HSPs and anxiety - Part One

Overstimulation and anxiety can feel similar, but it helps to know the difference.

Welcome to my weekly newsletter building a supportive community for Highly Sensitive People (HSPs).

Update: Due to various commitments, I’ve decided to experiment with publishing this newsletter on a Wednesday mornings instead of Tuesday. Thank you for reading!

Webinar reminder for tomorrow at 8pm BST

Parenting a Highly Sensitive Child: Strategies for a stress free summer

I’m very pleased to be teaming up with Augmentive to offer a webinar aimed at supporting parents and other caregivers of Highly Sensitive Children this Thursday, June 23rd at 8pm BST. Tickets cost £18 and you can book them here. Thank you to all those who’ve already signed up — I’m looking forward to seeing you.

If you sign up, Augmentive is offering a £25 discount for a first one-to-one session with any practitioner on the website (quote GEN25 in the chat pop up on the Augmentive website to redeem this offer).

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Anxiety as an HSP

As many of us in The HSP Revolution community won’t need reminding, anxiety can be one of the toughest challenges we’ll face as we work to become more aware and empowered. Unless you’ve experienced it personally, the crippling nature of the feelings that come with anxiety can be difficult to convey. The sense of overwhelm can make ordinary social situations an ordeal. And if your fight-flight response gets activated in a full-blown panic attack, you can literally feel like you’re dying.

I experienced anxiety for years, when it would manifest as chronic worry, over-analysing, and feeling self-conscious in social situations. But anxiety can occur in many forms, such as:

• Intrusive negative thoughts

• Obsessive or compulsive behaviours and rituals

• Social anxiety

• Phobias

• Panic attacks

• Habits such as nail-biting or picking at hair or skin

• Numbness — to protect ourselves from overwhelming feelings

Whatever form anxiety may take, at its root is a sense of not being safe. If we’re facing actual physical danger, then our body will reflexively react by gearing us up to respond. But for most of us, anxiety arises in response to a lack of emotional safety — a fear that our relationships, our self-worth, or how others perceive us, are somehow under threat.

Since anxiety is such a big area for HSPs, I thought I’d share some of my own story in this post, before offering some more general observations and practical tips for handling anxiety next week.

Before we start, it’s useful to bear in mind that overstimulation and anxiety are two different things, though they may sometimes feel similar. Here’s how to tell them apart:

• Overstimulation: Since HSPs are such deep processors of sensory inputs such as sound and colour, and pick up on other peoples’ feelings and body language, we can easily become overwhelmed in busy environments. Mostly, that feeling will fade when we remove ourselves to a calmer space. You may feel anxious in the moment — but with some quiet time you will soon regain your balance.

• Anxiety: Some level of stress can help spur us on, but psychologists talk about clinical anxiety when it starts to have a significant impact on your day-to-day functioning. Anxiety can present in many forms, and arise in response to many different triggers, but it’s more than the temporary feeling of overwhelm that comes from being overstimulated by too much input.

Nevertheless, overstimulation and anxiety can often feel quite similar, and can occur together. And they may share common physical sensations, such as: Sweaty palms; butterflies in your tummy; stomach ache; being unable to think clearly; nausea; racing heart, and feeling like you need to escape — to name a few. (For anyone wanting to dive deeper on this distinction, I recommend this blog by Dr Elaine Aron, the American psychologist who created the term HSP).

If you’re feeling uncomfortable in a stressful situation, it can help to take a moment to tune in to your body and ask yourself whether you’re getting overwhelmed by sensory input (over-stimulation) or whether some deeper fear response has been triggered (anxiety). Helping to name what’s going on can put some space around your sensations and make your feelings more manageable.

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My experience with anxiety

As a child and young adult, I never saw myself as an anxious person. On the contrary, people would complement me on my calm, “together” demeanour. When I started to train as a clinical psychologist, I noticed that my go-to response to a question about how I was feeling was: “I’m okay, I’m fine.” I began to suspect something was not quite right, but it was only after I started practicing as a psychologist in my twenties that I began to get a sense of how much unacknowledged anxiety I had buried inside.

Despite my studies in psychology, I was largely unprepared when a diverse trio of stressors conspired to trigger spikes of anxiety I could no longer ignore: the loss of several people close to me; work pressures and the insecurities that go with dating. I was finally forced to acknowledge that I had habitually learned to stuff down my anxiety because the feelings had simply been too intense for me to handle. And I realised that the unhealthy patterns of eating, drinking, overwork, partying and bingeing on box sets that I’d developed hadn’t just arisen by accident — I was unconsciously using them as distractions from what was going on inside me.

Frozen layers

Like many HSPs, I hadn’t grown up around adults capable of showing me how to recognise and label my feelings, and learn how to navigate them safely. Without even realising it, I had become numbed and frozen. Though we might see this as a bad thing, this numbing out was in fact a highly intelligent, protective response from my own nervous system. The problem was that it had become “stuck” and had outlived its usefulness, leaving me disconnected and shut down — while appearing outwardly calm and in control.

I began to experiment with different ways to begin to feel the feelings in my body and crack through these frozen layers. As regular readers of The HSP Revolution will know, I’ve tried many different approaches — from Native American-style sweat lodges to the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or “tapping,” to sound healing, dance, a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, journaling and a healing technique known as “quantum hypnosis” and psychedelic therapy — among many others.

Despite all these adventures, one of the things I found most helpful was simply taking a sauna. When I was struggling with feelings of overwhelm, I used to visit my grandparents in Norfolk and they would take me to the swimming pool and say “go to the sauna, try out the steam room.” I felt like I was burning off the stress from my body. Even now, I feel like I should take a sauna more often. (I know some people swear by cold showers or baths, but they’re really not my thing!).

Calming my system

Gradually, I began to allow myself to feel the physical manifestations of the feelings I’d been suppressing, such as a pounding heart, tightness in my chest, and a heavy, dull ache in my stomach. I noticed how often I was stuck in my head, overanalysing or ruminating on an issue — worrying incessantly about the future or getting stuck in thought loops that I couldn’t get out of. Such repetitive mental activity is often a sign that we’ve stuffed down feelings in our body we haven’t yet been able to fully feel.

Over the years, I’ve learned to become more attuned and can usually instantly sense when my anxiety is starting to rise. I feel my heart beating fast, my mouth go dry, and my chest tighten. When I take a moment to consciously step into those feelings, rather than avoid them, I take deep breaths and try to focus on the physical sensations I'm experiencing in my body. This active decision to tune in to my body helps to shift my focus away from the stories in my mind and starts to calm my system.

By bringing my awareness to my anxiety in this way, I find it loses its grip on me. I rest in the knowledge that the uncomfortable feelings in my body I label “anxiety” are merely a false alarm from an intelligent nervous system that is doing its best to protect me — but is responding to events from the past, and not the present. Instead of pushing my anxiety down, I can thank it, and get on with my day.

Next week, I’ll be breaking down some more practical advice for recognising and managing anxiety as an HSP.

See you next time!

Dr Genevieve