Why Highly Sensitive People Often Add Stress While Trying to Reduce Stress and How to Break the Cycle

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why so many of the things highly sensitive people do to reduce stress can accidentally create more of it, and what becomes possible when you begin recognizing the hidden pattern underneath. In this episode, you’ll discover why highly sensitive people often keep searching for better ways to manage stress, how that search can quietly become another source of stress itself, and how things can begin to feel different when you stop treating stress management like something you have to perfect.

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. Many HSPs approach stress management with the same conscientiousness they bring to everything else. The very qualities that make them thoughtful, responsible, and committed to growth can also make them vulnerable to believing that they should be able to do stress management well.

Most highly sensitive people care deeply about their wellbeing. We care because it affects us. When stress comes into our lives, it rocks the boat, and we like tranquility. We like peace. We like things to be in order. So when stress shows up, it makes perfect sense that we want to do something about it.

And we do. We read books. We listen to podcasts. We meditate. We try to improve our sleep. We try to eat better. We try to exercise. We may take supplements. But– and none of these things are bad. These are ways that you deal with stress. But the problem is that somewhere along the way, trying to reduce stress can quietly become another source of stress You can think of it almost like the project of feeling better, and this can literally become a project.

For some of us, it’s like a major project. And so when you’re dealing with projects, and it all depends on how you hold that project. What can happen is you can start looking for one more podcast or buying another course, or start wondering if meditation is working, or you start tweaking your morning routine, or you start changing your diet again, or researching supplements or optimizing sleep and wondering if you’re doing enough.

Maybe I haven’t found the right method yet. Maybe I need to be more disciplined. Maybe I should meditate longer. Maybe there’s another technique. So none of these things are bad. This doesn’t come from a place of weakness. It comes from a sincere desire to deal with stress, to do something effective, and there are effective ways of dealing with stress It’s this desire to take care of ourselves, and that is a beautiful intention So when we look at what’s going on here, it’s helpful to look at some examples.

For example, maybe you like listening to podcasts like this one, for example, and you hear an interesting idea and you write it down, and then another episode recommends a book, and the book recommends another practice, and then you have another teacher with a different approach. And so without realizing it, you’ve started collecting stress management strategies almost like you’re collecting tools in a garage.

You keep thinking, “Maybe the next idea will finally be the one that makes me feel okay.” And there’s so much out there. It’s infinite. It’s more being created all the time. And so it’s very easy to, in a way, get overwhelmed because you’re going from an in- desire to manage stress, and you’re starting to follow one thread, and that leads to another and then to another, and you can see how it bifurcates and spreads you out in a kind of thin way.

So your intention, instead of being concentrated, becomes dispersed. And that can be very stressful, especially if you’re attached to getting somewhere because now it’s like you’re, you tried to go somewhere and it’s just getting… you’re getting more and more spread out as you go Same thing with courses, right?

Maybe you’ve taken a mindfulness course or a nervous system course or something on breathwork or trauma healing or emotional regulation. All of these kinds of courses can be very helpful. I’ve taken many myself. But there’s an important question underneath. Are you learning because you’re curious or because a part of you believes that once you finally learn enough, then you won’t have to feel stressed anymore?

Those are very different energies. One has a certain kind of pressure. When I don’t wanna feel stressed anymore, there’s a certain subtle desperation in that. I need to break through. I need to find the answer. And that puts a pressure that is very different from the curious exploration of any subject Or take meditation, for example.

You may start wondering if meditation is working for you. And this can be one of the easiest traps of quietly turning meditation into another kind of performance. It’s so easy to do because a lot of meditation is taught in the context of gaining enlightenment, which we imagine is this perfect place where we have no stress whatsoever and we’re completely just yeah, completely stress-free.

So when you compare your meditation to these ideals or to your to other people or to what you read or anything like that, it can actually start making you feel more stressed. And so you may start judging your meditation. You s- may start thinking, “Okay, I’ve been meditating for five minutes. Am I any calmer?”

Or, “Why is my mind still busy?” Or, “I’ve been meditating for months. Shouldn’t this be working by now?” So notice what just happened. Stress just walked into the meditation. Now, the meditation itself has become a source of stress. Or we could say not the meditation itself, but my thinking connected to this meditation has become a source of stress.

Same thing goes if you’re tweaking your morning routine, which I’m always doing. Why not? It’s always interesting to find if there’s a even better way to have the morning go. And so maybe you try waking up a few minutes earlier, maybe you try cold showers, maybe you try journaling before meditation. Or then you think, “No, yeah, I think meditation’s better before journaling.”

Or, “Maybe I should have protein first,” or, “Maybe I should just have no phone in the morning. Maybe I need sunlight.” Again, none of these things are wrong. But after a while, what happens is that your morning starts feeling like a checklist that has to be performed correctly. And it’s like moving goalposts and moving s- like shifting sands.

Like, where is the solid ground? And so you’re not, you’re no longer beginning your day with just a simple, ideally thoughtless beginning. You’re now managing it. You’re now optimizing it. You’re now getting onto that project again, which is a very different kind of energy than just having a routine that works more or less for you, and you may adjust from time to time, but more or less, you don’t have to think about it.

Get up and then just get on to that process, that routine. Same thing for going to sleep at night. Many HSPs become experts on sleep, and you may be aware of different color of light, red light, blue light. You may be aware of temperature, trying to keep it cool in your room.

You may put– take magnesium, put magnesium cream on your legs, or you may study the sleep stages. You may invest in mattresses. You may use mouth tape or white noise. And all these things can genuinely help. But sometimes the pressure to sleep well becomes almost as stressful as sleeping poorly. So do you notice the pattern here?

None of these things are the problem. The problem isn’t meditation. It’s not courses or podcasts or sleep hygiene. It’s the quiet belief that if you can just get stress management exactly right, then you’ll finally be allowed to relax. If you’re rowing a boat and water starts leaking in, and say that’s the stress coming in, then it’s perfectly reasonable to scoop the water out.

But then what we can end up doing is that we can start worrying about whether we’re using the right bucket, and maybe another bucket would work, and we start researching buckets, we start thinking about it. And so this can become like an extra task in here when any old bucket would do just to get the water out of the boat.

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of bucket it is So the mind dislikes uncertainty. It dislikes discomfort. And as highly sensitive people, we’re very sensitive to discomfort. We don’t like stress. That’s why we’re interested in stress management. And so we naturally, whenever stress comes in, we start to ask ourselves “How do I get rid of this?”

And that question is not the problem at all. It’s a good question. The problem is when your mind begins treating stress like a puzzle that must be solved before you can relax. Be- y- you put stress management between you and relaxation. And so instead of simply experiencing stress, now you’re managing and measuring and evaluating and researching and comparing and optimizing.

And even these things are not bad. This is what we do as highly sensitive people. When we have a project, we evaluate, we research, we compare, we optimize, and that’s how we do a good job. I’m not saying any of that’s wrong. In fact, I do it myself. But notice how much mental energy that can require. And notice another thing, that stress management doesn’t have an endpoint.

It’s not like a finite thing of say, building a house or writing a book or doing something finite. This is a huge unending project because there’s new stress coming in all the time. So if you try to optimize that too much, you can end up on a infinite track that will just keep you revved up, in a way, optimizing beyond what is actually natural, and you can end up stressing yourself out, burning out on stress management.

It happens. So it becomes another part-time or even full-time job. And instead of reducing pressure, it creates another layer of pressure. Life creates stress, and then what you do with that is another thing. Your mind can end up creating stress about the stress. And that second layer often consumes more energy than the original challenge So the shift isn’t to stop meditating or stop exercising or stop learning.

Those things are amazing. They’re wonderful. They’re good. The shift is recognizing the energy behind them. So ask yourself, “Am I caring for myself? Am I getting a new mattress because I care about myself? Or am I using it to finally eliminate stress? Am I putting this extra pressure on there? Am I taking this course because I care about myself, because I’m interested?

Or am I trying to get the final breakthrough that will finally make me feel like I can relax?” Notice the difference. When I’m caring for myself, it feels spacious. When I’m trying to eliminate, just get to the final elimination and get to that perfection of stress management, then it feels urgent. One comes from kindness, the other comes from fear.

So sometimes the most stressful part isn’t the stress itself, it’s believing that I shouldn’t still feel stressed. That thought creates another battle, and that thought loops us into an easy trap for us as HSPs. Because we like to optimize, we can get caught in the trap of perfectionism, even in the area of stress management.

I got caught for years in the, “I have to get enlightened, I have to get enlightened. I’m not enlightened. I need to get enlightened.” That can drive you crazy. It can be a motivation on one hand, but it can be perfectionism on another, and you can end up getting so stressed out or feeling like your life isn’t fully there yet, can’t fully relax.

That’s not fun Sometimes what keeps the cycle going is that stress management has quietly become another thing to perfect. Ironically, the nervous system often begins to soften when it no longer feels responsible for getting stress management exactly right. There’s room to care for yourself without making your wellbeing another job to do perfectly.

And to do this, then this is a challenge, we have to become a little bit more comfortable with imperfection. And what I v- mean by that is with stress itself. If we try to eliminate it, then we’re almost asking the impossible. So what I love to play with is how can I be relaxed? How can I be okay even when stress still comes in and I still deal with stress?

This brings up that idea that stress could possibly coexist with peace. That I could be peaceful, I could be relaxed even when stress comes and go, even when pain comes and goes, even when imperfection is still there. This is the deepest level of where peace really exists, of where stress management really points, not in eliminating all of the actual stress points in our lives, which seemingly are infinite.

So the feeling I’m left with today is that as highly sensitive people, it’s easy to turn stress management into another source of stress. We love to optimize, and stress management is one of those things that we naturally care deeply about. But sometimes less is more, and sometimes holding our desires loosely helps In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people often keep searching for better ways to manage stress.

Part of it is our nature just naturally to look for how to solve a problem. And s- part of it can also be a certain pressure to eliminate that problem, and we can end up getting held hostage by that. We also looked at how that search can quietly become another source of stress itself, and that is when we try to perfect it, when we try to do the impossible, when we try to manage it so well as to prevent any possible future stress.

Great in theory, but in reality it can often create more stress in the process. And finally, we looked at how things can begin to feel different when you stop treating stress management like something you have to perfect. When you hold it loosely, when you, in a way, let go a little bit, that’s when things begin to soften.

That’s when stress can still come and go without it being something that feels like a failure or that I need to do more on. It’s “Okay, I’m gonna do my best with stress management, but I’m not gonna go crazy trying to get to the perfect ending there.” 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 Self-Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.