Why HSPs Lose Their Joy Trying to Do Meaningful Things Perfectly and How to Create from Joy Again

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why pressure quietly replaces joy for so many highly sensitive people, and how to reconnect with the energy that makes meaningful work feel nourishing again. In this episode, you’ll discover why meaningful things often become the very places where highly sensitive people feel the most pressure, what happens when perfectionism quietly replaces joy, curiosity, and connection, and how to reconnect with a more alive, inspired, and joyful way of creating and contributing This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.

Think of something that you enjoy doing. Maybe it’s a hobby, maybe it’s something you like learning. Maybe it’s music, or maybe it’s photography, or painting, or writing. Maybe it’s having your own business. Maybe it’s doing projects well. What is it that gives you satisfaction? What do you enjoy doing? If you think of one of those things, you will find there’s joy in that naturally.

For me exa- for example, one of my hobbies is learning French. I’ve been doing that for the last, I don’t know, seven, eight, 10 years, and I love learning languages. I love learning period. But there’s something fun for me about learning a language and going deeper and getting more proficient and being able to connect with people in a way that I…

was impossible without learning that language. So this is the joy of diving into something that you like doing. And usually when this happens, you’ll feel that there’s a lot of energy, there’s a lot of interest, you care about it. You’ll shift back to that whenever you get a chance. When you have a spare moment, you’ll be looking for that.

And this is the joy of life. But what can sometimes happen is that it can start to change a little bit over time, and you may notice that what started out as joy, what started out as enthusiasm, can start to have a certain kind of pressure on top of it. And this is where stress starts to come in. Now, the same situation for me learning French or something can start to feel like, “Oh, I need to do…

I need to work harder. Th- I’m not good enough.” And now the joy just went down about five notches. Or you may find yourself trying to be more meaningful, trying to be deeper, trying to be more impressive and… or just trying to be very precise and excellent at what you’re trying to do. And while this is fine to a certain degree, there’s a certain balance point where it tips a little too far into the trying camp and leaves the joy area And so you may find yourself redoing things multiple times, keep adjusting, like beating yourself up for not doing it as well as you could be doing.

And what you’ll find is that same thing that you used to run to, like any spare moment, you’ll find yourself avoiding because it’s no longer f- as much fun. You’ll start delaying finishing a project or you’ll start putting off taking i- interest in whatever it is that normally you would be interested in, and you may feel a kind of heaviness while you’re doing it.

The thing is, usually this is not because you stopped caring. I’ve been through phases in my learning of French, for example, where I actually stopped for a while, and that can be healthy, and that’s good. But it’s usually not because I stopped caring. It’s usually because I, I started putting a little too much importance there, or I started feeling a little too invested in it, and that started to drain the energy, and it stopped being something that gave me energy and started being something that took energy from me.

So this is how caring can quietly turn into pressure As a highly sensitive person, meaningful things will naturally matter deeply to you. We are built that way. Highly sensitive people are built to look for meaning, to go into things in depth, and to do things that align with our joy on the inside. And so we care about things probably more than most people care.

And we don’t want to do things carelessly. We want to do things with integrity and with alignment. We want to make things– do things in a beautiful way. We want to make a contribution that makes some kind of difference. And all of this is the natural result of the gift of being sensitive because meaningful things matter emotionally, and emotional things are what are most important to us as highly sensitive people.

It just goes with the territory. If you remember the definition of what it means to be a highly sensitive person according to Elaine Aron and the researchers, it’s D-O-E-S. D for depth of processing, O for tendency to get overwhelmed because of all of the stimulation and the sensitivity, and then E for emotional, being emotional and empathetic, which is natural for us, and then S is just sensory sensitivity.

So when all of these things come together in the personality and temperament of a highly sensitive person, we will naturally be attuned to emotion both in others and in ourselves. But what can sometimes happen is that we can get so attuned to other people’s emotions or so attuned to what we think is important in doing a good job that we can end up getting a little bit perfectionistic.

We can end up getting a little more stuck in worry about what other people will think, and the fear factor comes in So a project, for me, just a simple project which has some no endpoint to it of learning and improving my French can s- suddenly become like some kind of identity. I have to be really good at this, or I need to pass the tests and become, a pro.

I need to be able to be dropped into a French-speaking country and speak it perfectly without anyone even knowing that I’m not French. That’s perfectionism. Of course, I can never speak a n- a native another language as well as my native tongue unless I’m, like, making that my full-time profession or I lived there for a long time.

So this added pressure of trying to be someone that I’m not, that’s when the joy starts eroding. That’s when the pressure starts building and I start trying to prove myself. Notice this. When I’m trying to be something that I’m not or that I’m not yet, then I try hard to prove that I am that.

It’s such an ironic thing. We’re trying to fake it, basically. And this for me is the actual core identity of what an ego is. Ego is, for me, one simple way of thinking of it is who I’m pretending to be. So I’m pretending to be a native French speaker. I’m not. So now I have to prove it. I have to try harder, I have to learn more verbs or I have to work on my accent.

I have to get it perfect. And this is how this idea of trying to be something can turn into a pressure and make it about your self-worth and make getting approval so important and fear of failure so important, and that’s how we go from something that’s naturally joyful, I love learning, I love languages, to something that is stressful and pressured.

I need to get it right. I need to do a great job. I’m never gonna be good enough. And where’s the joy in that? It changes the emotional energy completely. So this is a common pattern, stress pattern that highly sensitive people can fall into. It’s not a part of being highly sensitive. You can be highly sensitive and be fully in the joy mode without putting pressure on yourself.

But when ego comes in, when fear comes in, when these stressful ideas start showing up in your situation, then that’s when the joy starts to reduce and that’s when the pattern begins So the m-main thing to pay attention here is there’s joy energy and there’s pressure energy. And joy energy has to do with curiosity and playfulness and connection and experimentation.

You cannot experiment when you’re under pressure ’cause there’s too much pressure. If I make a mistake, I’m gonna crash the whole thing down. So joy has lots of space for experimentation and play and just curiosity and going down this road and seeing where it goes, and then turning around if it doesn’t go anywhere.

There’s a lot of freedom in that joy energy, whereas pressure energy is constricted. It’s tight, and you’ll feel it in your body. There’s a tightness there in your body. It’s based around fear, it’s based around urgency, and it’s based around self-monitoring. And so the attention goes to trying to be somewhere ahead of where I actually am, being a- being ahead of my own evolution as Byron Katie likes to say.

Way up there trying to be someone that I’m not, and that gives me all kinds of undue stress as well as emotional heaviness. So many highly sensitive people think the problem is I need to care less. “Oh, I care too much. I care too much.” Highly sensitive people, we care. So maybe I care too much.

Basically, this is like saying, “I’m too sensitive. There’s something wrong with me.” The old like what everyone has taught us from day one, “You’re too sensitive. There’s something wrong with you.” So you should care less, and you should just go for less. That’s not our nature. There’s nothing wrong with caring.

The problem is not caring. We don’t need to change our nature and care less. But the problem is that fear has become tangled into caring, and that is a problem because fear is… has nothing to do with caring. It’s an additional stressful kind of poison in a way that mixes into the caring and messes it all up So when fear enters, then you start getting pressure.

And when pressure comes in, everything changes. The work becomes slower, becomes harder, becomes more draining. You start procrastinating more, you start avoiding more, you start overworking more ’cause you’re trying to push to get there. And ironically, the more meaningful something feels, the harder it becomes to move naturally inside it.

This is the place where we get caught as highly sensitive people. We care about meaning. We care about doing things that are important. And so when we get into that, we can sometimes get caught in the idea that we have to do a really good job because this is really important, and you can end up putting a lot of undue pressure on yourself and removing that freedom to be creative and to explore and to experiment.

So eventually, what happens is that your creativity will start to shrink, and your spontaneity will start to disappear, and your joy will start to fade, and exhaustion will start to grow. What once felt alive starts feeling emotionally high stakes. It starts to feel like a big deal, and you better not mess it up.

This is when you know that you’ve left joy, and you’ve now entered into the domain of pressure. You’ve left your creative, natural, highly sensitive nature, and you’ve moved into the world of stress, which is now sitting on top of your nature and constricting it So what most people do when this happens, strangely enough, is I’ve done it myself, is we push harder.

We try to motivate ourselves more aggressively, and so we start doing the very thing that puts even more pressure, that actually makes it even worse. We try harder. Or we start comparing ourselves and we start seeing “Oh my gosh, they’re doing it so much better. Look how good theirs is, and then look how bad mine is.”

And then the joy just moves out of our hearts so quickly. We just deflate when we do that. Or we sometimes will wait until inspiration returns, and so we just put off and put off. And sometimes it does return. In some ways, this can be a good strategy. But often what happens is you just lose interest and then the very thing that you wanted to do never ends up getting done.

And then you can end up criticizing yourself for procrastinating. But none of these approaches address the actual issue, which is that the emotional energy is… there’s an emotional energy underneath the work, and you can’t sustainably create from a place of chronic pressure. Creativity requires that spark from inside, that energy from inside.

And if you’re not feeling it, then all the pushing and trying and pressurizing in the world isn’t going to help. So we have to get back in touch with the spark in order to go forward It’s if you’re trying to dance while clenching every muscle in your body. You can imagine, like trying to do that, trying to do a really good job.

The tighter you get, the harder it becomes to move naturally, and you start tripping, you start missing, you start making mistakes. Not that you’ve lost the ability to dance, you may be a good dancer, but because the pressure has interrupted the flow. You have to be loose to dance, and you have to be loose to create, and you have to be loose to do things well So joy needs some openness in the nervous system

So the goal is not to stop caring. The goal is to stop confusing pressure with purpose. Pressure is not proof that something matters. “Oh, this is so important. Oh my gosh, I better hold it tightly.” That does not… That is not the same thing. You can do something extremely important and be holding it loosely.

That’s where joy and responsibility can meet in the same place. Fear is not the same thing as commitment, and heaviness is not necessarily depth. We confuse these stressful versions of emotions with the real thing. Fear is just fear, and heaviness is just heaviness. Depth, we tend to think, “Oh, if I’m doing something deep, then it must be heavy.”

W- why not do something deep and have it be joyful? Why not do something important and have it be joyful instead of full of fear? So sometimes the most aligned work and the most effective work actually feels simpler, lighter, more honest, and more alive So you can ask yourself, where or what energy am I creating from right now?

Is it coming from joy or is it coming from pressure? Not, is this perfect or will everyone approve or is this impressive enough? Those are pressurizing thoughts. But does this feel connected and alive and honest to me? Notice where the attention is. It’s on me and on the work, not on everyone else who you think may be watching.

This is the bridge back to curiosity and playfulness and permission to explore and creativity and joy

And if you’ve noticed that meaningful things have slowly started feeling heavy for you, or feeling pressured, or have become emotionally exhausting, I’ve created something to help. It’s called the Joy Versus Pressure Clarity Guide. It’s a short little PDF that will guide you to go back and find your joy again.

It will help you recognize when perfectionism has replaced joy and reconnect with a more aligned and creative and that nourishing energy inside of you, that spark that actually makes it all work. So if you’re interested, you’ll find it in the show notes. Just click on the first link you find or go to trueinnerfreedom.com/joy-pressure, and I’ll send it right over.