then processing that data more thoroughly. But then we also feel things more deeply, which is the emotional responsiveness part of this DOES that I mentioned. That means that they feel close to us, they feel personal to us.

Conclusions we’re working with are not just intellectual conclusions. They’re related to, um, US on a very, uh, personal way, on an emotional level. So the combination of, of all of this, um, causes us to reach a point of overstimulation much earlier than others. This has been shown in the research and so when you move through your day, your system.

Is doing more in each moment than the other people who seem to be breezing through their day. We’re like this very thorough machine that processes everything that it comes across, whereas others, um, don’t have to, they’re, that’s not their specialization and so they can be moving quite quickly ’cause they don’t have to process things deeply the way we we do because they play a different role in society.

Than we do as highly sensitive people. So in each moment we’re processing more detail, we’re making more meaning, and we have more internal activity. And that takes time and it takes energy and it takes space. So when you try to move at the same pace as as someone else who isn’t processing at that level, it can start to feel like you’re constantly catching up.

Like, why am I going so slow? What we’re not noticing is that we’re doing more, we’re built to do more to process thoroughly for a reason. And so we can start feeling like we’re falling behind and that can make us feel bad. But what’s actually happening is your system is working differently, and when that isn’t understood, it often gets interpreted as I am not keeping up, which.

Can lead to more pressure and more pushing and even less space, and that tends to increase the overwhelm because your system doesn’t just need to keep going. It needs time to process what’s already happened. Time for things to settle, time to return to a baseline that feels clear again, because your system isn’t designed to move continuously at speed.

It naturally moves in waves, periods of engagement, followed by periods of rest. And when those cycles are shortened or skipped, then things will start to build up. Imagine this, you have a full day ahead, maybe nothing extreme, just a series of tasks and conversations and responsibilities. You move through the morning, you’re focused, you’re engaged.

Each interaction leaves a small imprint a bit to process a bit to integrate. You move into the next thing and then the next, and at some point you start to feel it, a slight pressure, a bit of fatigue, a sense that you need a pause, but instead of stopping, you keep going because the day is still moving and there are still things to do.

And this is where the feeling of being behind can start to deepen. Because now you’re not just moving through your day, you’re also trying to catch up with your own system, trying to stay on pace externally while your system is asking for space internally. And that gap creates tension. You can feel it in your body, a kind of pressure to keep moving even when part of you is asking for space, asking for rest.

It’s possible to approach this differently. You can start by reorganizing your actual rhythm. You might begin to notice when does my system begin to feel full? When do I need space? Even if nothing big has happened, and you began to allow for that short pauses, moments of nothing, space between things. You may also begin to question the pressure that you put on yourself to keep up the idea that you need to move at the same pace as others.

Because as long as that feels true, your system will keep getting pushed past what works for it. And this is where understanding this HSP trait is so valuable when you realize that we are built to run at a different pace. That we serve a different purpose in our society as highly sensitive people, then you can adjust for that.

It’s a matter of understanding and accepting that, and then the comparison doesn’t make sense anymore. People who are not designed as highly sensitive people are meant to go fast. They’re meant to, to zoom ahead and to be quote unquote productive in their particular way. Where we are meant to be quote unquote productive in our particular way, which is we’re interested and we’re focused on depth, whereas others are focused on speed and together we make a great team.

So understanding this is very helpful, and then you’ll find that often understanding is not enough, that there’s an emotional component as well that is still attached to being as fast as everyone else. And this is where inner work can help. So looking at thoughts like, I’m falling behind. I should be able to handle more.

I should be just like them, and gently questioning those thoughts, our own thoughts. Not just thoughts, but the thoughts that are connected to the emotion. That deep emotion is what’s driving it, but the thought is connected to it. That’s the handle on the emotion. When you begin to gently question that thought connected to that emotion, then that emotion begins to shift and open and soften.

So when the thought loosens and the emotion softens, then the pressure starts to soften, and then you can start to allow your natural pace to come in. Which is more sustainable and you’ll actually enjoy your work more. You’ll actually be more productive. You’ll still be engaged, you’re still moving forward, but you’re no longer working against your system by comparing it to a system that is not the same as yours.

And from there, something important changes. The feeling of being behind starts to fade and what’s left is a way of moving. That actually suits you. So the feeling I’m left with today is that comparison takes us out of ourselves and it’s really not fair. When we focus on the pace that works for us, we stay balanced and more, are more effective at the depth work that we specialize in.

There’s plenty of room on the team for others to run fast. Our job is to slow down and to do things well. That’s what we’re built for as HSPs. In this episode, we looked at why the feeling of being behind is so common for highly sensitive people, and we saw that it’s because we actually do work more slowly than others.

As highly sensitive people we’re built to work more slowly. We’re built that way for a reason so that we can do things thoroughly. We also looked at what keeps that feeling in place, even when you’re doing a lot, that feeling of being behind, and it’s because we are unfairly comparing ourselves to others who don’t share this trade.

Finally we looked at what begins to shift and change. When you start seeing how your nervous system actually works, what happens is you begin to naturally accept the way you are built and to be grateful for the way that you are built and for the unique role that you play. And what naturally starts to happen is that you stop comparing yourself to others.

So thanks for listening. It’s always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.