Why It’s So Hard for HSPs to Ask for Space — And How to Remain Caring Even While Honoring Yourself

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why asking for space can feel so difficult for highly sensitive people and how it’s possible to remain deeply caring even as you begin to honor your own needs.

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 being deeply attuned to others can quietly disconnect you from your own needs. The deeper roots of why asking for space feels uncomfortable. Even when you need it most, and how it’s possible to remain caring and connected while also honoring your own needs. 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.

If asking for space, even just a little breathing room, brings up guilt, anxiety, or second guessing, you’re not alone. For highly sensitive people saying, I need time, or anything that is taking a little bit of space can almost feel like you’re saying, I’m abandoning you. Someone once shared a moment that perfectly captured the struggle of asking for space as a highly sensitive person.

She was at her niece’s birthday party with balloons loud music, a crowded room full of excited kids and chattering adults. Halfway through, she started to feel overwhelmed. Her heart was racing, her body was tense. Her smile was starting to feel more like a mask. And she told me, I knew I needed five minutes outside.

Just five minutes of quiet. But she didn’t go. She stayed in the kitchen holding a half full glass of lemonade and pretending to be engaged in small talk. She was afraid. Basically that someone would notice her stepping away and afraid her sister would think she was being rude or she didn’t care. And under all of that was that kind of voice that kicks in, saying, don’t make things awkward, just get through it.

Be good. And she ended up staying inside and then spent the rest of the afternoon feeling distant, somewhat dissociated and disconnected from everyone. The thing is, her hesitation wasn’t actually a weakness. It wasn’t about being indecisive or flaky or selfish. It was coming from a very tender place.

Her deep longing to stay connected, and that’s a natural part of all human beings and as highly sensitive people, we are especially connected to that instinct, that tendency to want to be connected with people. Her sensitivity was not the problem. The problem was the story that taking up space meant she was breaking connection or that she was gonna be causing problems or that people wouldn’t like it.

The thing is highly sensitive. People are wired to notice other people’s needs to sense their discomfort to pay attention to the emotions they may be having. We pay attention to these things and for good reason, it allows us not only to have deep connections with people, but also to be supportive in ways that are unique to being a highly sensitive person.

So the challenge comes when you’re doing inner work or when life just puts it in your face that you have to. Figure out what to do and you may feel like life is pushing you to go against your own nature. And I say life, and I even put inner work in that category because inner work always challenges what we’re thinking and believing it.

It gets us to push the envelope a little bit and it may, you may feel like you’re pushing up against your own nature because if your own nature is to go for deep connection, then. Okay, where’s the balance point in that, tough love likes to say, stand up for yourself. Just say, no.

Take a break. Be smart. Take care of yourself. These all sound very wise and good and intelligent and I can agree with them 99% of the time, except in that moment when I’m actually in the situation and I’m aware of everyone’s. Feelings, everyone’s thoughts, everyone’s potential reactions.

And yes, some of that can be fear-based, but some of that is just also being a caring person, being aware of others, and and being intelligent. Why would I do something that is gonna cause bigger problems if I do it? This is what we wrestle with as highly sensitive people, and it comes to the distinction between our nature and what’s layered on top of our nature, which is our stresses or our conditioning, our attachments.

And I love to push the boundaries on my attachments. I love to question my thoughts. And slip out of what I’ve been believing my whole life. I love to question my conditioning and work with that challenge it, but there’s also my nature, which I don’t want to challenge too much because that’s who I am part of loving what is accepting who I am, and part of who I am is sensitive.

So highly sensitive people by nature are. They want harmony. I think most everyone wants harmony, but highly sensitive. People are super attuned to that. We want harmony, we like attunement, we like a concord, we like a easy, peaceful experience. And that is in itself is not a bad thing. And so I think it’s really important when doing self work or like inner work to.

Challenge ourselves, but also pay attention inside where is the actual balance point, because it may not be flipping to the other side and becoming like super hardcore tough which most highly sensitive people couldn’t do anyway. So it’s about understanding ourselves and knowing that we’re probably gonna always be gentle.

We’re probably always going to put ourselves a little bit second. And we do that for good reason and it’s not a bad thing. And it doesn’t even have to change. It’s just a matter of degree. Where do we compromise one way, and where do we need to just insert a little bit more of taking care of ourselves so that we can have more to give?

And that’s one of my favorite ways to turn this around is to see that when I take five minutes, when I take a little time to balance, to take care of myself. When I pursue what I’m interested in, as well as other people pursuing what they are interested in, some new energy comes up inside of me. And when that energy is there, I have more to give to others.

I can actually be more understanding, more help, like helpful. And that is that’s like the balance. Taking care of myself, I. Is the basis of taking care of others. And so it’s not that I have to give up being there for others, being aware of others, being sensitive to others, or wanting harmony. No, it’s just inserting a little bit more of my true self instead of going on a fake version of peace where I’m like, oh, everything’s fine.

But I’m actually not happy on the inside. And then, yeah, I have peace on the outside, but at the cost of peace on the inside. So our nature’s not gonna change. We’re sensitive. We’ll continue to be sensitive. If we’re stressed and sensitive, that’s another layer on top of it. But if you remove the stress, you’re left with just plain sensitive and that is a beautiful thing.

So I like to look for where. My thinking has gotten exaggerated where my thinking has gotten into the other person’s business beyond just being sensitive to them. Where am I becoming attached to them? Where am I trying to influence them? Or where am I dependent on them to be happy myself? If I can identify those, that’s not my nature.

That has nothing to do with being an HSP that has to do with my conditioning, with my thoughts, with my beliefs. What the stories that I put up on top of the situation, and those can be very deeply ingrained and, but they also respond beautifully to self-inquiry. What I love about self-inquiry is that it is a chance for us to ask ourselves what feels right for us?

And if you really follow the instructions in that, you will not be confused between your own nature, which is sensitive kind. Generous and your stress, which is stressed, you will feel the difference. And so paying attention to that will allow you to navigate and know where, okay, I can feel confident doing what feels right for me without getting confused.

In other words, there are times when what feels right to me is to give up something that I want. And be there for someone. Maybe I want to do that more, but there are other times where I have to find that balance and realize that’s actually not productive at all. So the bottom line is I like to reframe this hesitation to take care of myself as something that’s not a bad thing.

It’s not a weakness, it’s not something that I have to overcome. It’s coming from a good place. Being kind to others is not a bad thing. But the mind can co-opt this behavior and use it to hide a little bit and to stay safe from judgments of others and to protect itself from vulnerability or being exposed.

And while that can be okay, it also starts getting into a stressful. Place. And so I just like to separate these two. What is my nature? What is the stress that interferes on top of it? And I like to question the heck out of my stress and the thoughts that are, that I’m believing, but I like to accept with full heart who I am and allow myself to be what I am.

And what if your struggle to take up space is just a sign of how deeply you value connection? What a sweet thing and what if that value doesn’t have to disappear when you step back and take care of yourself. I believe there’s always a way to have both. It may not be perfectly both, but there’s always a way to find that balance where I am able to be kind, considerate, and loving to others, but I’m also able to be kind, considerate, and loving to myself.

In this episode, we looked at how being deeply attuned to others can sometimes quietly disconnect you from your own needs. It’s part of the limitations of having a limited attention span from looking outward. It’s hard to be looking inward, and if I’m looking inward, it’s hard to be looking outward. But what we want to culture is the ability to broaden our attention span so that we can look outward and inward at the same time.

We also explored the deeper roots of why asking for space may feel uncomfortable even if you really need it. And this can be, the discomfort is often coming from some kind of conditioning, some kind of beliefs, some kinds of, some kind of thinking. In other words, some kind of overlay, some kind of stress that can be challenged.

But the na natural tendency for HSPs to connect and to be empathetic and to be harmonious is not something that needs to be challenged. It’s seeing the difference between the stressful version of ourselves and the natural version of ourselves. Seeing that allows us to challenge the stressful part without challenging the natural part.

Finally we looked at how it’s possible to remain caring and connected even while honoring our own needs. And sometimes just taking a little bit of time for ourselves may not even need to be that much. It gives us energy to be able to come back and have more to give when we’re around others. If we’re depleted, the best we can do is fake it, and that’s not really fun for us.

Generally it’s not that fun for others as well. So overall, the feeling I’m left with here is that it’s okay to be caring. There’s nothing wrong with being caring, and we don’t need to fix ourselves to somehow be less caring in order to take care of ourselves. There’s a way just have to explore it.

There’s a way to do both. So thanks for listening. I love exploring with you. This podcast comes out three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And 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.