Decision Fatigue in HSPs: How to Reduce Stress Through Planning

  By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how a little planning can reduce your overwhelm as a highly sensitive person.

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 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 why little decisions can cause overwhelm for highly sensitive people, how to minimize this kind of overwhelm through planning, and specific tips to avoid decision fatigue in everyday life. 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’re a highly sensitive person, you probably know that little decisions can cause a big overwhelm. Seems like a small thing, just deciding on what to eat, or just deciding on even what to wear, or some small decision that should be nothing can sometimes lead to just a paralysis as you start seeing all the options and all the nuances that are involved.

Why is it that little decisions overwhelm highly sensitive people? One of the reasons is that we, highly sensitive people, tend to process information deeply. We look at all of the potential outcomes, the benefits, the risks. We consider all of the people involved all of the repercussions, and this is a lot of information.

So it seems like you’re just deciding one small thing, but in reality, there are many factors involved and and that’s one of the things that can make it overwhelming. Another thing is if you’re trying to make a decision in, for example, a crowded place with, like in a store or something like that, with loud music and lights and people going by and somebody pressuring you for time and everything, that can just be too much very quickly.

There’s also the factor that HSPs tend to be sensitive to not wanting to do things, wrong, not wanting to make the wrong choice, not wanting to disappoint somebody. Okay. Not wanting to have any kind of negativity come out. And it may make it hard to make a decision because of that worry.

Picking a birthday card could end up being like, Okay, is that the right one? Is that to the right sentiment? Are they gonna like it? Are they not gonna like it? And suddenly you can spend a lot of time in front of the card.

Another thing is, and that’s similar, is just emotional considerations, how empathetic we are, and how highly attuned we are to others emotions, and how easy it is to get into other people’s business, and wanting them to feel good, really to protect ourselves, because we don’t think we can handle the negativity that they may express, or the disappointment, or the criticism.

So this adds another layer of things to consider when you’re a highly sensitive person making a simple, small decision. We also really value being in alignment with ourselves. So we want our choices to have meaning and we want it to align with our values, our beliefs and even small things. I know when I was deciding on a logo or a name like that for my business, it was like, Oh, my gosh it’s really line up.

And that took a lot of thought power. So there are many factors in there. I’m sure there are many more as well. But as you can see there, it’s not just Oh, is it a yes or no? It’s not just do I want this kind of cereal or that kind of cereal? It’s what is involved in, if I get this serial, what are the repercussions?

What is going to happen? And this is natural. We do these kinds of, we think this way, and it’s a good thing. We can actually perceive things in advance. We can avoid problems in advance. We’re playing chess sometimes, and chess is not a bad thing. You can have fun playing chess, but it can become stressful as well, and that’s what we’re wanting to look at.

So the question is, how can you minimize this kind of overwhelm when you’re faced with it in a regular way? One of the ways you can help yourself is to do a little bit of planning. And for me, this means separating the deep thinking part, which is looking at all those repercussions. From the actual action taking part.

So the decision making, the deep thinking, that’s something I need to sit with sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for even longer, as I’m sorting through and feeling through what is the, what feels right to me, what’s the right direction I want to go in. And if I’m doing that, if I’m trying to do that process on the fly when I have a lot of pressure, And a lot of distraction, it’s much harder.

So that’s one thing that works for me is to just separate those whenever possible. And that means that I’m really thinking about planning things a little bit more. So for example, If I’m planning what I’m going to get at the grocery store, I do that kind of planning at home first. I make a list, I think about it over the week I might be adding things here and there, and I, over time, learn that certain things don’t work for me, certain things do work for me, and hone the system down.

And so the system takes care of it, and I just tweak the system. And that feels like it gives me a little bit more space, and it prevents me from getting overwhelmed. I really don’t have to do a lot of decision making at the store. Another thing that can help with this, another kind of specialized version of planning, is routines.

Routines are a pre planned time period that is dedicated to doing a certain thing And I don’t have to think about it. For example, when I get up in the morning, I know what I’m going to do. First thing I’m going to do, I’m just going to drink some water. Then I’m going to turn my computer and my phone on.

And I’ll just peruse for a few minutes while I’m drinking my water. Then I’m going to go get some breakfast things ready. And I’m going to then do my Ikaskyu stretches. Then I’m going to take a shower. And after that, I will do a little bit of. gratitude in my journal, and then I’m going to meditate, and then I will after that, have breakfast.

This is a routine and some days I alternate with my partner, I’ll be walking the dog instead of doing breakfast. There’s a routine there that is I know when I get up, I don’t have to think, Oh, what am I going to do? Should this, is this more important than that? None of that decision making is happening because I’ve set it up as a routine.

And I set up other things in my life as routines as well, getting to bed, doing what I do before going to bed, a little stretching doing some reading the time of day for eating lunch, the time of day for, meditating in the afternoon, and all these things, these routines, can cut down on the decision making that I have to make.

Even within my work there’s certain routines that I have, and I will tweak those routines, create new routines, but the things that are working, I just let them work. And this is a real saver, like a mind saver, for HSPs, at least in my experience. When you have something that works, And you love it, and it’s something that you want to do regularly.

It, first of all, blocks off time for your priorities. And the second of all, you don’t have to think about how you’re going to do it, or when you’re going to do it. You just jump in, oh, time has come, and you start doing it. So this can cut down on decision fatigue by automating certain things. And there’s certain things like, you may not need to think about every day.

Like maybe you know what you want to wear. You can just set it up and go through for the whole week. Or what you’re going to eat. You may just have that worked out. Maybe once a week you sit and plan what your meals are. You can do this with many different things. You can do it with finance. You can do it with budgeting, that kind of thing.

You can do it with so many different aspects of life. Having some kind of routine. Exercise is another one. Even social commitments. You could say, this is a day, I’m going to have certain days when I’m open for social commitments, and other days when I’m not. And then you just know, okay. I only am open for business, so to speak, during these days, and it gives you a sense of ease, that you can you don’t have to decide every time. And of course you can change these routines and you can adjust them and you can make exceptions and things like that, but having a baseline can be really amazing. So yeah, I think these are a few ideas in terms of how to actually design a situation that is supportive for you, you can plan outfits for the week, you can set a default breakfast, you can create a standard shopping list, for example, you can prioritize your tasks automate repetitive tasks, you can do them.

All kinds of things to support yourself so that in the moment, you can just be living moment to moment and enjoying the freedom rather than constantly having to make a decision. Because here’s the problem with HSPs, it’s not a problem, but it can be, is that we like to do things really well. We like to optimize.

And if I’m making a decision every moment of my day, then I’m going to be trying to, instinctively, I’m going to be trying to optimize that decision. And to optimize the decision, I have to think about many different things. And that means minute to minute, I have to think many different things now, and then the next decision comes, I have to think about many different things then, and then, and you can end up getting exhausted really early.

I like to spend some time every day making deep decisions, and I like to spend a lot of time every day just enjoying the benefit of past decisions that I’ve already made, and just focusing on the future. living instead. In this episode, we looked at why little decisions can cause overwhelm for highly sensitive people.

And that’s because we, HSPs, take into account many factors when we’re making a decision. It’s not just the surface level. It’s not just the simple decision. We’re looking at the repercussions and how it affects different people and all of those things. And so Because of that, it becomes a bigger process for us than for non highly sensitive people.

We also looked at how to minimize the kind this kind of overwhelm through planning. And planning simply separates the decision making process from the action taking process. And this gives you the freedom to sit with a decision quietly first before jumping in Maybe jumping in too fast and then jumping back out and correcting course and getting caught into a cycle of overwhelm.

We also looked at routines, which are a special kind of planning, which are set and forget. You set something up and then you can just keep using that routine and of course you can adjust routines and keep tweaking them as you go forward, but the base is there and that can save a lot of decision making.

And finally, we looked at specific tips to help avoid decision fatigue in everyday life. And we looked at morning routines. Just knowing what you’re going to do when you get up can be so helpful. Just grocery shopping and meal planning. The just detailing out some of those things. Maybe there’s a routine to it.

We tend to do the same things week after week. Don’t want life to be completely routine, but having some base of routine can be super helpful. We looked at social commitments. Just deciding which days you’re available for social connection, which days you’re not can be freeing in a lot of ways.

Exercise routines, just having a particular time for exercise. And then even sometimes picking certain exercises to do or a certain number of exercises to do instead of having to create a new routine from scratch each time. That can help a lot. And you just rotate through the different variations and it can work really well.

Same thing with self care and downtime. You can take that and put it into a routine. Like from this time to this time. I’m just going to be meditating, or just this time, I’m only going to be reading. And so you know it in advance, you can plan around it. And it’s a great way of standing up for yourself as an HSP at the same time cutting down decision fatigue.

So thanks for listening. It’s fun to think about these things. Some of these are very practical, very down to earth ideas, but hopefully it gets your creative juices going that you can think about how you can use routine and planning As an extra support to give you that buffer so that your deep decision making can be done in a quiet place.

And it doesn’t have to be stopping you and overwhelming you when you’re in the middle of activity. So thanks for listening, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.