When Everyday Decisions Feel Too Big: Coping as a Highly Sensitive Person

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to come back to yourself when you start getting overwhelmed making everyday decisions.

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 recognize when your mind is starting to get overwhelmed by a small decision, how questioning an underlying belief can quickly bring things back into perspective, and why you are more in control than you think about how far down the rabbit hole you go. This is an edition of Guided Meditation Mondays.

where I’ll be guiding you to do the work of Byron Katie as you listen. As HSPs, we naturally pay attention to a lot of details. And so when we start making decisions, even small decisions, we often look at all of those details and can easily get overwhelmed. This just happened to me a few minutes ago and it’s a great opportunity for us to do a little bit of meditation together.

and see if you can recognize a similar kind of situation in your life. So what happened to me, I was getting ready to sit down to work. And of course, I work for myself, so I can do whatever I want, quote unquote. I got an email from a friend who recommended this training watch, which we’ve been talking about, and I’m a little excited about and it’s expensive and.

I’m not sure my partner would approve. And so I started looking at it, started exploring and turns out like I live in Canada, doesn’t ship to Canada, have to find another source for it. Oh, my goodness. 20 minutes later, I don’t know where I was, who I was, what was going on. And I was still not closer to a decision, actually found ways of purchasing and it’s just sitting in my shopping cart.

And I’m thinking. I don’t know if I can push the button on this, I should probably have a discussion with my partner, blah, blah, blah. In other words, something that looked like a fun little diversion for two seconds turned out to be a major rabbit hole. Can you find a situation like that, where you got pulled in, and you thought it would be something quick, easy maybe it is for a lot of people, but in your case, You got hung up with details and it started to become something a little bit overwhelming.

That was the feeling I had. I was starting to get overwhelmed. Like I could feel my blood pressure going up. I could feel the tension. I could feel like even some guilt, like I’m not working. I need to be working. Scarcity of time came in. All of that. So can you relate? Can you find a situation where something like that happened to you?

And what we’re going to do in this meditation is. We’ll all find different situations, something similar, something where you’re getting that stressful feeling. It’s a mental stress, it’s like trying to figure it all out, trying to get clear on the decision making process and what to do about it.

So the first thing to notice is how this starts to happen, how start to recognize this overwhelmed feeling that’s starting to happen. I notice it in me, like there’s a little tension in my gut. There’s a tension in my core I’m not breathing as well, and I’m trying to hurry it up, and every time I find something new that takes me further away, I start getting more and more stressed.

You can tell. By the stress level, when the overwhelm is starting to mount. So find a specific time and a place where this happened to you. And let’s do the work.

And if you have, if you need more time to find one, just pause the audio or the video, and you can continue giving yourself as much time as you need. So the thought I’d like to question together is this one. I need to figure this out now. I wasn’t thinking it verbally, but I was, that was what I was feeling, that was what I was thinking on the inside, on a subtle level.

I need to figure this out. I need to get this figured out. And let’s question this thought together. If you can relate, you need to figure this out now, looking at your situation. Is that true?

And what I want you to do is be in your situation. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m going back into that moment when I was feeling overwhelmed and trying to make a decision and just getting more and more involved in it. So be in your situation as you answer these questions from there. Is it true?

You need to figure this out now. Yes or no?

I’m going to go with my gut feeling, because my gut is what’s really doing my work here. I want my work to be coming from deep inside me, not just something cerebral. So my gut is saying, yes, I need to figure this out now, sooner the better. So I’m going to go with a yes. But you can go with yes or no.

And if your answer is yes, then there’s one more question, which is, Can you absolutely know it’s true? That you need to figure this out now.

And for me, I’m getting a no. That question slowed me down quite a lot.

So the next question of the work is, How do you react? What happens to you in this situation when you think you need to figure this out now? What happens?

Notice your physical reactions. and emotional reactions. Where do you feel it in your body?

For me it’s that tension, pressure. I need to figure this out now.

I’m already late. I already shouldn’t even be doing this.

Notice the feeling that comes in. I need to figure this out now. Then notice what happens to your mind when this thought is active on any level. I need to figure this out now.

My mind stops being able to think clearly. I lose touch with any internal sense of feeling, and my mind starts to just race around, like a little bit out of control. I

start rushing.

So what happens to you? I need to figure this out now. How does that thought affect your experience?

What are the images from the past or the future?

I’m seeing images of my partner laughing at me for spending that much money on a watch. Or I see him disapproving.

I see images of what I should be doing.

I feel guilt.

I need to figure this out now. How does this thought affect you?

I have no patience. I’m impulsive

and stressed.

So the next question of the work is, who would you be in your situation if you didn’t have the thought, I need to figure this out now. Who would you be?

I noticed myself slowing down a lot. I immediately took a deeper breath.

Without the thought, I need to figure this out now. There’s something that relaxes inside.

I start seeing, oh, there’s no pressure here. Don’t have to do this even this month or even next month or even in a year.

There’s space again. How does your brain start functioning differently? Without the thought, I need to figure this out now.

For me, there’s space. I

can start to look more objectively at this.

I also remember something really helpful for me that I tend to do when making decisions, and this is directly related to being a highly sensitive person, is that I tend to give it time. Oh, and I ask people, Yeah, can you give me some time? I need to think that over. And I touch back on it. Maybe several times a day, or over several days.

I give myself the luxury of time.

That’s who I am without the thought. I need to figure this out now. I feel sane,

and I see what I also really want to be doing right now is doing my work, not shopping.

I look forward to checking back in on the whole thing maybe in the evening, or maybe on the weekend. Or just letting it percolate in my mind

feels very luxurious without that thought for me.

So let’s turn the thought around. I need to figure this out now. Turnaround could be, I don’t need to figure this out now. So this is our new hypothesis. It’s like a new possibility. Could it be that I don’t need to figure this out now? Is it possible? And look at your situation. Be there in your situation.

Can you find it there?

Yeah, I can find it. I can find it. I don’t have to get this watch. And I wanted it for some training stuff, so that’s a good justification. I can do a lot of training without a watch. I already have a watch I can use for that, so there’s no need to want. Yeah, it’d be nice, yeah, but my favorite way to buy things that I want is to save up for them and take my time with it, yeah, so I don’t need to figure this out now.

Oh, and yes, here’s the good one, it’s a sale on, so my gosh, gotta take advantage of that. Pressure. But I don’t need to figure this out now, because What difference does a sale make if it’s already too much money? Better to wait until the money is not an issue, and then buy it when it’s no stress.

These are the more sane kinds of thoughts that come in for me when I’m not thinking, I need to figure this out now. And so this turnaround for me actually is truer. I don’t need to figure this out now. I don’t even need to come to a yes or no right now. I could take a week, I could take as much time as I want.

So how about you and your situation? How is it that you don’t actually have to come to the conclusion, the verdict, the yes or the no right now? Could you give it more time?

One of my favorite things in this regard is just asking for more time. It’s oh, I’d some more time to think about this. I can ask it of myself, I can ask it of other people,

and it’s a perfect antidote to my HSP mind. I like to process things slowly,

so I don’t need to figure it out. Not now. It will get figured out when the time’s right. In this episode, we looked at how to recognize when your mind is starting to get overwhelmed by a small decision. And you’ll notice it by that feeling of stress building up. Maybe small but every time you’re wanting to go back to what you were doing and then this little rabbit hole keeps taking you further and further away, you can feel the stress mounting.

And so if you start feeling that stress mounting, that’s the first sign that overwhelm is on its way and it might be a good time to look at it from a broader perspective. We next looked at how questioning an underlying belief can quickly bring things back into perspective. And we looked at this thought, which I really love, is, I need to figure this out now.

Such a time pressure thought. And when you question it, and find that it’s not absolutely true, and that it’s possible that I could take more time, or have the luxury of time, it can just allow you to breathe again and that overwhelmed feeling starts to diminish quite quickly. Finally, we looked at why you are more in control than you think about how far down the rabbit hole you go.

Of course, we all get carried away and and off we go and there’s nothing you can do when you’re in the midst of it. However, there are moments of awareness that come in and stress is a big alarm clock giving us that awareness and saying, Wait a minute, is this really where you want to be going? So if you pay attention to that stress and see that as the indicator light that it’s time to check things out, Slow things down.

Then you may actually be able to come out of the rabbit hole fairly quickly and then prepare for going back in as much as you may need in a more convenient time or over time. That’s one of my favorite ways. Instead of having to get this all done now, like this could be an ongoing decision making process that might take me, some long time to come to a conclusion.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for doing the work here with me. I enjoy doing this with you and diving into my own experience as well. So thank you and have a great rest of your day.