HSP Overload: Questioning the Thought "I Need to Fit In"

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to rethink what’s really important when you’re in a high pressure situation.

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 we HSPs can overlook our own needs in an effort to fit into a fast paced, high pressure world, why we need to experience an inner shift on the feeling level for any real change to occur, and how to invite the ego itself to do its inner work so we can move back to balance.

This is an edition of Guided Meditation Mondays. where I’ll be guiding you to do the work of Byron Katie as you listen. For all of us, there’s a natural balance between wanting to fit in and taking care of ourselves. And as HSPs, the need to take care of ourselves may be slightly greater than for non HSPs.

But the pressures of wanting to fit in continue. So let’s look at how to balance this a little more in our lives through a bit of inner work, and this is going to be through the work of Byron Katie. So let’s start with looking for a situation where you were trying to fit in, needing to fit in, and were willing to overlook your own needs or your tendency your need for quietness, ability to have time to process things.

And you were getting caught up in something that did lead to overwhelm. So look for a situation where you were wanting to fit in, and you put it above taking care of yourself.

And if possible, look for something specific.

For me, I’m thinking of when I was in college many years ago. I was in a high pressure situation. It was a good school, and there were a lot of demands. And I kept pushing myself to keep up with those demands, working long hours, and just trying to get everything done, regardless of whether I got enough sleep or led any kind of balanced life.

Thrown in there was also the need to fit in not only with the school’s demands, but my mom’s expectations as well. So do you find a situation, maybe it’s at work, maybe it’s with your partner, maybe it’s with your child, maybe it’s with It could be anything where you’re trying to fit in and be more and trying to give more than you actually have to give.

And you can pause the recording if you need more time to find a specific time, a specific situation. Having a specific thing in mind will help you get more out of this when you go through the process that we’re going to go through here together. So the thought we’ll be questioning is, I need to fit in.

And we’ll begin with question one of the work. Is it true? You need to fit in. In your situation, is it true?

And we want your honest experience here, so look for that. Don’t cheat with the intellect’s version of what you think should be the answer. Stick with what is your answer on an experiential level. Yes or no? Is it true you need to fit in here in this situation?

I’m going to go with yes. It’s what it feels like when I put myself back in that situation when I was at college.

There was no choice.

So if your answer was yes, then Go with me to question two, which is, Can you absolutely know it’s true? You need to fit in. In that situation, are you sure?

And I’m going to go with no.

So regardless of your answer, let’s go to question three. How do you react? What happens in that situation when you have this thought active in your mind or on a feeling level that you need to fit in? How do you react? What happens?

We’re just reporting what happens. When the thought is there, I need to fit in. So in my situation, I push myself. I used to work, I used to do homework probably 12 hours a day, plus classes. It was non stop.

I would stay up late to get the job done.

How else do you react in your situation? Your situation may be a little different, but how do you treat yourself when you are trying to fit in like this? I treat myself like I don’t have any needs. Or that I, my needs don’t count,

I’m not caring about myself and I’m like, I’m not being caring.

I need to fit in.

How else do you react when you believe this thought?

I start to get burnout.

I start to experience what I didn’t know at the time, but I can say now is overwhelm.

My mind goes down, becomes dull and tired and I’m still pushing.

And how do you treat the people that you’re trying to fit in with?

Treat them like, They are over me, they are above me, and I have to do everything I can to mold myself to be, to do what they want. That includes my mom, includes my teachers, my professors, even my other classmates.

Yeah, we had a strong work ethic in my school, so I kept trying to fit in. I’ll just be working hard too.

I have no regard for my needs there, other than the basic needs.

And now that I think about it, I got sick a lot. I got depressed at one point.

These are the effects of needing to fit in, believing the thought, acting on the thought. I need to fit in.

So who would you be in your situation without this thought that you need to fit in?

I noticed that I see more options without this thought. Like my vision is more 360 degrees instead of just looking forward, looking to others. My vision also includes myself, and my needs, and my expectations and interests.

Without the thought I need to fit in, I see myself the possibility of just doing my best in class, just doing my best with my homework, and leaving the rest. It’s a radical idea for me.

Without the thought I need to fit in.

I’d be going to bed earlier.

I would do as much of my homework as I had time for.

I can see myself scheduling more playtime, more hangout time

with friends.

Without the thought, I need to fit in with my, the expectations of my school, the expectations of my mom, the expectations of the whole group of people I was living with. I could hear my own body’s cries, Take some rest. Don’t go to class today. Don’t stay up later to finish this. I see a counterbalance without this thought.

With the thought, I see no balance. It’s just all in, and I’m at the mercy of however much homework I was given.

So this thought, I need to fit in, can make a big difference in a stressful situation. It can make the difference between it being stressful and it being more balanced.

So how can we turn this around? Instead of, I need to fit in, an opposite could be, I don’t need to fit in. And how could that be as true or truer in your situation? Do you really need to fit in? It’s like question one and two. Are you sure? How could it be that not fitting in could be as good or better? I

think that it’s taken me decades to begin to learn that taking care of myself, balancing myself, is as important as doing things that are important jobs for others and projects that I take on.

So I don’t need to fit in.

If I had done that right there in college, I would have learned that lesson and skipped probably 30 years of figuring it out later. Not that I could have, but We’re just looking. I don’t, in reality, need to fit in. I could have learned a major life lesson in college and gotten lower marks and had a more balanced life.

Well,

how about you? How is it you don’t need to fit in? How’s it okay if you don’t? How’s it okay if you honor your HSP traits and needs?

I

don’t think I would have failed if I had done that, even if I hadn’t given it my all in compromising nothing to get good grades. Even if I hadn’t done that, my guess is I would still have done fairly okay. Not perfect. Good enough. I would have passed. I would have graduated. So I don’t need to fit in.

This is the, these are the examples we’re looking for. How is it possible you could just do the opposite and still be as well off or better? I don’t need to fit in. My mom would have still loved me if I didn’t get straight A’s. Sure.

Great example. My, my sister didn’t get straight A’s and she was actually probably the closest one to mom. So what is this story that I need to fit in? I need to meet this expectation. It’s a story. What story are you believing when you think you need to fit in and is it really valid

another turnaround? I need to fit in with myself. I need to fit in with me.

That may be more important

Is it worth it for me to get sick or if you take that and go further with it? imagine just decades of not taking care of my body or my Mind, my heart, just to meet expectations, just trying to fit in, I could end up with real health problems. So I need to fit in with me because I’m the one I live with.

And if I don’t, I may not live so much. My quality of life will be less. My life expectancy will probably be less.

Not to mention, as HSPs, when we take care of ourselves, that’s when our superpowers engage. That’s when our intuition becomes strong, that’s when our ability of discernment and subtle processing increases. So I need to fit in with me, with who I am, with my limitations as an HSP. If I live within those, I can not only have a good experience internally, but I’d probably be more successful in the long term.

I love this turnaround. It balances the idea of needing to fit in with others to needing to fit in with myself. Like the inner is as important as the outer, maybe more important.

Outer depends on inner.

So if I only focus on outer, it’s going to crumble at some point. In this episode, we looked at how we HSPs can overlook our own needs in an effort to fit into a fast paced, high pressure world. And we saw how this just happens naturally. We think we can just keep up with others, and we miss that we have our own special needs to take care of that make us excel.

And so when we do take care of ourselves, it can actually make us more productive in the world. We also looked at why we need to experience an inner shift on the feeling level for any real change to occur. And as I was doing my work, I was noticing that it’s not enough to just intellectually get, Oh yeah, I should work less, or I should pay attention to myself, or I should take breaks.

That’s all fine. But, it’s I have to see it. I have to discover it on an experiential level when I’m doing this process of inquiry. That’s when something touches me on the level of the heart. That’s when I get the kind of inspiration like, Oh, this is what I really want. Let me engage and pay attention to my inner world.

Not just my outer world, and that was the feeling that I got left with. It’s oh wow, my inner is actually more important than my outer, or certainly as important. And then finally we looked at how to invite the ego itself to do its inner work so that we can move back to balance. This is just a really important point whenever doing the work of Byron Katie, is that the ego is the one that’s trying to get, trying to get others to like it, trying to fit in, it wants all these things, and it’s the ego itself that has to slow down and say, is that true?

The ego itself has to go, who would I be without that thought? And could the opposite be true? Could fitting in with myself be even better for my own best interest than as fitting in with others? So when the ego does this work, when the ego discovers these things within itself, Then that’s when change begins to actually land, instead of just being another theory that you pass through and doesn’t really touch anything.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for participating in this guided meditation. We’ll do this again soon, every Monday. Excuse me. We have these meditations and I look forward to being here with you again. In the meantime, have a great rest of your day and we’ll talk to you later,