Why Highly Sensitive People Feel So Internally Overheated and How to Come Back Into Balance

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why highly sensitive people can so easily become emotionally and physically overheated in modern life, and how simple forms of cooling and nourishment can help your nervous system come back into balance again. In this episode, you’ll discover why highly sensitive people often accumulate far more internal stress, stimulation, and

emotional heat than they realize. How m- modern life quietly pulls many highly sensitive people further away from true nervous system nourishment and recovery, and why simple forms of cooling, nourishment, and restoration can help highly sensitive people feel calmer, steadier, and more balanced again. This is an edition of Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

Think about what it feels like to be out of balance. Can be emotional reactivity that shows up, or it could be that feeling of being wired but exhausted, or just mentally overstimulated. It can even have that feeling of being cranky, don’t wanna do anything. Or there’s tension, physical tension, or your emotions are inflamed, or you’re just unable to settle.

There’s so many variations on imbalance, but oftentimes it’s interesting to think about these as a kind of inflammation, a kind of running too hot, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s physical, or whether it’s both. And many highly sensitive people slowly accumulate more and more internal activation without realizing how far out of balance the nervous system has drifted.

And it’s often not through just one dramatic event, but through constant accumulation. And especially in life the way it is today in our modern world, there are so many demands. There are so many people that we’re coming in contact with, each with their expectations. There’s so many jobs to do and to do well.

And so this pressure from outside can just heat up the system, both emotionally and physically, to the point where it starts to really feel bad. And as highly sensitive people, we notice that feeling u- usually more than other people, and we’re affected by it greatly One framework that I found very helpful over the years comes from Ayurveda, which is a traditional system from India that looks at how different qualities affect the body, mind, and nervous system.

And one of the ideas I understand from Ayurveda is that modern life can become very heating to the system, not just physically, but emotionally too. So thinking about that in terms of heat gives us just a different angle on how to look at imbalance when it comes up. It could come as overstimulation, just too much going on.

Heating in Ayurveda’s terms is thought of to be associated with transformation, with with actual change, with any kind of extra movement that is heating the body. So rushing around or being urgent all the time, like that kind of pressure, this is where the an- the f- high fire energy can start getting stronger and stronger.

Or emotional conflict, that’s a big one. Or multitasking or any kind of emotional intensity or pressure. Even screens are just constantly bombarding us with more and more things to look at. And what do we do as highly sensitive people? We process everything that we take in. So that processing, that is transformation, and that has an effect of heating the body a little bit more, heating everything a little more.

And so if you’re constantly processing more and more things in this modern world, you can end up feeling like you’re getting hot on a physical level as well as just overwhelmed on a mental and emotional level. So all of this contributes to activation and tension and internal heat So highly sensitive people process things deeply, and that means that everything that comes in has to be worked through, has to be processed thoroughly.

And this in itself is more work and in itself can allow for things around in our environment that are hard to process to get stuck in our processing machine and not get taken care of. And so they just keep looping around trying to get processed better. So over time, this accumulates, and what can happen is that your nervous system can end up staying on all the time, and this just keeps making the imbalance grow more and more.

Modern life is intensely activating. It is full of notifications, it is full of constant communication, it’s in full of emotionally charged media, and it’s full of productivity pressure and rushing and lack of transition time and emotional carryover and so many things like that. So as a result, HSPs rarely come down from activation, ’cause remember, we need more time to come down from activation.

We need more time naturally to process things because our nature is to process things thoroughly and to find the subtleties in everything. And so because of that constant bombardment, we get less time. We don’t get enough time to actually take care of and process the experiences that come in. Now, on top of that is emotional heat.

Emotions themselves can become heating, especially a- anxiety, anger, urgency, pressure, conflict, rumination. The body continues carrying this activation long after the moment ends, and this keeps the state in a heated position. Have you ever noticed how your body can sometimes heat up when you’re angry, for example, or when you’re embarrassed, for example, or when you’re just not happy about something?

There’s a heating that’s happening. And this heating can accumulate. It’s like a pot of water doesn’t boil instantly. It accumulates gradually. And many highly sensitive people live with a kind of constant low level stimulation with emotional pressure added on and activation and all of this. And so without realizing it, a lot of heat slowly builds up over time

So many HSPs are not just tired, they can be chronically activated, and that’s a different thing. It’s like you’re just always on with no chance to rest. And modern life just naturally sets this up for us. But when you go back to nature, when you go back to m- older traditions, they are interested in how can we bring a balance to that heating quality?

Heat is necessary. Heat is good. Transformation is good. Processing is good. All of these things are good, but too much is too much. So how do you introduce some cooling qualities? In Ayurveda, they have a concept called soma, which is describing experiences that are cooling and nourishing and replenishing and restorative.

It can be foods, it can be activities, it can be things in our environment, but these things tend to give nourishment as opposed to stimulation. These help the nervous system to soften instead of activating further. So the word soma is used in Ayurveda, and it’s a great word to bring in as a concept to think about, is this activity I’m doing increasing the fire the heating quality, or is it increasing the cooling quality?

And so that’s what we’re gonna look at here today. Modern life gives tons of stimulation, but not always nourishment. And a lot of times the nourishment that it gives is kinda like fake nourishment. Oh, s- you have some food, but it… and it tastes good, but it’s actually got a lot of poison in it because of the way it’s processed and the way that it was manufactured.

And so you’re going for nourishment, and you end up getting something that actually creates more imbalance, actually creates heat and imbalance on the inside, inflammation, for example So there are a lot of things that we can get fooled into, or we just don’t know how to take– how– we don’t know how to take care of ourselves because so many things are pointing us towards taking care of ourselves in ways that aren’t actually helpful.

So you might wanna take a break, for example, but then you sit on the break and you end up going on an endless scrolling period, and you end up consuming tons of content, which is putting your brain in overdrive instead of giving yourself a chance to settle and to get some quietness in the system.

Or you take a break, you’re even going on a vacation or a week- a weekend, and you end up multitasking, doing so many different things that you end up not getting any nourishment, not getting any rest. And then not to mention when emotions become intense or when you’re watching entertainment that is intense.

For example, you watch a movie and it’s nonstop flashing lights and loud noises and emotional content, and you feel like you’re more tense after watching the movie than you were starting it. So these are the things to look for. Notice when you’re going for relaxation and you’re actually creating more activation as a result.

Many highly sensitive people are undernourished at the nervous system level, not just tired, but under-restored, under-settled, under-replenished. We don’t need more stimulation or more optimization or more intensity. We need replenishment. So how can we do that? There are many ways to increase coolness in the body and in the system, and Ayurveda talks about some of these, and you can use your common sense to think about these as well.

One of them is sleep and nighttime. If you go to bed earlier, then you sleep during the time when coolness is maximum during the night. And Ayurveda recommends going to bed before 10:00 AM 10:00 PM and being up early as a result. They always say early to bed, early to rise, and so it’s the same thing from this culture as well.

Winding down, taking time for restoration, and allowing yourself to restore during the night is extremely helpful. Even if you don’t sleep, just lying quietly in bed at night with the lights off, it is nourishing Food is another area, and one of the things that can really help bring nourishment is to have freshly prepared foods that are just cooked right now.

You cook them yourselves. Vegetables, juicy vegetables, summer squashes are so cooling and nourishing and easy to digest as well. Juicy foods in general, fruits and less of the sour things, less of the heating things, less hot spices, more just like average spices. I love spices like cumin and coriander and fennel seeds and those kind of things that give a little bit of heat just to digest the food, but not so much that you start burning up.

If you start having a lot of chili or hot spices, it can aggravate the very thing that is already out of balance. So this is how you can start paying attention to everything around you, your food, how you sleep. Just being around water, for example, and swimming. If you can swim, that is such a cooling exercise and it’s it’s refreshing.

If you can get into some lake somewhere or some cool water, especially in the summertime, this can be extremely helpful for cooling the body. If you can’t, just taking a cool shower or a cool bath can be amazing for reducing heat, or even just washing your face with cool water. Water helps to absorb the heat and absorb the stress that it, that you have so that you can come back to balance.

This is nourishing. It’s the opposite of getting on your phone and scrolling as a way of relaxing, ’cause then dum- dive into a lake and see how you feel after that. And this goes more generally to be in nature. Nature, according to Ayurveda, is full of soma. The trees, the plants, that is exactly what soma is.

The moon, like walking in the moonlight, sitting against a tree. Just sit for a long time under a tree and read or just relax, do nothing. Get curious about the trees or get curious about the plants. Get to know them as friends even. In the Native American culture, they talk about tree people, and they are our elders.

They’ve been here much longer than us, so go to the trees and seek their wisdom. This is the kind of ways that you can get back in touch with nature and at the same time balance your system

Or just reducing input. Sometimes y- instead of just cooling, just having less activation can make a difference. Being around places where you have less noise or less urgency or less emotional intensity and where you’re consuming less content, and this can make a difference because that rest itself is nourishing Highly sensitive people often don’t come back into balance through more effort.

They come back into balance through replenishment. I just want you to think about that. How can I replenish myself? How can I

give myself something that is n- truly nourishing to myself instead of something that sounds like it’s entertaining, but it actually is stimulating more? So the feeling I’m left with today is that balance always comes from applying the opposite thing. If there’s too much heat, some cooling is needed.

This can be done by reducing exposure to things that are heating and stimulating, and by increasing exposure to things that are cooling and nurturing. It sounds simple, but it works. In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people often accumulate far more internal stress, stimulation, and emotional heat than they realize, and that’s because it builds slowly, and it becomes the new normal as you continue accumulating that.

But as you begin nourishing yourself, as you begin moving in the opposite direction, you will start to notice that, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how far out of balance I had become, and this is the joy of coming back to balance. We also looked at how modern life quietly pulls many highly sensitive people further away from true nervous system nourishment and recovery.

And it does this by tricking us, giving us things that look like they’re nourishing, but they’re not. My favorite example of that is a bag of Doritos. You eat a chip, and then y- you don’t feel satisfied. You want another one, and another. So it’s like an addiction rather than nourishment.

We’re tired. We need nourishment, and modern world gives us addictions. Okay, great. So be aware. And then finally, we looked at why simple forms of cooling, nourishment, and restoration can help highly sensitive people feel calmer, steadier, and more balanced again. And the key word is simple. Simple forms.

Just being in nature, just being in water, just eating some simple nourishing food that is natural. These things make a huge difference. They seem oh, they’re not gonna be much because we’re so used to these… this more dramatic approach of modern life. But what is needed to– the antidote to modern life is simplicity.

Come back to simplicity So thank you 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.