How to Finally Leave Work on Time So You Can Actually Rest at Night as an HSP (Stress Management Tip)

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover an amazingly simple way to get outta work on time so you can enjoy your evenings again.

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 I used to end my workday and why it kept me working later. The simple change I made to my end of day routine that is consistently working for me and the benefits I’m experiencing since switching to this new approach. This is an addition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.

My partner once said to me, you have a thing about finishing things. And it was not like, oh, that’s an okay thing. It was like, there’s something stressful about that. I can see that you’re hung up about it and he is right. I have since learned that is maybe also an HSP thing and that there’s nothing actually wrong with that desire of finishing things.

After all, we as HSPs are interested in going the distance, in getting to the depth, getting to the heart of the matter, and I’ve always had the thought like, if I’m not gonna really do the job well, then why bother doing it? It ties into our sense of responsibility and even self-pride. It’s not a bad thing to want to finish things.

The problem is it can get, we can get stuck there and we’re talking about stress management here, so there always has to be a balance. When I was a kid, I, my dad used to say, do your homework first, then you can go out and play. And I followed those directions and actually it served me very well. I did well in school and I was always on top of my assignments and all of that.

But the problem was I never went out and played or I didn’t do it as often as my sisters who, pretty much did the opposite. They went out and played as much as possible until the last minute, and then they did whatever homework they could and went on from there. Maybe I’m generalizing a little bit.

I have to be fair to my sisters, but I know I took it more seriously. And because I’m an HSP, I also did my work more slowly. So the problem was when is the downtime, when is the play? And as an adult, I still tend to run the same pattern. And I often feel like I can’t stop unless I’ve completed something and ideally, unless I’ve completed everything.

Of course that is almost an impossibility when you’re in school and you have a certain number of subjects and each subject has a certain number of tasks, you can pretty much do everything. It might take a while, but you can pretty much do everything. When you’re running a business or working in a complex situation, sometimes the tasks are more than you can physically do, and this is the problem that.

Most of us run into at some point. The problem with needing to complete something before you can rest is that it puts a kind of artificial deadline on my work. And so HSPs don’t do well with deadlines, first of all. And what happens is, at the end of the day, I start trying to make this heroic effort to get everything done, or at least to get some important things done.

Before I quit, and it means that I end up working later and it means that I am still thinking about it, or I’m drawn to go back to my work again in the evening, or even worse before bed where I’ll just think, oh, I’ll just work on a few emails here. And then before I know it, half hour, 45 minutes have passed and my mind is completely revved up again.

And it’s just the opposite of what I wanna be doing as I’m settling in to go to bed. So I wanna share with you a little change that I made that, I don’t know how this happened, but just randomly, this idea came up of pushing a pause button at the end of my day instead of wrapping things up formally and getting everything completed and feeling like there’s a sense of closure.

I just did this one day and then I just started noticing this is a really cool idea and I’ve been using it now for a few weeks and it has really been effective at helping me break that like transition to make that transition where I’m continuing to work when I really need to be going and resting.

So what I did is I literally. Just stop. I picked, I work till five. So at five I now just think, okay, we’ll see how much I get done before five. And at five I just stop. And I might be in the middle of writing an email. I might be mid task, it’s not done, and I just pause it and then I think, okay, tomorrow I’ll come back and I look forward to picking up where I left off.

The nice thing about this is that I’m not being irresponsible in one sense, ’cause I tend to be feel like that sometimes. I’m just pausing. I am gonna come back to it. And in fact, when I do come back in the morning, I am usually more clear, more energy and I’m able to work through these little tasks that I was working on in a faster way.

It’s if you’re sitting waiting for a plane and it’s boarding time and you’re working on your computer and suddenly they announce that your group has come up and it’s time to board. What do you do? You just close your computer and get on the plane. You don’t worry about shutting down the program, making sure you finished that task.

Make sure that email got sent and actually finished. No, you just close it. Flip the laptop closed and jump on the plane. And then later when you’re ready to work again, you open the laptop. And the amazing thing is everything is exactly where it was when you closed it. So that’s what I’m doing now. At the end of the day, it’s just okay, computer closed, and then tomorrow it will be there exactly where I was, where I left off.

I find this to be subtly but powerfully freeing. Now, my end of day is not tied to a sense of completion. Instead, I just stop. I think a lot of people work this way in certain jobs, for example, in retail or service jobs where they’re on the clock, they just work until the clock stops and then they go, and it’s not that they’re being irresponsible, it’s just that they.

Honor that particular agreement of working so many hours and when you’re working for yourself or when you’re working for someone else, sometimes it can be easy to blur those lines, and sometimes you have to, I’m not saying this is an absolute, but it can be really helpful to just think, okay, you know what?

I’m gonna stop here. And again, I’m gonna be continuing with this the next day. So it’s not like I’m dropping the responsibility. It also forces you to prioritize during the day. So I would say this is counter-cultural. It’s like walking away from a conversation without closure.

We tend to wind things down. We tend to wrap things up and have things presented in a kind of feeling of completion before ending a conversation, say. But if you’re living with somebody that you see every day, you can drop and run without closure, and you can still have a great relationship. In fact, I think it’s a testament to the strength of a relationship that you can do that.

So why not treat your relationship with your work in the same way, like this intimate relationship where you’re like, I’m so interested in this and I gotta run. We’ll catch you tomorrow. It’s a different way of thinking about it. So the benefits I’ve been experiencing since switching to this new approach is that, first of all, and most importantly, I feel like I’m allowed to relax in the evening.

Subconsciously there’s a part of me that thinks I’m not allowed to relax until I finish all my homework. And so I have this weight hanging over my head. And it prevents me from relaxing when I just hit pause, then I’m on break. And when I’m on break, I allow myself to be on break, and it feels I actually can enjoy some downtime.

I also don’t get sucked into the mind trap of doing just a few things before bed. I’m off now like I’m on break, so I don’t go back to my computer at all. And this has given me much better sleep. I’ve noticed a huge difference in that in, in just these few weeks. Also, I don’t shut my computer down anymore.

That was actually another task, and it took time like, okay, I gotta close this DOC program, make sure this document got saved. Make sure that I don’t forget what I was working on, put it in a task or something. It could take me a little time to, to wrap things up at the end of the day. And I know some people really love to do that, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that if it works for you, but for me it was like another task that I wasn’t really doing that and it was slowing me down and taking even longer to get out of the office.

The other cool thing is that when I hit the pause button and just close the computer. When I open it back up, everything’s exactly where it was in the morning, and I can literally get some easy wins in right from the get go. And this is great because I’m fresher, I’m more efficient in the morning, and I’m able to knock out a few of these things that were probably not that hard to do that I was trying to wrap up at the end of the day.

So finally what I love about this is it gives me a bigger perspective. It’s not about just today. It’s not about getting everything done today. It’s about a continuum of getting things done on an ongoing basis. And for me, that feels bigger. It feels more powerful, and it gives me a lot less feeling of stress.

So the feeling I’m left with today is that having a sense of completion and ending my day are two completely separate things. I no longer need to have a sense of completion in order to end my day. I find this very freeing and I’m now just simply hitting the pause button. In this episode, we looked at how I used to end my workday and why it kept me working later.

’cause I always had to finish what I was working on first. A simple change I made to my end of day routine that is consistently working for me and that is simply stopping. And finally, we also looked at the benefits I’ve been experiencing since switching to this new approach. And it is evenings that are just mine more.

Sleep, better rest and easy wins to come back to when I start the day the next day. So thanks for listening. It’s always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Show 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.