Why HSPs Feel They Need to Think Everything Through Before Moving Forward & How to Know When You've Thought Enough

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why highly sensitive people often feel the need to think things through so carefully before taking action, and how to recognize when a situation may not require as much certainty as you’re asking it to provide. In this episode, you’ll discover why highly sensitive people naturally spend more time thinking through situations before taking action, how the mind can sometimes apply high stakes standards to situations that don’t actually require that level of certainty, and how to recognize when you’ve gathered enough information to move forward and let experience teach you the rest.

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. Have you ever found yourself thinking about something for days or weeks or even months, trying to make sure that you’ve considered every angle before moving forward?

Maybe it’s a decision or a conversation, something that you’re deciding to purchase maybe, or maybe it’s a career change and you wanna weigh all the options carefully. Or maybe it’s a relationship, whether to start a relationship with someone or whether to end a relationship with someone, or some aspect of a relationship that you’re trying to figure out.

Maybe it’s a project and you’re trying to think carefully about it before starting in on the action phase. And a part of you keeps feeling, “I should think about this a little more first.” It’s not that you’re avoiding doing it. You really wanna do it. It’s not that you’re lazy or afraid in a way, but because you generally want to make a good decision.

You want to do the best thing, take the best action. This is a natural trait of being a highly sensitive person. In many situations, this is extremely useful, and it is something that we have this trait for a good reason. It is an evolutionary result of who knows how long it’s been going on, this kind of evolution.

But we arrive as highly sensitive people today based on the need for this kind of deep thinking When you look at what it means to be a highly sensitive person, one of the characteristics of the trait is called depth of processing. And this means that as highly sensitive people, we tend to think before we act.

We often ask ourselves, “What could happen if I take this direction? And then what could happen if I take that direction? And is there another direction that I haven’t considered yet that also is worth thinking about?” This is what the highly sensitive mind will naturally do, and this is an amazing trait.

We think about consequences. We think about, “What’s the result of an action that I take? And what am I not seeing? And how could this affect other people? And what are all my options?” I like to describe this as doing our trial and error in our minds before we do it in the real world. And I know myself, this is something I just do naturally.

I’ll think through all of the various options before taking an action, and I’ve already found the optimal one because I’ve really thought it through. I’ve done my due diligence. I’ve played out a scenario in each case of what the repercussions would be. I’ve thought about those things. This is what it means to have the quality of depth of processing, and this allows us to avoid a lot of errors, a lot of mistakes, a lot of pain.

We can just find the optimal solution in our minds first, do all that trial and error in our minds first, and then take the action. As they say, measure twice, cut once. That’s what we do as highly sensitive people, and this is a great thing The benefits of this is that we tend to make good decisions. It’s so– We get so good at this that it’s actually rare that we do something that w- wasn’t planned for, like that wasn’t an intelligent decision.

It gives us foresight, and it allows us to avoid mistakes. It’s actually rare. When you think about it, it’s funny. We’re so perfectionistic in certain ways, but when you really think about it, it’s rare that we make a mistake because we’ve thought it through before we took the action.

This is the benefit of being highly sensitive, having this quality of depth of processing, which allows us to prepare for act- for action and for activity in a way that avoids a lot of of mistakes or trial and error in the real world. So the goal of this episode is not to convince you to stop thinking things through.

This is your nature, it’s your birthright, and it is one of the greatest gifts of being highly sensitive All we wanna look at is where to use this trait and where it may be like getting overused. Always about balance. It’s always about balance. So the ability to think deeply is a strength. The challenge comes when that strength gets applied in situations that don’t require quite so much analysis.

So you can think of it as like some things are high stakes and some things are low stakes. Some situations need to be thought through very thoroughly and be extra careful about, and some don’t. If you think of an anal– of a, an airplane, for example some… If you’re working on an airplane, if you’re engineering an airplane, then you are going to need to take extra care.

This is when you’re going to check things, quadruple check, and double-check again, and just go back again. You can’t be too sure because people’s lives are riding on this. This requires an extraordinary level of certainty. That’s why everything in airplanes is done in duplicate. You have two, two pilots, two, two of everything.

In case one goes down, there’s still something that’s gonna continue flying the plane. So this kind of certainty is needed when you’re engineering an airplane or when you’re performing a surgery. The kind of double-checking that a surgeon must do, I don’t know I can imagine would be extremely precise and extremely careful and well thought through, and the planning ahead of time is thought through.

Or say you’re designing a bridge, for example. People are gonna be driving their cars across that bridge. If you don’t do the math right, if you don’t double-check everything, then the weight of a truck going over could be enough to bring the bridge down. Or like those bridges that the suspension bridges that started resonating with the wind, and then they broke up because of that factor.

So all of these things need to be considered when you’re dealing with something of that importance. Imagine if you were designing or managing a nuclear reactor. This kind of thing where one mistake can be detrimental to the whole planet. So extra analysis is super justified in situations like that But everyday life is different.

Many situations are not like this. For example, let’s say you are thinking about trying a new hobby. Yeah, the tendency as an HSP is to think it through, and again, nothing wrong with that. But notice where your mind may start treating this new possibility of doing a hobby like it’s engineering an airplane.

And now you’re trying to make it so airtight that you don’t make any mistakes and you land on the perfect hobby, and that it’s gonna be the one hobby that you stay with for life and no one’s gonna be disappointed or hurt or anything. That’s– that would be taking the idea of planning and thinking deeply we could say to an extreme, but actually it’s more just in, in a context where it’s not needed.

We’re doing overkill in this context. Same thing like with going on a date. You may try to get everything all figured out and make sure that you’ve done all the due diligence and make sure you’ve really thought through everything before going on a date when in reality that may be overkill for what the actual reality of the situation calls for.

Same with starting a project or even just sending an email. Like, how many times have you thought things through so much with an email that it becomes more than is actually needed in this case Or taking a class, trying a new routine or making some kind of modest purchase. These situations are often reversible, and that’s what’s not possible in an airplane.

If you messed up with the engineering and the airplane stops working, then it falls out of the sky and it’s, it crashes. So there’s no way to reverse that, other than trying to prevent it in the next airplane. So that’s a very different high stakes type of situation. Whereas if you mess up with a hobby, then you can reverse that and be like, “Oh, I’m not gonna do that.”

Or mess up with… y-you, you go out with somebody on a date, and it turns out that you don’t really like that person so much. That’s reversible. And we often think that they’re not reversible. Another interesting piece on that is that when we… the muscle of saying no or changing our mind or asking what we want is weak or underused, then it may feel like it is irreversible and that we have to only say yes.

If that’s the only word in our vocabulary, then it can be very daunting to go on a date because I better know ahead of time that this is the right person, otherwise I’m just gonna have to go all the way to the end of my life with that person. So this is where looking a little more closely and finding what is actually reversible and what isn’t reversible can make a huge difference.

Often what we think is irreversible is something that is just a weak muscle that could be trained and could be strengthened so that there is flexibility Often situations are self-correcting as well. So you start in one direction, say you start on taking a class in something, and then it turns out, eh, that wasn’t exactly what you were hoping for, but you run into another class, and that’s where you ended up going.

Or you find new ways of working with this that are what you’re looking for. So this kind of self-correcting is an important part that gets missed when we try to control everything ahead of time. So the mind can sometimes treat a reversible situation as though it were an irreversible situation. And one way of looking at this is instead of asking the question, “Have I thought about this enough?”

You might ask, “What level of certainty does this situation actually require? Is this a nuclear reactor or is this something of a lower stakes?” And this can often bring a perspective that helps you to know how much to keep pushing with the depth of processing and where to l-let it rest and just move into action.

Many HSPs are not trying to make perfect decisions. They’re trying to avoid preventable pain, and that’s understandable. That’s why we have the trait. Preventing pain is the benefit of acting. I’m sorry, of thinking before acting. But the problem is that life doesn’t always offer the level of certainty that we’re hoping for, and we can get stuck there trying to think our way through something that actually requires action.

Some information comes from thinking, and some information only comes from participation. It’s like studying a map. If you study a map, you will see all the places on that map, and if you zoom in, you can go even more into the details of what’s on that map. Maps are useful for this reason, especially if you’re thoughtful ’cause you can start making connections, you can start seeing things.

But eventually, you have to start walking. You have to get down onto the terrain that the map is describing, otherwise you don’t actually have the experience of what you’re looking at

So thinking can tell you likely outcomes. It can tell you the risks, it can tell you the possibilities, it can tell you the consequences. When you do this kind of trial and error in your mind, you can think about these things, you can see them, and you can find ways to avoid certain issues. But what thinking cannot tell you is how you’re gonna feel when you’re there.

It might give you an idea, but it may not fully give you the experience. It may not actually be able to tell you what you’re a- going to learn there. There’s too many unknowns. You’re not gonna know, for example, what opportunities will appear, say, by going on a particular date or by taking a particular class.

Who knows what else is going to appear out of the unknown in that experience that you can’t predict, you can’t think through, you can’t plan for. And so this is the unknown factor, which is– which requires us to put aside this planning aspect, which is again, our gift, and in certain situations, move forward even without knowing what’s going to happen and getting into it so that we can start learning what actually is gonna be presented there.

And so sometimes unexpected benefits can emerge from something that we’re just jumping into without fully knowing. Many situations become clearer through participation, not through more analysis. So a useful question can be: Do I genuinely need more information here, or am I hoping for a level of certainty that this situation cannot provide?

Or you can ask yourself, if this turns out imperfectly, how recoverable is it? This often reveals the actual stakes. Many everyday decisions are surprisingly recoverable, and life is often more forgiving than the mind assumes So highly sensitive people often think carefully because they care. That is not the problem.

The challenge is that some situations require careful analysis and others require participation. Thinking can help you move wisely, but it cannot eliminate uncertainty. And sometimes the next piece of information you’re looking for isn’t available through more thinking. It’s available through experience.

So the feeling I’m left with today is there’s nothing wrong with thinking deeply and responsibly about things. This is our gift as highly sensitive people. But as with everything, there is a balance. When we choose which things to go deeply into and which things need less thinking, we free up our precious resources for the things that matter most In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people naturally spend more time thinking through situations before taking action, and that is because we are wired that way.

We have a natural depth of processing that allows us to think things through before actually taking action. And this is a gift, and it allows us to avoid a lot of pitfalls as a result. We also looked at how the mind can sometimes apply high stakes standards to situations that don’t actually require that level of certainty.

And I just love the analogy of being an airplane engineer and making those kinds of decisions and doing that kind of preparation versus the kind of preparation you need for most everyday kinds of situations. And finally, we looked at how to recognize when you’ve gathered enough information to move forward and let experience te- teach you the rest.

And I think this is just such an important point to hold. There’s a balance. There’s a value in thinking ahead, and there’s a value in plunging in. And so we need to, as highly sensitive people, use a little more of the plunging in side because we tend to be… can get caught in the overthinking. We can call it overthinking.

Not necessarily overthinking. It’s a depth of processing. So it only becomes overthinking if it gets us into a stuck place where we’re not able to act at all. So play with this balance between thinking ahead and just jumping in as best you can, and sometimes there’s a little bit of both happening when you find that balance.

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.