Why You'll Never Feel “Strong Enough” as an HSP (And It's Destroying Your Confidence)

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover the comparison trap that’s crushing your confidence.

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 comparing yourself to others always leaves you feeling weak. The hidden cost of measuring yourself by insensitive standards and how the strength comparison. Is sabotaging your self-worth? 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 younger, I would visit my mom in New York City. And my stepdad was like, you have to go see everything in New York. He would just keep coming up with suggestions. You probably want us to be up at five in the morning or six and out the door. Let’s, I want you to see Statue of Liberty.

I want you to see every museum in the city. I want you to see this place, that place. It was like insane. For me, from my perspective and my sister who’s similar to me I think also HSP. We just wanted to hang out, like maybe go to a park and chat on a bench and spend the afternoon just chilling, watching people talking like that.

But we used to feel bad. We used to feel judged and we used to even hide our preferences and actually make up places that we went, be like, oh yeah, we went here. And, just because we didn’t, we couldn’t go at that kind of pace. At my stepdad’s dad’s pace. In fact, we used to call him the shark because, like sharks, they die if they stop swimming.

So that’s the way, that’s the way he was. I came to love my stepdad and regrew very close over time, but especially in those early days, it just felt like I was being judged. I, there was something wrong with me. And if you’ve ever felt that. Because of your sensitivity or because of how quickly you reach overwhelm or what your normal is, then you’re not alone.

Maybe, for example, your husband loves walking in the busiest part of town and he loves the energy, and you’re like, I prefer the park. And he’s oh, but it’s so boring. It’s hard not to feel judged. It’s hard not to feel different. And that’s something we face as highly sensitive people on a regular basis, maybe you think?

It’s hard not to feel like other people are stronger because they actually can handle more. So it’s really hard to overcome this judgment. We actually buy into this judgment that they are stronger because of that. My mom, for example, she could go 24 7 with very little sleep. I’ve seen her pull allnighters and then just do it all over again.

And like my whole life, that’s just the way she was. She’d wake up earlier than you, no matter how early you got up. And I always felt like the loser, like no matter what I do, it’s just never gonna be like her. So maybe you feel like, like maybe it’s like your husband. Is like, how do you live, right?

How can you be okay with everything? And it doesn’t bother him? Maybe you’re not okay, but it, he’s okay. This is that constant comparison that happens between highly sensitive people and everyone else. So you can even watch, maybe your husband has a health problem and doesn’t even notice it.

While you’re affected by everything else going on, including that health problem. So the problem is if you measure your worth by someone else’s capacity, you always come up short. My sister is a super businesswoman from her twenties right after college. She just dove right in and was just working those long corporate hours, like really strong.

Flies all over the country. She gives talks. She is she’s amazing and really hats off amazing. But look, when I see that comparison and I see my quiet life and how I live, and the kind of quiet way that I run my business, I think, oh, there’s something wrong with me. This is the kind of thing we can fall into as highly sensitive people.

What happens is your confidence starts to erode and you start to watch. Others handle things that you get overwhelmed by and you can’t help but start judging yourself and thinking that there’s something wrong with you. Instead of just seeing that you’re different, we’re wired differently. And then what happens is relationships start to suffer because you may start to resent the ease with which other people are living their lives, and you may start to feel ashamed of your struggle.

The problem is you’re using the wrong measuring stick. You’re comparing, it’s like comparing like a feature rich phone that drains a lot of battery quickly to a flip phone, which like if you had the same battery, it could go on for, these days it could probably go on for a year without charging, if you had the same batteries as we did back in the day.

So it’s not fair. We as highly sensitive people. Have a feature rich phone. We have a lot of things that we process. And so we have to go into low power mode. We have to charge sooner than other people, and that’s just the reality of it. The problem is if you start believing that you’re weaker than other people because you can’t handle what they can in reality, you’re not weaker.

You are processing probably 10 times more information in every moment. Than everybody else. So that means your workload is necessarily way bigger than everyone else’s and you do things differently. For example, my partner buys things and then he takes them back again, and then he buys another version and takes it back and does it a number of times until he gets what he wants.

And that’s a perfectly valid way. Of purchasing, buying and finding what you want. He has to see it and see it in the place and see that it works, and then he’s satisfied, but it actually does cost a lot of money because you have to return things sometimes you can’t get the return, you have to sell it.

Then, it’s complicated. Whereas my way, which is more of an HSP way, I research more deeply and I don’t purchase until I’m actually clear. That it will fit my needs in multiple situations and that it will continue to fit those needs into the future. So this is like what I mean by 10 times more processing.

I’m taking time to make those decisions based on inference and deduction and intuition and thinking it through, whereas other people just run in, make the purchase and then they may have to do it multiple times. Not, it’s not that one is better than the other, but it’s good to know who we are and that there’s nothing wrong with being a slow processor.

We do that for a reason. It’s just like saying that a race horse is not weaker than a plow horse. They’re built for different purposes. A plow horse moves slowly, but it pulls a lot of weight, and that’s more like the HSP trade. So your sensitivity isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of a highly sophisticated nervous system, a nervous system that was built for depth and built for getting to the bottom of things and avoiding any kinds of errors that sometimes other people just learn more by trial and error.

And we learn by thinking first and then finding our way. True strength isn’t about handling everything. It’s about knowing what serves you and having the courage to choose it. This is so important for us because we can just end up caught forever in this trap of comparing ourselves with other people. If so, if you’re exhausted from feeling weaker than everyone around you, if you’re sick of being made to feel broken because you need different conditions than others.

And you’re tired of apologizing for having a more sensitive system than the people in your life. But what you really want is to feel proud of your depth and confident in your uniqueness, and powerful in your sensitivity. That’s exactly why I created the HSP Inner Freedom Program. If you’re interested, go to the show notes, click the first link you find, or visit true inner freedom.com.

Enter your details and we’ll help you stop comparing. And start celebrating what makes you different.