Why Overwhelm Happens in Certain Situations for Highly Sensitive People and How to Find the Root Cause

 By the end of this episode, you’ll see what’s really causing overwhelm in certain situations for highly sensitive people, and what begins to change when you stop focusing on the surface problems. In this episode, you’ll discover why overwhelm can show up so strongly in certain situations for highly sensitive people, how the mind can focus on the less important causes.

And what begins to change when you see what’s really driving the reaction. This is an addition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. I worked with a client recently who was dealing with the experience of overwhelm in the moment while we were in the session.

She had just gotten back from a trip and she was a bit jet lagged, and suddenly everything that she had put on hold for the time while she was away started piling up in her mind, and she was just very overwhelmed trying to organize her day, trying to figure out what to do there. There were just so many things pushing in on her that it took her to that point very easily.

Certainly because of the fatigue and the travel and everything, there’s less bandwidth. And of course they hit you. Everything piles up in your mind more because of that. But when we started looking for what is the source of this, we started exploring like, first of all, like what were the things that were on her mind?

And I often invite my clients to just do a brain dump. Of everything they think they have to do in the moment of overwhelm, just get it out on paper. And so she, she had a huge list of all the different things that were going on. She had to finish a report for work. She had to, she wanted to do some progress in a class she was taking.

She thought about a friend that the relationship’s been not as great as she had wanted, and she’s not even sure what the status of it is. Then that became a big thing should I reach out or not? She had another interaction with another person that is wanting her to do things work-wise.

And it’s challenging relationship. And so that’s another piece of stress on the plate. And then all the little things like. Buying a plane ticket or organizing a class or doing some kind of like even getting into what should I eat and I need to have a plan about eating and maybe I should lose some weight.

And, I don’t know if I have a morning routine that I really works for me. And you can see how the mind just starts looking and finding more and more things. To focus on. Oh yeah. And she was moving too. So oh yeah, I’ve gotta organize that. And and on. So this is a typical experience of overwhelm that happens to anybody.

We as highly sensitive people tend to hit that overwhelm point quicker than others. It’s just a part of our nature. So we’re looking at what do you do when that happens to you? Like when you have suddenly your mind going into just overwhelm because of seeing so many different things at once to do.

And the idea, I find is to look for what’s causing that. And at first you may look at. Some of the reasons that are very obvious, like the jet lag, for example, anyone with jet lag is gonna reach overwhelm quicker, so that’s a no brainer. She said she had also over eaten a little bit in her travels, and that can affect things.

You can look at some of the issues, like some of the boundary issues and some of the relationships that she was concerned about and needing to get back to about. You can even, we could even point to a little bit of imposter syndrome of worrying about a presentation that she has to give.

These are valid causes of overwhelm and worth looking at, but I like to put everything on the table and just see what, what’s going on all levels, because. Each thing can be explored, but you can’t, even in doing your inner work, you can’t explore all of them at once. So if you can find what seems to be the most underlying reason or cause of the overwhelm, that can help in just how to approach the overwhelm itself.

In her sharing with me, she shared one more thing and that was that she had woken up from a dream that she had of her father. And I later learned that she hadn’t spoken to her father for a couple years and this dream was interacting with him in a way and trying to figure out what to do.

Like when she came up, there was emotion there. There was a sense of all the issues that were on the table with her father from when she stopped talking with him and the conflict because she loves her dad as well. And so this was like a very poignant, very powerful, emotional kind of trigger.

Came from a dream, but something there got unsettled. And this is the kind of thing that as she spoke about it, it became really clear this was unsettling her more than almost anything else. You can’t rule out the fact that she was tired, that she had overeaten, that there were a lot of things to do, but this kind of emotional experience coming in this case from a dream.

Or it could come from other types of experiences. Look in my experience, look for the emotion. Look for something that’s oh my gosh, that’s really, it shook me. Or it made me feel overwhelmed emotionally. Because once you’re overwhelmed emotionally, then all the projects and on all, even the little details of things you have to do becoming overwhelming on top of it.

So this is just a general principle when you’re looking for how to work with overwhelm. There’s two ways to do it. One is to give yourself rest, give yourself time to deal with any kind of just like imbalance that’s crept in, like from travel. But probably as important or more important is look for what triggered you emotionally at some point recently.

And that is probably what put things over the top. What made you start feeling like, oh my gosh, I can’t manage this is too much. When we did that, when we focused on her father and looked closely at the situation and started seeing the actual issue very clearly, and when we started doing inner work on that issue, then we were, you could feel it.

We were addressing what was. Had been an issue sitting underneath for many years, for a couple of years or even longer. But it had come up in the dream and it had come to the surface. And when that happens, it’s usually because it’s ready to be dealt with, something is emerging, something triggers me and I start coming face to face with something that.

I maybe wasn’t ready to work with before. And so as we did that work on her father and we started finding different ways of looking at the relationship and how to experience the connection, the desire for connection, and yet the issues with with boundaries that were a big part of that whole thing as we worked through it, as we basically held the emotion and let the emotion work through it.

That’s when things started to settle, that’s when a sense of calmness starts to be coming into the whole experience. And so when there’s more calmness, when the emotion has settled again, then projects and other smaller issues in life become more manageable because our bandwidth just increased dramatically.

I don’t know if anything. I don’t know of anything that decreases bandwidth quicker than emotional stress and emotional stress is there for a reason. It shows us sort of our underworld that needs to be worked, but when it comes up, it takes over, especially if you’re highly sensitive. So that is when problem solving and trying to tweak your routines and trying to.

Manage your to-do list is probably not gonna be as effective as listening to that surge of emotion coming up inside of you, following the thread and doing the inner work to actually process that and move that forward to a place where it can settle again and you can really take a large step of your own inner evolution when you do it.

And that brings a kind of joy and it brings a kind of. Excitement. I’m actually starting to deal with something that has been an issue for a long time, and that brings energy back into the system. And when that energy is there, then there’s energy to do the different, to-dos. There’s energy to think clearly, oh, what should I be doing today?

Is it work or should I just be re resting after travel? Like you can think clearly. You can think strategically, you can think objectively. So that’s the value of finding what the emotional root was and dealing with that in real time, and then watching the overwhelm begin to diminish. So the feeling I’m left with today is that it’s worth taking your time.

Define the deeper reasons for overwhelm. It may not always be just that there’s too much to do. Often when the emotions are stirred up, the mind starts seeing problems everywhere and the to-do problems become bigger than they actually are. And when the emotions settle, again, the same tasks feel much less overwhelming.

In this episode, we looked at why overwhelm can show up so strongly in certain situations for highly sensitive people. And that is as highly sensitive people, we feel emotions stronger, and if something emotional is coming through, coming up, getting triggered in some way, then that can very quickly lead to the experience of overwhelm.

We also looked at how the mind can focus on the less important causes, which are, oh, I need to fix this problem. I need to deal with this person. I need to. Work on my my eating or all these things. They’re not unimportant, but they are not necessarily the original cause of the overwhelm. When you trace it back, there’s often one thing that feels emotional, that is at the root of it.

And finally we looked at what begins to change. When you see what’s really driving the reaction. Which is some emotion coming out. And so when you do deal with it then you’re giving attention to what actually needs attention. The emotion is calling for attention, and so when you give the attention to it in a constructive way, in a way that balances it, then that emotion starts to settle again and you, your energy comes back.

So thanks 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.