Why Highly Sensitive People Crave Alone Time AND Deep Connection, & How To Finally Have Both

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why needing both solitude and connection as an HSP isn’t a contradiction, and how making peace with this tension can lead to deeper self-compassion.

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 why the HSP nervous system pulls you in two directions and why both are valid. How feeling torn between solitude and connection can trigger shame, guilt, or self-doubt. A practical shift to stop judging your needs and start honoring your natural rhythm. 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.

When I was in my twenties, I lived in an ashram for many years, and in some ways it was a highly sensitive person’s dream. There was little external stimulation. It didn’t have any TVs. We didn’t listen to the radio. I did a lot of meditation. We used to meditate about eight hours a day. That was our main job, and it was simple living.

It was very simple. It was routine, and what I focused on was going deeper and deeper each day into the practice of my meditation. And so this brought a lot of joy, a lot of bliss on the inside, as well as some release of stress, which sometimes wasn’t comfortable. But overall, I could see my progress and I could feel it.

And I loved the deepening that happened there. So as life would have it, my mom remarried and ended up in New York City. As working there as a doctor with her husband and I would come from time to visit her from the ashram and celebrate Christmas or birthday or something like that. And in my naivete as a 20 something year old, I would come to New York and think I’m just gonna keep doing the same routine that I had in the ashram.

And so what would happen is I would still do long meditations. I would meditate for, I don’t know, two, three hours in the morning, two, three hours in the afternoon, and I would be pretty much not around when everybody else was doing things. I missed out on the bonding and the fun that people had, and I started feeling the the disapproval, the anger, the.

This trust that was growing between the different people in the family and myself, and I started feeling alone and different and left out and all of that, I was torn. And this is what can happen when you honor one side of the story more than the other. Life is a balance, and I tended to, in those days, favor the quiet side.

I was taking care of myself. Yes, I stayed rested even in a busy city. Yes, in many ways I was honoring my HSP trait and I was taking care of myself, but it came at a cost. And as a highly sensitive person, I also love connection. I also love sharing love with my family, and I was missing or limiting that when I did.

I remember one particular experience where I was meditating. I don’t remember if it was afternoon or morning, but everyone else was out of the house and I was just going so deep in meditation. It was just so nice, and I was really diving inwardly and the doorbell rang and I could tell that they had forgotten their key or lost their key or something like that.

And they were like desperately trying to get me to answer the door. They knew I was in there. But I pretended like I didn’t hear it, and I just kept on meditating and yeah, it was like I didn’t want to turn myself away from that beautiful inward feeling of meditation, but oh my gosh, I did feel guilt.

I did feel bad. We never talked about it. But to this day, I can tell you I feel this kind of pang of guilt when I think of that, that I basically ignored my family, left them out on the street. While I just enjoyed my depth of meditation. Totally understandable. I see the innocence of it at the same time, but it’s not balanced.

And that’s what I’m bringing here today, is that there are two sides to us as highly sensitive people. There’s a side of us that loves to go inward, loves to go deep, and loves to be alone. And there’s also a side of us. That loves connection and loves to go deep with others and be with others in a meaningful way.

And sometimes these two, or maybe in many instances, these two contradict each other. But this is life. And if I favor just one above the other, I can, but it may not be the balance that I was actually looking for, the actual depth of. A balance that would nourish me on all levels. What can happen, as I’ve just shared, is this guilt and shame or self-doubt can start creeping in.

You can start thinking there’s something wrong with me, or you can just feel bad about it. And this actually affects the meditation. Like meditation starts to become a little less deep because I’m feeling guilty about something that I really, in all. Honesty should have been doing, answering the door.

So as I’ve matured over time and with the help of my partner who was more mature than me, my partner was also from the ashram, but we came out together and we started to look at how to integrate the outer and the inner, and that has been and continues to be a life’s work for me. But it started, I remember with my stepdad and he, after my even before my mom passed away, but especially afterwards we got in the habit of being like all hands on deck for him.

We, he loved to do things. He was a real doer and he was practical. He was a woodworker and he liked fixing things around the house and running errands, and he just loved doing things and he had a great heart. At first, this was the thing I resisted in the fact that it was not my inward meditation and quiet, and he didn’t really understand that, or at first seemed like he didn’t understand it, although I think he grew on him.

But what changed, and this I learned really from my partner, is that there was a balance that we could go all out. Just be there for him and just say, okay, you want to go to the hardware store? Yeah, let’s go to the hardware store. Can you help me move these things around? Sure. We’re gonna move these things around.

Like we’d show up at breakfast time on a regular routine. It wouldn’t be like super late in the morning after a long meditation. We’d get up early enough to do everything, do a little less meditation and show up there. And what happened was. We started to engage, we started to connect. And the depth of connection in relationship with my stepfather was amazing.

Like to this day, he’s been gone for a number of years, but when I think of him, my heart just swells. It’s just this feeling of love because we gave our all to him and he knew it and he appreciated it. And even my stepbrother’s what are you guys doing? He sure loves you. That’s the reward of giving up a little bit of the meditation, a little bit of the inward, which is still precious to me.

But this is equally precious, and this is what I’m trying to say, is that it’s, there’s a way to have both. And over time as I’ve continued to live in the world, but also my partner and I live in a kind of almost ashram like way, we do still a lot of meditation and. And we have a quiet life, but we have learned how to step in and out of the silence and to not be so upset when it changes or when something comes up.

Now, for example, if something comes up in the middle of meditation, I can get up and deal with it and then come back to meditation without a lot of stress, and I’m like, oh, I ruined that deep feeling or. Sometimes I’ll skip a meditation and I can be okay with that. This is going with the flow, and I still favor doing my meditation as regularly as possible, and it’s usually twice a day, but I’m not as attached to one side or the other.

I don’t get stuck in one side of the other. For me, the stuckness was more on the quiet side. But it can equally happen that you get stuck on the outward side and maybe you’re just outward and outward and outward, and you’re getting burned out and you need some quiet time. You need that. We need both.

We need outward and we need inward. And if you can see it as this is necessary for us as highly sensitive people that we have both, it can help. Overcome getting stuck in just one side or the other. So the feeling I’m left with is a feeling of freedom, a freedom to rest, and a freedom to interrupt rest, freedom to be active, and a freedom to interrupt activity.

These two opposites have to interrupt each other in order to coexist, and my experience is that. As this interruption continues to happen back and forth from silence to activity, what I find is that there’s more silence in activity and there’s more of a, less of a difference between silence and activity.

Then I can be at home wherever I am, whether I am sleeping and get interrupted of my sleep, or whether I am acting and decide to stop and go meditate. This feels like freedom. In this episode, we looked at why the HSP nervous system pulls us in two directions and why both are valid and we can say in retrospect that this is because we need more rest than other people.

So we tend to look at that and that’s a valid thing to do, but we also love connection. And if we only focus on rest, it can lead to imbalance. We also looked at how feeling torn between solitude and connection can trigger shame or guilt or self-doubt, and this is not a pleasant thing. Why would I want to be alone if I’m not enjoying that aloneness?

If I’m feeling guilty, then it’s almost what’s the point? And we looked at a practical shift to stop judging your needs and start honoring your natural rhythm. And that is a rhythm between rest and activity. Deep rest to balance out the activity to integrate the rest. Both things are needed and as I’ve grown over time, I’ve found that these two can coexist more and more in my life.

So thanks for listening. It’s great to explore and share and think with you. This podcast 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.

So the feeling I’m left with is a feeling of freedom, a freedom to rest, and a freedom to interrupt rest, freedom to be active. A freedom to interrupt activity. These two opposites have to interrupt each other in order to coexist. And my experience is that as this interruption continues to happen back and forth from silence to activity, what I find is that there’s more silence, inactivity, and there’s more, of a less of a difference between silence and activity. Then I can be at home wherever I am, whether I am sleeping and get interrupted of my sleep or whether I’m acting and decide to stop and go meditate. This feels like freedom. In this episode, we looked at why the HSP nervous system pulls us in two directions and why both are valid and we can say in retrospect that.

This is because we need more rest than other people. So we tend to look at that, and that’s a valid thing to do, but we also love connection. And if we only focus on rest, it can lead to imbalance. We also looked at how feeling torn between solitude and connection can trigger shame or guilt or self-doubt.

And this is not a pleasant thing. Why would I want to be alone if I’m not enjoying that aloneness? If I’m feeling guilty, then it’s almost what’s the point? And we looked at a practical shift to stop judging your needs and start honoring your natural rhythm. And that is a rhythm between rest and activity.

Deep rest to balance out the activity. Activity to integrate the rest. Both things are needed, and as I’ve grown over time, I’ve found that these two can coexist more and more in my life. So thanks for listening. It’s great to explore and share and think with you. This podcast 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.