Why Alone Time as an HSP Is Essential to Achieving Your Goals & Preventing Overwhelm and Stress

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why alone time is not just a nice to have as an HSP.

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 stop judging yourself for needing alone time that others don’t seem to need. What happens when you ignore this essential HSP need? And how to integrate alone time with stress-free outer engagement in your life. Welcome to this edition of Self-Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.

I remember the first time that I thought about what would be my ideal living arrangement. I was back in college and I was in summer school. And I was living in a small city Iowa City at the time, and I remember liking the idea of being in a place where there were people around, but also having a place where I could be alone.

And so it was this kind of mix of being in the center of things, but also being able to retreat into. A, a place where I’m alone. And so this is an interesting thing that has developed over the years with me over the decades, we could say is this kind of balance between wanting to have that alone time and wanting to be with other people and how to balance those two.

If you notice other people around you, you may find that some of them can keep going and going and going and going. It’s amazing how much energy some people have and how far they can keep going without really getting into overwhelm. Of course, you can see the signs of fatigue and you can see the signs of stress in everyday people as well.

But when you look around, there are really a lot of people that can just really go. But what happens if you try to keep doing that? What if you just keep trying to keep going and being with others and taking one task after the other? I’m sure you’ve probably tried it. I know. I certainly have.

And if you’re a highly sensitive person, you will probably find very quickly that there are limits. Of course, everyone has limits. But highly sensitive people reach their limits more quickly and go into overwhelm more quickly than other people. The problem is if you judge yourself by other people’s standards, then you may start to see yourself as a failure.

You may think there’s something wrong with you. You may think that you need to work on this somehow to become better at staying like able to keep going. But the problem is we’re not all the same. Not all people are made the same, just like not all plants are made the same. You always, if you’re familiar with gardening, you’re probably familiar with the idea of shade loving plants and sun loving plants.

If you’re a shade loving plant, then you do well and you thrive in the shade. If you’re a sun loving plant, you do well and you thrive in the direct sun. And so if you put a shade loving plant out into the direct sun, it’s going to wilt, it’s gonna have problems. It’s not going to thrive. We as highly sensitive people are like those shade loving plants, and we need our protection a little bit.

We need a little bit of a different environment. There’s nothing wrong with being a shade loving plant, it’s just a different kind of plant. It’s optimized for a different kind of living, and that’s what, understanding the HSP trait is all about and why it’s so important. What happens when you ignore this essential need of alone time as a highly sensitive person?

The first thing is obvious overwhelm. If you keep pushing, keep going outward, you keep doing everything that you think you should be doing, you’re gonna reach your limit before you know it. And if you keep reaching your limit and keep pushing past it, you’ll end up with burnout. And all of these basically amount to a lot of stress, irritation, problems in relationships, problems at work.

Just problems. Problems come when we’re overwhelmed, when we’re in our sweet spot, when we’re not overwhelmed, we can do amazing things. So when you get overstressed by not taking downtime, not taking alone time, then you can end up. Losing clarity about what it is that you want to do, and you may lose the energy to take the steps necessary to even achieve your goals.

As HSPs, we love goals. We love accomplishing complex and difficult tasks. We’re good at it, and we try harder and we stick to the job longer than most people. That’s why we can sometimes feel guilty taking time for ourselves and. We can say even taking a time away from our own goals. So we’re self-motivated here, and we can feel a pressure to keep on pushing or keep on going.

And this is a natural conflict that comes up. We want to do something, we know what to do. We also know that doing it the more complete way or the right way is gonna be more effective. So our task is big. But if we don’t respect this need for downtime for alone time, then we’re gonna push past our limits and we’re actually gonna become less effective if you keep coming back to work every day or back to whatever ever it is you’re interested in doing with stress that hasn’t been fully released, the stress that has undigested stress, a residue of stress.

And you just keep coming back, then that will affect your job. It it’s like a sticky gummy thing that work like gums up the works and you’re going to be less effective, you’re gonna be less enjoying your work and in the end it leads to even more stress. So how can you integrate alone time and outer engagement in your life?

’cause both are important. Alone. Time is good. Outer engagement is also in good, is also good, but it has to stay in balance. The good thing is we’re all endowed with something called stress. Stress tells us when we’ve gone too far, and if you listen to that, it will tell you exactly when. It will give you even warnings ahead of time saying you’re getting close.

You’ve only got a quarter tank of left in your in of gas in your tank, and now you’re down to an eighth of a tank and now you’re running on fumes. And then now. The system is stopping. So if you pay attention to stress, it will point you in the right direction. It will say, Hey, come on back, take a break.

And when I say alone time, I don’t mean just alone time working. Alone time, like really giving yourself space that might be resting, that might be doing something totally unrelated to what you’re normally focused on. It has to be something where you are not working on some kind of project, even a self-improvement project or even a stress reduction project.

It has to be downtime. So the simple feeling that I’m left with today is that alone time is not a failure. It’s actually the essential ingredient that makes everything else work in your life as an HSP. In this episode, we looked at how to stop judging yourself from needing alone time that others don’t seem to need.

What happens when you ignore this essential HSP need and how to integrate alone time with stress-free outer engagement in your life? Both are essential. It’s not enough just to have alone time, and it’s not enough to just have outer engagement. Most of us need a balance. All of us need a balance, and your stress will tell you when you’re in balance and when you’re out.

Thanks for listening. It’s great to explore, as always with you, this program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.