Anxiety Overload: Stress Management
Strategies for Highly Sensitive People

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover the root cause of anxiety and practical strategies for reducing it.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host Todd Smith, a certified facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover the root cause of anxiety and how to reverse it, three methods for reducing anxiety that you can use on a daily basis, and why being highly sensitive does not mean you have to experience anxiety.

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.

If you’ve ever experienced anxiety, you know the feeling of it. There’s a tension there, the mind is agitated, you can’t settle down, and it feels stressful. Anxiety is something that many of us live with, and it’s something that can come up. And it’s something that is worth looking at to see how to reduce and keep as low as possible.

So let’s think about what causes anxiety. If you think of your own experience, you probably notice that you get anxious when you can’t control things. When there’s something in the future that you can’t do any actions on now, or you don’t have any control over what the outcome is going to be. Or, when you’re around other people and you’re not feeling comfortable with them, then anxiety can come up.

You can’t control how other people are going to act with you, interact with you, you can’t control if they’re going to judge you, none of that. So, this element of not being able to control things is part of what causes anxiety.

I sometimes like to think of it as the mind is stuck in the outward direction. But for whatever reason, the mind is looking outward, and outward is where the least amount of control is. So when I’m looking outward, and I’m waiting for somebody to accept me in order for me to be happy, if they’re not doing it, I can start feeling anxious. Or if I’m working on a project and I’m waiting for something to happen so that it’ll be successful, it can cause anxiety.

Anxiety can also be caused by just overload, overwhelm, as we HSPs know very well. Everything may be fine, but the sheer quantity of things that I’m trying to manage may start to overwhelm the system.

And then what happens is the mind becomes a little smaller, a little less focused, or a little less expanded is the word that comes to mind—where your ability to solve problems becomes less, your ability to think rationally becomes less. Emotions start to come up, and panic may start to arise.

So in all of these situations, the mind is getting involved with all of these things outside, which are too much for it or that it can’t control. And this produces the experience of anxiety.

What is missing from the experience of anxiety is more connection on the inside. When I’m inside, when I’m connected inside, even when I go outward with things that I can’t control around me, there is not an experience of anxiety. Because there’s something, I’m rooted in myself. I’m connected to myself.

I know who I am to some degree when I’m involved with other people, when I’m involved with different projects and things I can’t control. When I’m involved with even too many things.

Now, of course, there are physical limits to how much you can be exposed to before you can’t handle it. Everyone has a limit, and as highly sensitive people, that limit shows up early. We have to be aware of it and work within those limits.

But the idea is if you can stay connected within yourself somehow, the experience of anxiety is going to be less.

So I’d like to think about three possible ways of reducing anxiety that you can use on a daily basis. One of them I talk about all the time on this podcast is called The Work of Byron Katie. And I love it because it always points me back into myself.

It takes whatever I’m thinking and believing about the world around me and invites me to explore that and kind of find turnarounds that point me into seeing my side. Like seeing where I actually still have control. Seeing where my happiness is dependent on things inside of me, not just on the external.

And that can be very freeing, that can be very transforming, because suddenly that person doesn’t have to change, that project doesn’t have to be successful, I don’t even have to get what I want on the outside in order to be content, happy, peaceful on the inside.

So this is a meditative process, and it works because it points us back to ourselves, points us towards taking responsibility for ourselves and for our own happiness. And it does this in a very gentle way that doesn’t take it too far where you start to beat yourself up, and that is also going to be stressful.

If you can move gently on an experiential level back to where the power lies, where the energy sits, then that is going to reduce anxiety. And that’s been my experience and the experience of many clients I’ve worked with over the years. When you do the work, anxiety reduces.

When you get clearer on a specific situation, your anxiety goes down a little bit. And then, you may start to notice that it transfers over to other situations, and they become less anxiety-producing. And as anxiety becomes less and less, it starts to be familiar. This is like our natural state—to be not anxious. And so that becomes the natural; we come back to ourselves and become more naturally set up in that place.

Another way of reducing anxiety that I use on a daily basis, I use the work of Byron Katie on a daily basis, or almost daily basis. Another one that I’ve been using since I was a little boy, since I was six years old, and I used it all through high school, college, my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now into my 50s, is something called Transcendental Meditation.

This is an amazing meditation practice. And it also brings you back into yourself. What it does is it allows the mind to naturally begin to settle down into its restful state. The mind wants to go out, try to solve problems, try to deal with people, and it gets confused, overwhelmed, and has trouble settling down.

It just kind of gets in these little loops of trying to fix problems on the outside. And, of course, anxiety is the experience.

When you do this technique of sitting with your eyes closed, 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, and you practice this very effortless mental technique, it allows the mind to naturally, by its own nature, settle down.

And it starts to experience finer and finer levels of thought. Like, it begins to experience the subtler, quieter ways of thinking. And this is a very experiential thing as well, that’s why it’s a meditation. But the effect is, you feel expansion in your heart, you feel happiness in your heart. I always look forward to my meditation practice because it’s going to expand my heart.

You also feel more grounded and there’s this connection to yourself on the inside. That can serve you throughout the day when you go out dealing with the particulars of daily life.

This meditation is well researched. I think there are, I don’t know, hundreds of research studies about Transcendental Meditation. And I’ve been doing it consistently for many, many years now, many decades.

There is a study specifically on anxiety, which I can point out to you. It was a Stanford University meta-analysis, which looked at 146 independent studies and found that the TM technique was twice as effective at reducing anxiety compared to other meditation techniques.

So it works. It’s a very powerful technique.

There was another study on the decrease of severity in psychological distress. It was a 2016 study published in Military Medicine, and it demonstrated that the TM practice is a powerful treatment for psychological distress and other symptoms of PTSD.

There have been studies on lowering cortisol, improving focus with people with ADHD, and just reduction in PTSD.

One interesting study showed that 50 percent of veterans participating in the study no longer met the criteria for having PTSD after practicing the TM technique for three months, as compared to 10 percent of those receiving standard therapies.

So this is what I call my second engine on the train. I use the work of Byron Katie and I use Transcendental Meditation, and these two complement each other beautifully. And it can be super powerful for reducing anxiety on a regular basis.

As highly sensitive people, reducing anxiety on a daily basis is really helpful because we have a low threshold. Anxiety can pop in quickly because we’re so sensitive. So having something to clean it out on a regular basis keeps that anxiety from building up and overwhelming the system.

I’ll mention one other method you could say, it’s free and easy for everyone, and that is to be out in nature.

Being in nature connects you to yourself again. It’s simple, it’s easy, it brings joy. It’s universal. And it also is the practice of just quieting things down. You’re no longer involved with the busyness of the day. You’re no longer involved with social interactions.

It’s quiet. And maybe there is some social there, if you’re with other people. It just settles everyone down. Getting in water is another one—that’s also nature. Being in the woods, going for a walk, being outdoors. This can help in reducing anxiety.

And of course, we can’t ignore the things that sometimes prevent us from going inward and being comfortable inside ourselves. Often there’s trauma, often there are wounds from previous experiences. And those are also important to be addressed and should be addressed.

You can work with a therapist on that. You can do the work of Byron Katie. It can be very effective in dealing with different types of stresses that were caused from depression, different kinds of traumatic experiences in the past.

It’s often helpful to work with somebody instead of doing it on your own, but it can also be done as well on your own.

So there you have it. These are some interesting, powerful methods that I use to help counteract the effect of anxiety.

I want to leave you with the thought that being highly sensitive is one thing—that’s a trait, that’s a part of being sensitive. Your makeup, it’s like biology, that’s how you’re made and like a part of your personality. So it’s not going to change. I will always be highly sensitive.

But being highly sensitive doesn’t mean that I have to experience anxiety. Highly sensitive people are prone to experience anxiety, but everyone is prone to experience anxiety.

Just because we’re more sensitive to things doesn’t mean that we have to experience it if we know how to deal with it. If we can stay ahead of it, and if we can use techniques like The Work or TM (Transcendental Meditation), or even just being in nature or other kinds of therapy to stay ahead of the anxiety, then we can be constantly in a state of enjoying the benefits of being sensitive without having the detriments of being anxious and overburdened by too much outward direction that’s overshadowing the inner experience.

Okay, so thank you for listening, and thank you for being a part of this process. I encourage you to take action. Anxiety builds up in normal life. And if we don’t do anything, then we end up getting behind, and it can become more than normal.

So do some of the work, get out in nature, learn to meditate—do these things that will support you to begin to actually manage the stress that comes in on a daily basis.

In this podcast, we talked about the root cause of anxiety and how to reverse it, which is getting caught on the outside, not having that connection to the inside or not as strong. We talked about three methods for reducing anxiety: The Work of Byron Katie, Transcendental Meditation, and being in nature.

We also talked about why being highly sensitive does not mean that you have to experience anxiety.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.