Fatigue or Stress? Stress Management Strategies for HSPs

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to recognize fatigue versus stress, and how to approach them differently.

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 how to tell the difference between the sometimes confusing experience of fatigue vs. stress, and practical strategies for addressing fatigue as well as specific approaches for dealing with more deeply rooted stress. 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 woken up in the morning feeling tired? You don’t want to get out of bed, just want to pull your head under the covers and stay there, maybe forever. That feeling of tiredness, that feeling of, yeah, feeling tired, is it coming from fatigue or is it coming from stress? These are two different things, and sometimes it’s really hard to tell the difference.

Both of them will make you feel cranky. Both of them will make you feel low. Both of them will be, not a pleasant experience, and sometimes have the exact same symptoms. But what you do to take care of these two things can be quite different. So it’s important to pay a little attention and examine what is causing this feeling.

Maybe I just had too much to eat last night, or I went to bed too late, or, or something else. So, that’s different than a deeper kind of stress which can keep you awake or make you feel tired even if you did sleep. The only way to tell the difference, interestingly enough, is to start trying to take care of it.

The first thing I like to do is try to give myself more rest. So if it’s just fatigue, then rest will take care of it. Rest will begin to just work through the system, whatever fatigue has built up there. If there’s some toxicity that has built up due to poor eating or drinking or something, then the body will begin to balance itself if you give it rest.

If it doesn’t respond after giving some balance—it might take several days to do this—then there may be something deeper going on. It may not just be fatigue as in, “I worked too hard,” or “I was not giving myself enough time to sleep,” or that kind of thing. So, if the body doesn’t respond to your balancing efforts, then it’s time to start looking, okay, what else could be going on here?

And, you have to kind of research in your mind. What has been bothering you? What’s been on your mind recently? The interesting thing is fatigue will bring stresses like those deeper stresses to the surface. This makes it even harder to tell the difference because when you’re tired, everything bothers you. And of course, the things that bother you the most are going to be right there on the surface.

If there are some deeper wounds or stresses that are coming up, then it’s going to look like, “Oh my gosh, it’s just all about deep-rooted stress.” But it may just be fatigue, mainly. The first approach is to try balancing. The next approach is to look for what is actually going on, like, in your mind.

For me, for example, I had this a few weeks ago where I was just feeling off. Not sleeping so well, waking up early and then still just lying there, then waking up tired. My back was hurting, my energy was low, almost like a depressed kind of feeling. Sometimes I even just had that feeling like I wanted to cry.

Fatigue can do this to me. If I get enough fatigue, I can really get cranky. And I was wondering, “Okay, is that it?” So what I did was I first started trying to make sure I have plenty of time for bed, get to bed early, trying to get up early, and it wasn’t going away. There was something more.

As I looked, I started looking at what was going on in my mind and in my life. I found part of it was some deadline anxiety. As a highly sensitive person, deadlines are not my favorite thing. I can get anxious about them easily. It’s a common thing for HSPs. And so that was one area where I could start to look at what I was doing and whether it was possible to extend some deadlines and give myself a little more ease around that.

The second thing I noticed is that my dad’s health has been declining over the last month or so, and he may be getting toward the end of his life. There’s almost an unconscious mourning happening already about losing my dad. And so that’s a deeper stress that is not just about fatigue, but about something core and something that I need to take a closer look at.

That’s the difference between fatigue and stress, and they do get mixed up. So let’s look at some practical strategies for addressing the fatigue area. First of all, rest is key. Going to bed earlier and doing that consistently for many days helps. I find that one day going to bed early is not enough. Two days going to bed early is maybe not even enough, but many days, and even if possible, creating more of a routine where I’m doing that as a lifestyle going forward. This can avoid a lot of issues in the future.

In the beginning, if I’m really feeling this extra fatigue, I may need to sleep in. And sometimes if I start sleeping in, then I’m not as tired when it’s time to go to bed because I already slept in the night before. This can shift your rhythm, your circadian rhythm, so that you start sleeping in later and start staying up later.

As far as I know, the best rest comes in the early part of the night, rather than the later part of the night. It’s certainly deeper than daytime sleep. So if possible, I like to keep my routine of getting up early and going to bed early. Another key to maintaining that balance is doing some exercise in the morning.

I like to get outside, walk my dog, sometimes run with my dog, do some push-ups, sit-ups, and other little exercises. This gets the blood moving and the body active at that time. It also has the effect that later on, by the time evening comes, there’s more fatigue in the body, which makes you want to go to sleep.

If it’s just fatigue, exercise, especially in the morning, can improve your sleep. Another thing to help with sleep is winding down, having some routine in the evening. I like gentle stretching or listening to audiobooks with my eyes closed while I’m stretching, or just avoiding projects, emails, and screens before bed.

Finally, if you’re dealing with fatigue, consider a vacation, long weekend, or a “do-nothing” day—a sick day, perhaps, where you read, nap, walk, and daydream without being social. Having a day or a few days focused solely on your body’s needs can often help alleviate the fatigue that’s built up.

If it’s more than just fatigue, what approaches can you use to deal with deeper stress? Stress, at a deeper level, comes from the mind getting stuck on something. It loops and can’t get off, staying stuck. You have to start with where the mind is. If it’s stressed, give it attention. Allow that stress to come out, be heard, and be listened to. Rant on paper, maybe journal, writing stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Let the emotions out—anger, frustration, sadness. Write your stresses out on paper; they’re not going to hurt anybody, and it feels good to get them out.

Many studies show that just journaling your stressful thoughts can be therapeutic. If you want to take it further, this is where the work of Byron Katie can come in. Take the stressful thoughts you wrote when journaling or ranting, and put them through a course of questioning and turning the thoughts around.

This lets the stuck part of you explore and look at the truth of the story it’s believing, letting it climb out of the hole. Don’t push yourself, but allow yourself to climb, explore, and see another perspective. Letting the stuck part answer the questions can be amazing because it educates itself and leads you out of feeling stuck.

Another method for deeply rooted stress is transcendental meditation. Practicing it for years has given me deep rest—deeper than sleep—that allows these stresses to release even without a conscious process like the work of Byron Katie. There are other meditation techniques as well, but deeply restful meditation can do wonders for releasing stuck stress.

Finally, working with a facilitator or therapist can help address deeper wounds or traumas that may be activated. Having support from an experienced person can be very helpful.

In this episode, we looked at how to distinguish between fatigue and stress, noting that fatigue can be addressed by rest and balancing the system, while deeper-rooted stress needs other approaches. We explored practical strategies for addressing fatigue, including time off, going to bed early, and morning exercise. We also discussed specific approaches for handling deeper stress, like journaling, doing the work of Byron Katie, transcendental meditation, or working with a therapist or facilitator.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to more time with you in the future. In the meantime, have a wonderful rest of your day.

Oh, and before you go, here’s a quick follow-up. I recorded this session, then attended the Autumn Virtual Retreat—a weekend of doing the work—and I questioned thoughts about my dad’s decline and some of my work transition stress. In one day, the back pain that had been there for a month went away. It felt like something unhitched, unhooked, and it hasn’t come back since. There are still residual aches and pains and probably more work to be done, but it was clear that the physical stress, showing up as fatigue, was due to an actual thought. When you question the thought, the body releases. It’s amazing.