Why Doing Too Many Different Things Drains Highly Sensitive People and How to Simplify Your Life

 By the end of this episode, you’ll see what changed when I simplified the way I structured my work as a highly sensitive person, and why it made such a big difference in my stress levels. In this episode, you’ll discover why doing too many different kinds of things can quietly drain highly sensitive people, what happens to your system when there’s too much shifting, switching, and recovery throughout the day, and what began to change when I created more simplicity, continuity, and space in my schedule.

This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. I’ve been doing my job as a facilitator for more than a decade and a half, and it has always been a challenge to juggle everything. I never thought of myself as running a business when I was young.

I never studied how to manage time. I never learned these things until practical life put these lessons in front of me. So what it means on a practical level for me is that since 2010, when I started all this, and even before when I had another business as a photographer, I was constantly juggling all of the different aspects of running a business.

So in my particular business, it means taking care of clients, doing client sessions, writing a newsletter. I had a blog for a long time. Keeping up my website and keeping up with the technology there and learning the basics of marketing, which I never studied until I was on the job. Developing courses and holding workshops and figuring out logistics around all of that, creating content for that.

And then I also had a community for thirteen years, which was something I stayed in every day, like twenty-four like not twenty-four, like seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I was checking in and doing my work there, supporting other clients there, and it was a beautiful community, but it required a lot of time.

And then on top of that, some years ago, I started this podcast, and so that requires a lot of doing and thinking and creating and everything. So imagine, and you can probably imagine this in your own job, whether you’re working for someone else or whether you’re working for yourself, there are so many things that you, that are you’re trying to juggle, and that’s what my experience was.

You can also add in the fact that I was the son of two doctors, so for them- Working evenings, working nights was normal, and that was my role model growing up. So I would come home from school and do my homework, and homework, because I’m an HSP, took me longer ’cause I was slow. I like to do things methodically.

I like to think things through. And it would just take up the whole evening. And if I needed to work later, then my mom was great with that. “Just stay up until you finish your homework.” So this is the training that I had. And then, of course, in college, the demand of assignments was huge, and I somehow just managed to do all of them working, I don’t know, 13, 14 hours a day plus classes.

And it’s like this became my norm. And when you’re young, you can kinda get away with it for a while. But in reality, it has always taken all my time. And so it was no exception when I got into business for myself, how I would basically use up all the hours of the day that I wa- that I wasn’t sleeping or eating or meditating, and that would be taken up by work.

And so this is something that I… it never worked for me. And so the problem is it’s just too much, trying to do too much in a finite amount of time, especially as a highly sensitive person, ’cause I do work slowly. And so I’d end up trying to fit all of this randomly into my schedule, and I’d have a little bit of this for an hour and then switch to this for another hour.

And then if I didn’t finish something, I would finish that in the evening or on a weekend. So I constantly had open loops in my mind of things that were half done that I’m trying to work on, then oh, I needed to switch to another thing. And as you can imagine, it creates a state of overwhelm, and it can lead to a kind of burnout that can happen as well.

So I did get things done. I’m highly dedicated, but I never had a feeling of downtime, and I often felt scattered and frustrated juggling so many different things. This is a common experience for highly sensitive people. We were not built for doing many things at once. We are built for dealing with complex problems, but not 10 different complex problems at once which is often the case that we’re having to face.

So what this caused for me was a kind of inner tension, like I’m always on duty. I’m always on. Even when I was meditating, I was catching myself planning what I was going to write about in a newsletter or what I was going to talk about on a podcast episode, or thinking about a client or on and on. So this kind of- Always being on is the result of this too much going on, trying to fit too much in.

And I find myself craving for vacations and not sure I could even take one. For many years, I never took a vacation. And, I couldn’t even take a weekend or an evening for it at all, so a vacation seemed strange. Or a vacation became only those mandatory vacations, like where you go and see family because that’s what everybody’s doing, and it almost feels like more of a like a duty rather than just relaxation time.

Luckily, I’ve always prioritized meditation, and that has truly saved my life. But it’s still not ideal. Like just meditating and working, there’s not a balance there. There’s not a balance for just relaxing and being yourself. And so what happened to me, and it may happen to you as well, is that you may start to feel like you don’t have a right to be, to exist, and you don’t have a right to enjoy something other than work.

And yes, I do enjoy work. I love work, but it’s… it can’t be everything. And even at work, I find myself rushing from one thing to another and always behind, and I felt like I was time poor. And so when I would just get started on writing something, maybe I was working for an hour on that, then it would be time to switch and go to a client.

And then when I came back, I’d lost the momentum. And so I used to crave long blocks of time where I could go deeply into something, which is actually what we’re built for as highly sensitive people. As highly sensitive people, our nervous systems were designed to go deeply into one thing and to really get to the bottom of it.

And if we’re constantly switching and juggling, it’s not only frustrating because you can’t go deep, but it’s also a major cause of overwhelm and burnout. So we as HSPs have to respect our nervous system and work with it, not against it. I tell people that I teach stress management because I need to learn it myself.

That’s why I’m so passionate about it. Everything I learn, I test out for myself, and it’s a constant process of growing and improving on my own. So I wanna talk about a series of changes that I’ve made over the past six months or so that have made a huge difference for me, and they fall under the categories of simplification and containment.

So let’s talk about containment first. What I mean by that is that What non-containment is, by contrast, is that you don’t have an end to things. You don’t have a container for, say, your workday. And that was my life for my whole life. All as a student and as an adult, it was just get the job done at all costs and all hands on deck until the job’s done.

And basically, I’m at the mercy of the jobs that get handed to me. And because I’m conscientious, I take jobs on that people offer me. I often don’t say no. And on top of that, I have a creative mind, so I’m constantly coming up with new jobs for myself, whether anybody’s handing them to me or not. So containment, for me, was a new idea, something that I implemented more consistently in about six months ago, where I set a end time to my workday.

At that time, it was five o’clock. I’ve actually recently changed it to four o’clock, and my workday ends at that point. And so what that means is that whatever’s going on during the workday is contained within the workday, and anything I didn’t finish will have to be finished the next day. It’s not… I don’t use my personal time as a buffer time anymore.

And this makes a huge difference. I can tell you personally, it took months for me to fully respect the boundary. But now that it’s clear and established, it’s like I walk out of the office and a part of me relaxes ’cause I’m leaving all of that responsibility behind. I know I’m gonna come back to it. I may not get back to an email right away, but I will get back to it.

So this means literally nothing. I don’t turn my computer on. I don’t check emails. I don’t do one last thing. I don’t check in just before bed to see if somebody got back to me. I don’t write down a nice cool idea that I had in the evening or in the morning before work. I completely take off. This is what I mean by containment.

And I can say it was a little bit challenging to do. It went against the grain of not only what… how I functioned my entire life, but also how our world tends to function. And so this required really building a habit for myself. But I can tell you the difference is like night and day. Now I feel like I can breathe.

And at first I didn’t know what I could do with my time, but slowly I started finding that I actually was in… had lots of things that I like to do in non-work time And I started engaging with my partner more, I started reading more, I started playing with our dog more. I started doing lots of things and just sometimes just sitting around not doing anything.

I’m even f- starting to find myself exploring and being interested in more social options as well. In other words, I have a personal life now, not just a professional one. And this came from this one idea of containment. Work is during work hours, and life, personal life, is during those other hours. The other area that I wanna talk about is simplification.

So one of the big changes that I made this year was in February and March, I closed my online community after thirteen years. And this was a great community, and I loved it, and it was something that I poured my heart and soul into. I made a place for people to come together, do inner work together, support each other as HSPs, and it was beautiful.

But it required a lot of time, and it required me to be constantly thinking about it, improving it, juggling it, and trying to fit it in between clients and podcasting and course creation and all of this. So fitting all of that into my weekly schedule left no room to do everything, and I was always feeling frustrated.

I was always feeling like there’s just not enough time. And so I made a decision to close it, and I had real grief letting it go. It was hard for me to let it go. It was like my baby in a way. But when the dust settled, what I found is that I landed in a place of simplicity. I now just do two things, podcasting and clients and my newsletter.

So that’s it. When there’s space in my schedule, I can work on a simple admin task, or maybe I’ll do something with my marketing, or I will just take a break. If there’s no space in my schedule, I don’t need to do anything more. I’m fully doing my job, and this allows me to relax. I’ve basically gone from doing five or six things to doing basically two things.

And so this simplicity makes a big difference in your stress level. And I took it even a f- step further just in recent weeks of switching my podcast recordings and creations to Wednesdays only. So instead of fitting it in around clients and doing an hour here and an hour there, I just dedicate the day of Wednesday to creating this podcast, and I create three episodes a week, so that’s a full day just doing that And then on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I’m just with clients, and it feels like almost like I’m off duty.

I’m just taking it easy, enjoying working with clients, having that enjoyable interaction that I have with clients. And so I’ve contained even the podcasting to one specific time. So this idea of containing and simplifying can make a huge difference on your ability to enjoy your work and feel like you’re not behind all the time, but that you have enough time to do what you like and do what you need to do.

So now I focus deeply on Wednesdays, and it allows me to be in the flow of working with clients on other days. And then finally, one other tweak that I’ve done in recent time is I now space my clients out throughout the day so that I have about thirty minutes between sessions. This allows for in case a session goes over for a few minutes, or it allows me to do email and other admin jobs instead of squeezing them in the evening, or it allows me to just take a break.

And this has helped me just come down step down on a few notches and go through the day in a much more relaxed way. So the result is, at the end of each day, I feel good. I don’t feel overly tired. I’m ready for a break, but I don’t feel exhausted. And I feel overall like I’m time rich, not time poor.

And so the only thing I have to watch is my future dreams. I sometimes can dream, and I think of new courses I could do and different things. And so I have to be patient with that and table that and let myself stabilize into this simple routine that is working in so many ways. Of course, things will evolve and change, but in the future, when things change, I’m not gonna be adding them on and keeping everything else.

I’m gonna be taking… If I change and add something new, I’m gonna be removing something off of my schedule so that it stays simple. The result overall is that hobbies are starting to come back online. I’m starting to study my French again. I’m starting to do yoga again. I’m starting to read again. I even started doing joined a dragon boat racing club, which is awesome, just to get out on the water and get some exercise in a supportive team environment.

And so this is how life can expand when you simplify and take care not to be doing too many things. So the feeling I’m left with today is that it’s amazing how much life can open up- when you simplify. And this is especially for highly sensitive people. It applies to everyone, but I think most especially to us who tend to work best when we have a simple approach to life.

In this episode, we looked at why doing too many different kinds of things can quietly drain highly sensitive people. And it’s simply because we’re not wired to do many different things at once. We’re wired to do one thing and do it well, and then go to the next thing and do it well. We also looked at what happens to your system when there’s too much shifting and switching and recovery during the day.

And what happens is you get scattered, you get frustrated because you can’t quite finish something. And there’s always an open loop that you want to go back and close. You want to finish writing that newsletter article, and then you want to finish following up with that email. And it’s just too many open loops that can actually drain you and make you go a little bit crazy.

Finally, we looked at what began to change when I created more simplicity, continuity, and space in my schedule. And the feeling is I felt like I got my life back, or maybe for the first time, got a life. Maybe I’m still in the process of getting a life. I’ve always been working instead. So thank you for listening.

It’s always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join 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.