Drowning in Overwhelm? How to Navigate the Chaos as an HSP?

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to prioritize on the highest level of your life, to avoid overwhelm and experience more happiness. 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 why you need to look at the big picture of your life to avoid overwhelm, why compromise is essential if you’re going to thrive as an HSP, and how to identify your biggest priorities and start focusing on them. 

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.Prioritization is a powerful tool to help avoid overwhelm. Think about the last time you were overwhelmed. What was going on? If you think about it, you’ll probably see that you were trying to do more than one thing at a time, or that the task that you were working on was starting to become complex and was involving many different things going on simultaneously. It’s this extra input from many different directions that causes overwhelm. 

And prioritization is a way of streamlining your attention to focus on the most important things and put less attention on the less important things. This is a tough one for highly sensitive people. I know I’m capable of doing things well. And so when I have too many things going on, or if a job is too complex and it’s involving too many different, parts, then it becomes difficult to go deep into one, and it becomes difficult to actually do any of those things well. And that leads to frustration, and that also reduces my bandwidth, And pretty soon, it grinds me to a halt or makes me have to push through, in which case I end up, regretting it because of the effect that it has on my body and my mind afterwards.So, prioritization is something that I did not learn early in life. I really didn’t. it was expected of me, at least in my mind, that I would do okay. Everything that my teachers told me to do, right? That was the assignment. 

You get an assignment from school and you do it. Well, I think my mom expected me to get A’s and I expected myself to at some point, and so there wasn’t a choice. And as the further I went up in school, the harder it got, the deeper the assignments, the more, quantity of assignments. 

I remember in college. working probably 13, 14 hours a day, doing homework, trying to just manage four classes. And that took a toll on me. It led to some feeling of depression.It led to, some feeling of burnout. and I did end up still getting good grades. But at what cost? At the end of the time in school, I was looking for something other than that. And in fact, I went and lived in an ashram after that. 

so prioritization could have helped me in school. And I didn’t learn it at that time, but I have learned it over time. the value of it is it streamlines your attention. instead of being spread too thin, You’re saying, you know what, these are the things that I want to focus on, and the other things can just wait, or maybe they’re just not going to get my attention at all. It’s hard. It’s like budgeting your money, in fact, it’s the same skill.Now I’m talking about today about prioritization, not just on the small scale. it’s easy to prioritize. 

It’s kind of happens sometimes necessarily when you’re under a real time crunch. you’ve got a deadline, you know, you’re getting ready for an event, and you’ve got to make decisions and they’re just, it’s not possible to do everything, perfectly. And so you start, you just say, okay, I can’t do that. Or can someone else do that? Or what happens if that doesn’t, get done the way I was hoping it to be done.In other words, time will force us to prioritize in a way. and, and that’s great on a small scale. 

If you prioritize your day and you, just focus on the. Most important things that day, it can be very helpful, but I want to step back even further and look at am I even doing in my day what is most important to me in my life? And so this is a kind of alignment that can happen as you look on a grander scale. And so if we’re doing the most important things in our life while we’re living in our days, Then there’s, there’s joy in that, there’s energy that comes through, and that can actually allow us to not only be successful in those areas, but also to enjoy them and to have energy, to do those things.

So, people often avoid prioritization because they don’t want to compromise. I’m the first one to say that because I tend to like to do everything well. It’s one of my identities. I tend to think of myself as, you know, kind of a quiet person who likes to do things well. if you can read perfectionism in there, you’re probably spot on.and I take it or leave it, you know, there’s good things about wanting to do things well, and there are things that, can be challenging with that mindset. 

And so what I’m doing over time with myself is I’m challenging that mindset a little bit, not changing my essential nature and I’m kind of passionate about doing things well, but, I’m looking at it from a practical point of view and the practical side is I’ve got to compromise.I can do anything well, and I think this is true of pretty much everyone and especially true of highly sensitive people because we can go so deep. 

I can do anything well, but I can’t do everything well. And for me, this tells me one thing, is that if I want to have that experience of doing some things well, I have to let go of doing others. It’s not all or nothing though. Like if I’m saying, okay, well, if I can’t do everything well, then I’ll just do one thing. 

Well, and yeah, that’s probably not a bad thing, but you can take it too far and get become like too focused on one thing, like to the complete exclusion of everything else.you know, like workaholism or that kind of thing, where you just threw everything out of balance. you’re not even eating or something, you’re not even socializing at all or doing any kind of exercise or things like that. There are different parts of life that have to be balanced.

But it’s a question of what are the priority for the main ones that you want to focus on so that you can, get the most, the best experience out of those and have the others be supporting. So I go back to the school analogy, for me that works really well. I was always trying to get A’s with everything, you know, I wanted to get 100%, wanted to do as well as I possibly could on every assignment, and that was stressful, because there wasn’t enough time to do that.So, the way I start to think of it now is, there’s some things that I want to do A’s on. 

A work on and there’s some things that I actually set out and plan to do B or C or even D work on or even F work failure. I actually make it my intention to do lower level work on those areas. Because I know that it’s a compromise. And if I try to do a work on those areas, I will not be able to do a work on the most important areas, which I would like to be doing it on. So the beauty of this kind of compromise, even though it can be challenging at first, is that it allows you to focus on basically one thing. And that’s where HSPs thrive.When you’re just focused on one thing, you can put all of your attention into it. 

You can look for connections. You can go deeper into it. And it can be very satisfying and it can also end up giving very good results. So focusing on one thing, is not only powerful for getting results, but it also has the experience of being less overwhelming. You’re just focused on one thing. 

You’re not divided. So how do you start to identify the biggest priorities in your life? Like, how can you do this on a practical level? What I did is to Just start brainstorming, what are the main interests in my life, what are the things that I have to do? What are the things that I really want to do?What are the things that bring me joy in my life? And I just started writing the big areas. for me, meditation is a big one. 

It’s always been. important to me. My job has always been important to me. I actually like thinking about this because sometimes you’ll come up with things that you weren’t thinking about. I realized one of my favorite hobbies is learning. I really love learning things. And one of the things I love learning is languages.So, a few years ago, I realized that and decided I want to quote unquote go back to school. I started learning French. 

And it became like a little passion, something fun that was not important. But, it was like a hobby for me. So, that’s one of those things that I would like to do. Exercise is another thing. It’s have to do it in a way just to keep my body healthy, but I actually like to do it too. And so I put some muscle building exercises, some yoga on there. I do something called a gaskew, which is great for posture.those kinds of things. so, and I play pickleball. That’s another one. 

It’s a hobby, something I do with my partner. It’s also exercise. I discovered also reading is something that I really like to do, and I hadn’t been doing it for a long time, so I put that on the list. Being social, I think is, is important to me. So, this is what I mean by just brainstorming, like, the big picture items. maybe it’s doing something related to your health, maybe it’s something related to relationships, something related to your job, or to learning, or to, you know, Hobbies or, or whatever comes up for you.First thing is make a list on a grand scale of what you’re interested in, what you think you’d like to do, what you need to do and start there. So then what I did was I basically separated it into three categories. 

One is areas to master. And then the second one is areas to be average at. And this was like a big turnaround for me. Like I’m actually striving to be average at some things. And then areas to not do. so if you’ve been brainstorming about things that you really want to or have to do, You may find that there’s not as much that you want to not do, but it’s good to have that category because you may need it.So then start putting the activities in these categories. 

And for me, like meditation went right into the area of areas to master. My job also goes in that area. And I put French in there as well because I really want to master it. I’m willing to put in some time every week to do that. So then that leaves a lot of things to where you could say I have to put those in the category of areas to be average at.And so I put my exercising, my Dog training, you know, like I like training my dog, but it takes time and it’s not my highest priority. Pickleball. Like, it used to be like, that was really high priority, and that kind of shifted when I really looked at it. It’s not as high a priority as I, as I once thought. For me, twice a week, that’s a great amount of time for me to play pickleball. Reading. 

Yep, there’s another one. Like, I’ll do it around the edges, but I’m not going to carve out a specific time for it. it’s not as high a priority. Being social, same thing. I like being social, but it’s not the highest priority.So, as I look now back on this, I made this list a year or two ago, how am I doing in this? Yeah, meditation, it’s still high priority. I put that into my schedule every day, and I dedicate time to that. My job, same thing. And, French, I did that for a long time. And I came to a certain level of competency and I would like to continue with it.

But right now it’s actually dropped back down into the Let’s be average at at that area and it’s kind of just dropped down to a maintenance level at some point I will bring it back up into the top level all the other ones I’m actually striving to get you know C’s and D’s in these in these classes if you will dog training I’m doing very little of pickleball just twice a week reading Yeah, I’m probably getting a half hour a day in something like that, but it’s not always consistent Social Yeah, I do some social, but I don’t really prioritize it, and some of these things may drop down even further, you know, like, right now I had, I used to have yoga on my average area.Now I’m not doing yoga right now. So this leaves me with really just two things to focus on, which is my job and my meditation. 

And funnily enough, if you keep playing with this, you may even find that being average at those is also a good thing. So regardless of what yours are, I invite you to just sort them a little bit and find two or three at the most that you want to really focus on and make your priorities.And that just knowing that can give you a lot of freedom. Like, oh right, I don’t have to be amazing at pickleball anymore. 

I don’t have to be, the best dog trainer in the world anymore. I don’t have to be the most amazing friend anymore for like a million people. It’s like I’m just toning those things down. So I hope this gives you some ideas of how you can do this yourself and I hope that it supports you in avoiding overwhelm and just strategizing on the highest level a little bit so that you can do the things that really you want to be doing and do less of the things or do the things that are you’re not as interested in doing do them less well.In this episode, we looked at why you need to look at the big picture of your life to avoid overwhelm. 

Sometimes we can get so caught in the details, and we may be prioritizing on a small level, but not on the largest level. And we looked at why compromise is essential if you’re going to thrive as an HSP. If you try to do everything, then there’s just not enough energy, there’s just not enough time, and you end up doing everything, on a less than satisfying level. So I love picking one thing and going a little deeper with that.And finally, we looked at how to identify your biggest priorities and start focusing on them. 

And for me, my favorite way of thinking of this is areas to master versus areas to be average at. and then also things to just stop doing, that can be very freeing. So thanks for being with us and thanks for, listening. I love thinking about how to avoid overwhelm as a prevention instead of how to deal with overwhelm just after it happens. Prioritization can be super help for sidestepping it and avoiding it in the first place. So thanks again for listening, and I hope you have a wonderful day.If you haven’t already, be sure to go to the show notes and take the survey regarding the kinds of stresses highly sensitive people face. As a special thanks for your help, I’ll be giving you access to my three day stress management training for highly sensitive people.