Why Work Can Be So Hard to Leave Behind for HSPs and How to Reclaim Your Evenings

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why work can be so hard to leave behind for HSPs, and what starts becoming easier when you recognize what your mind is actually trying to do. In this episode, you’ll discover why work can keep following HSPs long after the workday ends, what your mind starts doing when something feels unfinished, and how your evenings can begin to feel like your own again when your attention no longer has to stay attached to work.

This is an edition of Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person. You close your laptop, you leave the office, and you get in your car. When you arrive home, you either make dinner or it’s there for you, and you may have someone that you’re sharing this time with asking how your day was, and you’re off work.

But a part of your attention is still there You suddenly remember an email. You’re trying to have a conversation, you’re trying to enjoy a meal, but a meeting pops back into your head. Or you start planning mentally for tomorrow. And you may realize that you’ve stopped working, but work hasn’t stopped working inside of you.

This is a common experience for highly sensitive people. It’s a common experience for everyone, and especially for highly sensitive people. So this is more than just thinking about work. Many people assume that they’re just simply busy or maybe that they’re bad at relaxing or that they need a better work-life balance.

But that’s not quite what this feels like. It’s as though part of your nervous system refuses to clock out. Even when you’ve– you genuinely like and enjoy your evening and you’d love to spend time with the people you’re with, there’s a part of you that just refuses to clock out of work. And this can become so habitual that this just seems like the norm.

“Okay evening is just more work time.” I also like to think back to when I was in school, how the real work day was at home in, at home work– like homework time for me. And so there’s a training, at least in my culture, of working in the evening as it being like that’s that’s when you have your best work time.

It’s also when you’re alone, which is very appealing for a lot of HSPs. But the problem is there’s often a real lack of balance here. When do you actually get to enjoy yourself? When do you actually get to spend time with people that you care about? When do you do the other things in life that are also important to make life meaningful?

In other words, it’s very easy in our culture to have work take over because the expectations are so high and as an HSP to have this constant sense of responsibility that keeps preventing you from relaxing and enjoying downtime and then just all the habitual training that reinforces all of this. So if you’re like me, I went years, decades, my whole life until really just last year Being basically like a workaholic, working all the time.

And I’ve always loved what I’ve done. I’ve always enjoyed it, but I never had time for any of the other aspects of life. I never had time just to decompress and relax in the evening other than what I was forced to do by my partner, who’s lucky enough… I was lucky enough to have to almost force me.

But even then in relaxing, quote unquote, my mind would be back on work. But I can tell you over the past year, it took a little work, took a little discipline to, to create it, but I can tell you that I don’t think about work between workdays. It’s weird. I don’t know who I am, actually. I just took a vacation for ten days, just a staycation, and my computer was like some kind of a monument or relic in my office.

It had no appeal. I didn’t have any thought, “I’ve gotta go check this,” and, “What about that?” I just don’t recognize that person. So that’s what I’m talking about. We get so used to this, and it’s so natural for us to to be responsible that we can end up not having a life as a result. So why has this happened for highly sensitive people?

Highly sensitive people don’t just process experiences deeply, they also tend to keep their attention attached to anything that feels unfinished. And this has always been true for me, that anything unfinished really s- it, it bothers me. It’s something about that, then I have to keep going back and checking it out and working on a little more.

And this can become for long-term projects or bigger things that can’t be contained in one day or one hour, this can be a real problem ’cause it means that my mind doesn’t shut off, just keeps going, keeps messing with it, keeps optimizing and trying to finish what is unfinished. And what can be happening on a nervous system level is that you can be asking yourself, “Is it safe to let go of this yet?”

And if the answer doesn’t feel like a yes, then your attention just stays connected. That’s how we get hooked into this, on top of all the societal pressures and all of that. But it’s a feeling of lack of safety. If I let go of this, then what are the repercussions gonna be? Something’s gonna fall through the cracks, and then somebody’s gonna be upset with me for that.

And as HSPs, we don’t like people being upset with us. We try to avoid that because we don’t like the stimulation that comes in. That kind of anger or disappointment or pressure from others affects us deeply. And so we do everything to try to avoid that, including overworking and burning ourselves out.

So it’s ironic, but you can see where it’s coming from. The nervous system’s just asking, “Is it safe?” And if it isn’t, then who cares about anything else? I’m going to safety first. I’m just gonna keep on working ’cause that’s my way to stay safe. It’s not like we’re trying to overthink, but our system is trying to protect us.

It doesn’t want anything important to be forgotten

And once you see this, you’ll probably notice that it isn’t just work. It’s– work is a great place to look at this but think about other situations. Think about the last difficult conversation you had. Maybe you replayed it for many days after that. Or maybe something that happened to you a long time ago, and your mind just keeps going back to it, trying to work it out, trying to work it out.

I remember when my mom died, she died in a plane crash, and I was going back trying to figure out how that happened over and over for a long time until I did some inner work on it and let it go. But there was this sense of something is incomplete, something doesn’t make sense, something isn’t done.

And so as a result, you can end up getting hooked into this again and again. Or take, for example, a decision that you haven’t made yet. Have you noticed that it keeps resurfacing? It’s because it’s not complete. And same thing with your to-do list. Something that’s just sitting there and is not done yet, your mind keeps reminding you.

And I think for highly sensitive people, this is especially true because we tend to be so responsible, and we want to do things so well, and we really don’t want any negative repercussions from missing something or not doing something well. So the pattern isn’t work here. Work is an example of it. The– really, the deeper pattern is unfinishedness.

Work simply creates dozens of unfinished loops every day, making it one of the easiest places to notice where this can start to happen So the cost isn’t simply thinking too much. The cost is never fully arriving where you are. Your body’s eating dinner, but part of your attention is still at work. I can be walking the dog with my partner, having a conversation, and my mind being on some work project.

I’m not present. So you’re spending time with someone you love, and another part of your mind is organizing tomorrow. You’re technically resting, but your nervous system never completely receives the message that it’s allowed to rest. This is the key. Over time, your evenings begin feeling strangely unsatisfying It’s not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because only part of you is actually there to enjoy the rest

What if your nervous system isn’t waiting for everything to be finished? What if it’s waiting for something else? Maybe it simply needs confidence that unfinished things won’t disappear, won’t fall through the clef- the cracks, that they have somewhere to land, that they’ll be there when you return That shift alone can begin changing how your nervous system experiences the end of the workday.

Not because everything is suddenly complete, but because it no longer has to stay mentally open. This is the huge little insight that as I put into practice in my life allows me to now walk away at the end of the day and not think about work, feel like it’s done So if you’re starting to recognize how often work follows you into your evenings, or you’ve noticed that even after the workday ends, part of your attention is still back at work, I created something to help with exactly that.

It’s called the Work Life Boundary Reset. It’s a short guided reflection you can use at the end of your workday to help your mind recognize that work has a place, your personal time has a place, and it’s okay to move from one into the other. It isn’t about becoming more productive or creating a rigid routine.

It’s simply designed to help your nervous system begin letting go of work so your evenings can start feeling like they’re your own again. You can download the Work Life Boundary Reset. Just go to the show notes, click on the first link you find, or go to trueinnerfreedom.com/work-life-boundary-reset,

and I’ll send it right over.