If you’re a highly sensitive person, you’ve been handed some intense emotional experiences in your life. Somewhere along the way, either outright or through subtle conditioning, you’ve been taught that many of those emotions are unacceptable. So maybe you’ve tried to “cure” your feelings with online shopping, binging on Netflix, overeating, or drinking. I’ve used all of these coping mechanisms countless times. But until a few years ago, what I didn’t know was that they aren’t coping mechanisms.They make up a behavior called emotional buffering.

The Life Coach School (LCS) podcast is where I first learned the concept of emotional buffering. On the podcast, LCS founder/host Brooke Castillo defined it as “using external things to change how we feel emotionally.” It’s taking something like alcohol, television, food — anything really — and using it to numb how you feel. Learning what emotional buffering meant gave me a serious lightbulb moment, because I could suddenly see how often I was doing it in my life… and how little it helped me.

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Real-life Examples of Emotional Buffering 

I used to drink to numb my feelings of social anxiety. I would pre-game to keep from feeling even the slightest bit of apprehension before meeting friends at a noisy, crowded bar, my sensitive senses assaulted by unwelcome scents, sounds, flashing lights, and the nonstop energy of all… those… people. I took Xanax that didn’t belong to me because I felt entitled to a sense of calm without having to do anything for it (like stay home). I wanted to not care what people might think of my appearance or personality. I wanted to reject those feelings in myself before anyone else got the chance to reject me. But I didn’t want to do any of the personal development work it would take to change those things at the root. I just took a pill or drank to feel better in the moment.

But the sneakiest part about it? You can use literally anything to buffer your emotions — and we highly sensitive types have many, many emotions. It doesn’t have to be as obvious as alcohol or illegal drug use. The action itself doesn’t matter so much as the reason behind it. For example, devoting yourself to your work seems admirable on the surface… but not as much if you’re killing yourself with 80-hour work weeks to avoid problems you’re having with your partner. Similarly, exercising more seems like a great aspiration… but it’s another matter entirely if you’re trying to yoga your way into feeling happier in your toxic family. Behaviors that start as emotional buffering often develop into more serious issues, like eating disorders and addictions.

Emotional Buffering Never Leads to an Answer

Another way to know you’re emotionally buffering is that whatever buffering behavior you engage in doesn’t actually resolve anything. It’s just a temporary escape from the truth of your lived experience. After you max out your credit card, sleep with another random person, or wake up hungover (again), whatever feeling you’re trying to ignore is still there, waiting to be attended to. You can feel it, and you can’t stand it. You feel anxiety not because you’re anxious, but because you’re resisting all your other feelings. Insecurity, inadequacy, grief, loss, fear: They aren’t soothed by outside means. Only by inside means, and only when you make the effort.

Here’s the thing: Nobody can escape their emotional experience of the world — least of all an HSP. I’ve tried. The lifetime of effort I’ve invested in stuffing down my emotions, suppressing things I didn’t want to feel, and actively ignoring their effect on me is shocking. If you’re like me, you probably learned from a young age that certain emotions are “unacceptable,” like crying or being open about your feelings. But in truth, every emotion is valid. Resisting your emotions is like holding a beach ball underwater. It can be done, but it’s physically and mentally draining. And once your energy is depleted, the beach ball will explode through the water’s surface with a vengeance.

Uncomfortable emotions aren’t easy for anyone, but HSPs feel the discomfort more keenly than most; truly — it’s biology and due to sensitivity genes. Our most challenging quality is that our capacity for feeling is so deep, though it can also be our greatest strength. I believe we HSPs are more adept when it comes to emotional processing because of our immense capacity to feel, not in spite of it. 

Need to Calm Your Sensitive Nervous System? 

HSPs often live with high levels of anxiety, sensory overload and stress — and negative emotions can overwhelm us. But what if you could finally feel calm instead?

That’s what you’ll find in this powerful online course by Julie Bjelland, one of the top HSP therapists in the world. You’ll learn to turn off the racing thoughts, end emotional flooding, eliminate sensory overload, and finally make space for your sensitive gifts to shine.

Stop feeling held back and start to feel confident you can handle anything. Check out this “HSP Toolbox” and start making a change today. Click here to learn more.

What to Do Instead of Emotional Buffering

So, if you know you’re emotionally buffering and want to stop, the question is: As an HSP, what do you do instead? It comes down to three things:

• Own what you’re feeling. Take responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because emotions are a choice, we can’t blame others for how we feel. Be honest about the truth of what you’re feeling and why you feel a certain way, even if you think it’s weak (it’s not) or a failure (it’s not). Let yourself feel it. Allow for any feeling that comes up, whether it’s anger, sadness, shame, happiness, you name it. You are human, and it is a completely natural, human experience to feel the full range of human emotion (especially as an HSP).

• Let go of self-judgment. The only thing worse than letting yourself feel bad is when you feel bad about feeling bad. You’re not wrong or selfish or ungrateful because you aren’t happy all the time. Nobody can be happy all the time, nor should we be. (I mean, can you imagine being happy while getting fired? Or after receiving a serious diagnosis?) Shame has no place in emotional well-being. It holds us back from expressing the truest, most beautiful versions of ourselves.
  
• Feel that sh*t. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. We owe it to our emotions to feel them all the way through. Anything less than that will lead to resentment. As Dr. Nicole Lapera, a clinical psychologist, says, “Resentment is a sign you’ve abandoned yourself.” This step is the hardest for me. Every time an unpleasant emotion comes up, it genuinely feels like it’s going to kill me. Like when I read a personal development book that addresses healing past trauma that I resonate with, it’s so hard to let those feelings come to the surface. They’ve been buried a long time. My brain is convinced I won’t survive it. But as hard as the waves crash over me, I always come out the other side.

Fellow HSP, I have faith in you. If I could stop emotionally buffering, so can you. Remember to let that beach ball float to the surface — don’t hold it underwater, which is not natural. Let it bop around with the current, similar to how your emotions will bop around, too. And the current will get more calm, I can assure you of that.

You might like:

• 6 Ways to Manage Big Emotions as a Highly Sensitive Person
• I’m Sensitive, and I Drank to Turn It Off
• Do You Feel Emotions ‘More’ Than Other People? You’re Not Alone

The post What Is Emotional Buffering, and Why Do HSPs Do It? appeared first on Sensitive Refuge.

It’s been quite the year for big, emotional topics looming large in our awareness. We’ve all probably experienced some form of struggle stemming from the train wreck that is 2020. Whether we find ourselves in an extended work from home scenario for the first time or whether social distancing keeps us separated from friends and family, it’s been a hell of an ordeal. And that doesn’t even begin to address any personal challenges we may be facing on an individual level.

As someone who is highly sensitive, high levels of intense emotional energy can take a toll if I’m not careful. Essentially, a highly sensitive person (HSP) is anyone born with the biological trait of being extra-attuned to their environment, physical stimuli and, yes, the emotions of others.

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What It Means to Be an HSP 

Due to the trait, we HSPs experience life intensely through each of our senses. And that does mean all the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. With these senses, we usually notice many subtleties in our surroundings that others don’t.

HSPs are also known for experiencing life on a very deep level internally. This can take up a lot of our energy, and we’re often quiet for this reason. It’s like our internal state has eight browser tabs open at all times: we can still operate, but tasks will take time to complete and there’s a lot going on under the surface. 

Sometimes, it can take us days to process an experience or explore a big, new idea since we tend to get mentally and emotionally flooded more than most. We’re also very conscientious and can easily sense the moods of others; although this can overwhelm us, it also makes us extremely committed and attuned as partners and friends. 

HSPs Experience Emotions — and Life — a Little Differently

With only about 20 percent of the population in possession of the HSP trait, we know and understand that the world is designed for the 80 percent majority, so we learn to navigate life in our own way. 

It’s not that we don’t want to be out in the world — far from it. After we go on our adventures to concerts, travel, or spend a lot of time socializing in unfamiliar spaces, we require extra downtime afterwards to regain our equilibrium. The need to be restored is simply what our biology demands. 

In fact, being an HSP has everything to do with how I perceive the world around me. If I wasn’t highly sensitive, I’m certain I would still be living undiagnosed with my recently-discovered Hashimoto’s autoimmune disease, because my symptoms were so subtle that even I almost missed them. 

I believe my HSP trait makes me more in tune with my body and self, as well as makes me a better sister, friend, partner, writer, and “fur mom.” Embracing my HSP nature and aligning it with how I live has made all the difference between running on empty and living a full life.

The following six elements help me live my best HSP life, especially when it comes to dealing with big, raw emotions (which HSPs have in abundance) in a healthy way. I practice each one daily to create the balanced sense of well-being I want in my life. 

6 Ways to Manage Emotions as a Highly Sensitive Person

1. Take time to listen — really listen — to your inner voice.

Staying tuned in and actually taking the time to listen to the still, small voice inside your head can be scary. HSPs feel their feelings in a big way, and even after years of practice, I still get scared to let myself feel them sometimes. It feels like if I let myself “go there,” I will be swallowed whole. 

But as I like to remind myself on a regular basis: I won’t die from a feeling. Paying attention to misplaced emotions, like anger at something that wouldn’t normally make me angry, is a good place to start, since processing my emotional backlog is a huge factor in my mental and emotional well-being.

2. Move every day: Remember that “emotion” is “energy in motion.”     

Exercise is an essential component to managing my emotions. 

If you think of the word “emotion” as “energy in motion,” it helps describe the concept of emotion as a real energy, and our physical bodies give emotion a vehicle through which to pass. When I first started practicing yoga regularly, I would frequently experience such an emotional release that I’d just burst into tears after a practice (another reason I work out at home). It was so cathartic (especially for my highly sensitive soul).

To get a good balance of activity, I now commit several days a week to weight training and walking around my neighborhood. 

Unfelt feelings, as energy, can get trapped and stagnate. Nothing can access those pent-up energies stored in the body like exercise can.

3. Journal — daily — to help process your thoughts and feelings.

Journaling is a daily part of my life. I’ve kept a diary or journal since I was a kid, but only as an adult have I used it as a tool for mindset work — and only in recent months have I committed to a daily journaling practice.

On days I didn’t write, it was becoming more and more noticeable that my well-being suffered as a result. Now, my morning ritual after waking up is to make a cup of coffee and take it to my office, close the door, and open up my journal to a blank page to release everything on my mind. Since HSPs tend to be introspective, journaling is ideal for us, I think.

Research also shows that there are also many health benefits of journaling, including reducing stress and clarifying thoughts, and I’d agree. Recording my thoughts on paper helps me see — right in front of me — what’s going on inside, and then I can make informed decisions about how I want to move forward.

Need to Calm Your Sensitive Nervous System? 

HSPs often live with high levels of anxiety, sensory overload and stress — and negative emotions can overwhelm us. But what if you could finally feel calm instead?

That’s what you’ll find in this powerful online course by Julie Bjelland, one of the top HSP therapists in the world. You’ll learn to turn off the racing thoughts, end emotional flooding, eliminate sensory overload, and finally make space for your sensitive gifts to shine.

Stop feeling held back and start to feel confident you can handle anything. Check out this “HSP Toolbox” and start making a change today. Click here to learn more.

4. Nourish your body and soul, from paying attention to what you eat to how you spend your time.

Taking care of myself by attending to all my inputs — the things that influence my life and refer to anything I give my attention to — is huge. They include what I eat, read, listen to, watch, who I talk to, and how I spend my time. 

Being aware of my inputs and making sure they nourish me as an HSP helps me know that I’m using my energy wisely. If things start to feel “off,” usually one of my inputs has gone awry. 

Inputs that always help are nurturing foods that make me feel like I value myself, watching a show that gives me a good belly laugh (thanks, The Office), reading empowering books, listening to fascinating podcasts, and long, intimate talks with meaningful friends.

5. Make sure to set aside time to recharge.

I need time to recharge, preferably alone in the quiet. Over the years, I’ve discovered that my highly sensitive self has about a four-hour social battery for intense, unfamiliar experiences (parties, big family gatherings, outdoor adventures). When that battery runs out, it’s out. It has to be recharged to get back into working order.

My career is based on working from home. Plus, I don’t have kids, so a lot of solitude is built into my everyday life. This did not occur by happenstance, and I’m very lucky to have a partner in life that understands and supports my HSP nature. I enjoy doing things alone because it allows me to replenish my depleted energy. I’m no stranger to browsing bookstores, hanging out by the pool, reading, or exploring the local farmers’ market solo.

In fact, most HSPs thrive when they have time to recharge away from the hustle and bustle or lively groups of people. We then crave quiet and solitude, ideally in our very own HSP sanctuary, where we can control our environment (lighting, temperature, sound, smell, and so on).

6. Relate to others on an authentic level.

HSPs can get way up in our heads; to the casual observer, it may come across as distant or standoffish. I’ve been told more than once about my resting bitch face (sorry, it’s just my face). Often, we’re simply processing our inputs, but the perception that we’re snobby can make it difficult to reach out and relate to people — we just don’t want to burden you with our giant-ass feelings. 

But true connection with another person is incredibly important to almost every aspect there is about being human, especially for us highly sensitive folk. Our well-being, emotional health, and quality of life depend on it. 

It can be hard for me to put into words how difficult it sometimes is to make genuine connections with others. But eventually I get there, and it feels really good to relate to another person on an authentic level, which HSPs often crave.

For more well-being content like this, check out my website at KaceyHayes.com or follow me on Instagram at @kaceyhayeswrites.

You might like:

• Why Highly Sensitive People Get Mentally and Emotionally ‘Flooded’
• How I Learned to Stop Being Ashamed of My ‘Big’ Emotions
• Do You Cry Easily? You Might Be a Highly Sensitive Person

This article contains affiliate links. We only recommend products we truly believe in.

The post 6 Ways to Manage Big Emotions as a Highly Sensitive Person appeared first on Sensitive Refuge.

Those of us with high sensitivity are known for feeling our emotions very deeply. In fact, science has confirmed that emotions hit highly sensitive people harder, and we also have a greater likelihood of feeling others’ emotions. When our empathic tendencies are activated, almost like a radio signal, we can tune into others’ energy and emotions and mistake them for our own.

On the flip side, it’s a common occurrence for highly sensitive people to feel our energy and emotions being taken from us. We can experience intense drains to our emotional state from experiences like high-demand social encounters, stressful circumstances, or coping with an illness.

Regardless of the scenario, when it comes to highly sensitive feelings, we need simple, practical tools to preserve them. The following five strategies can help HSPs become more aware of our emotions, practice mindfulness to maintain it, and ultimately set healthy boundaries for our own emotional protection. 

Like what you’re reading? Get our newsletter just for HSPs. One email, every Friday. Click here to subscribe!

5 Ways to Protect Your Emotions as an HSP

1. Get out in nature — aside from calming your overstimulated HSP senses, it’s good for you.

Henry David Thoreau said, “nature is doing her best each moment to make us well,” and I’m inclined to agree with him. Humans are meant to spend time in nature, breathe fresh air, and find time to put our feet on the actual ground — not just concrete or asphalt. 

I know that when I spend more time indoors than I should (thanks, winter), my mental well-being — and subsequently, my emotional state — suffers for it. Spending more time outdoors has been proven to be beneficial for your physical and cognitive health: it can do everything from lower your blood pressure to relieve anxiety. But those of us with higher sensitivity feel an even stronger sense of improvement. Finding a park, hiking trail, or even visiting the backyard refreshes our perspective and helps us refocus our thinking. Really feeling the air on our skin, the sun on our face, or watching the leaves dance on a breeze almost feels like an awakening of our inner connection to other living things. 

Start with just a few minutes outside each day to make a difference in how you feel. Bonus points for taking a barefoot walk through a grassy space or along the surf on the beach, when weather allows. 

2. Sage your space — it’ll help cleanse you of uncomfortable lingering emotions.

Rooted in ancient indigenous and Native American traditions, sage burning is an important spiritual ritual in energy work. Experts say that burning sage — also known as smudging — in a room or home is thought to cleanse the space of negative energy, promote a greater sense of well-being, and improve one’s physical health. HSPs stand to benefit greatly from a smudging practice, since we’re constantly on the receiving end of residual emotional stimulation, thanks to our abilities to perceive So. Many. Feelings. 

I’m no expert in spirituality, but almost every time I perform the routine weekly smudge in my home, something positive happens soon after, like signing a new client at work or receiving unexpected good news. When I’ve tried everything else to rid myself of uncomfortable lingering emotions, burning sage is like pressing a mysterious, yet powerful, reset button. 

To give it a try, light a bundle or stick of sage over a heat-safe container (such as a ceramic bowl or glass dish), and then blow out the flame to create smoke. Let the sage smolder for 5-10 minutes and walk around your space with it until you feel it has been cleansed. 

3. Visualize a protective force to help calm your overwhelmed emotions.

Despite more of us staying home these days, the time will come again when we find ourselves in less-than-optimal social situations. Sensory overwhelm due to multiple energies battling for attention, or feeling drained after an encounter with an energy vampire, will inevitably happen to us HSPs again. 

When it does, visualization techniques are an effective tool for energy awareness and preservation — and a way to rebalance our emotions. I like to use visualization when I get sick, which is often stressful and emotional (especially as an HSP!).

The last time I fell ill, I was spinning out about how I couldn’t afford to be sick and felt angry about having to pause and recover. When I realized it wasn’t serving me or helping me heal, a mantra came to me: “I trust the healing wisdom of my body.” I would close my eyes, put a hand over my heart, and repeat my mantra in my mind. I pictured each cell of my body, in her ancient wisdom, doing everything that needed to be done to get well. I didn’t need to interfere with her process. Soon, I felt much calmer and much more trusting — and started feeling better physically, too. If you’re new to using a mantra, you can think of it as spiritual energy or condensed prayer, a way to look inward.

One of my fellow HSPs likes to visualize by sitting in silence to picture a white, glowing light surrounding her entire being, like rays from the sun, deflecting any unwanted or negative energy or thoughts. Another envisions a powerful spirit animal, like a jaguar, always at their side to protect their energy from harm. Spirit animals are thought to be the embodied form of a spiritual guide, making them an excellent visualization avenue for HSPs who feel emotionally exhausted and in need of a protector.

Whatever aligns with your preferences, visualization is a powerful technique for staying mindful of your own energy and emotions in situations where protecting them could be challenging. And nobody even has to know you’re doing it (you can do it alone, in your HSP sanctuary, or while sitting at your desk at work).

Need to Calm Your Sensitive Nervous System? 

HSPs often live with high levels of anxiety, sensory overload and stress — and negative emotions can overwhelm us. But what if you could finally feel calm instead?

That’s what you’ll find in this powerful online course by Julie Bjelland, one of the top HSP therapists in the world. You’ll learn to turn off the racing thoughts, end emotional flooding, eliminate sensory overload, and finally make space for your sensitive gifts to shine.

Stop feeling held back and start to feel confident you can handle anything. Check out this “HSP Toolbox” and start making a change today. Click here to learn more.

4. Utilize grounding techniques, like sitting still and taking deep, measured breaths.

As highly sensitive folks, it’s easy to get swept away when emotions run high, making us feel less like ourselves and impairing our ability to set energetic boundaries. This is where getting grounded in your body and mind is a powerful step when it comes to guarding your feelings and well-being.

Grounding techniques pull us back to solid earth when a stressful situation or emotional event sends us spiraling, such as receiving criticism at work or getting into an argument with a partner. 

To do it, find a chair in a quiet corner, take a seat, and plant both feet firmly on the floor to gain a sense of stability and support when all your senses feel overwhelmed. Another option is to practice deep, measured breathing (inhale for a count of four, exhale for a count of eight) to reset the nervous system and flip your fight-or-flight response into rest and digest mode. This provides an incredible emotional benefit by reducing an elevated heart rate caused by anxiety. The 5-4-3-2-1 method is particularly helpful for highly sensitive types, too, because it leverages each of the five senses as a focus point: five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.

Like with visualization, you can use these techniques no matter where you are, from the driver’s seat of your parked car to the bathroom stall at the doctor’s office.

5. Engage in mindset work: try to find the root of what is depleting your emotions.

One big factor in protecting our emotional state is realizing when our energy is being depleted in the first place. As a highly sensitive person, I’ve learned that connecting with the thoughts behind what I’m feeling often helps me get clarity on what’s going on when I feel like I’m mentally and emotionally flooded. For example, if I recognize that what I’m feeling is anxiety, I try to get to the original thought behind the anxiety by asking myself questions: 

• Why do I feel anxious? 
• Because I have an important call on the calendar. 
• Why would that make me anxious? 
• Because I want the call to go well and I’m afraid it won’t.

Once I get to the true root of my anxious energy, I can take steps to contribute to a positive outcome as best I can. In this example, I could prepare for the call with detailed notes and thoughtful questions. Then I can refocus my energy on creating a great experience on the call. My mind is free to be present and really listen, knowing that I’ve done everything I can and all my bases are covered. 

Being born with the trait of high sensitivity comes with its own set of benefits and challenges. We move through the world differently. Our sensibilities perceive subtleties and nuances that most people miss. It can get exhausting just being ourselves. It takes so much emotional energy just to process, like, being alive. 

All this to say, we don’t need to add a further drain to our emotional state. Let’s make life a little easier instead of harder. And we can do this by learning to protect our feelings and emotions as highly sensitive people — it’s one of the most important steps we can take for our mental well-being.

You might like: 

• Why Highly Sensitive People Absorb Other People’s Emotions
• Why Highly Sensitive People Get Mentally and Emotionally ‘Flooded’
• 11 ‘Little’ Things That Overwhelm Highly Sensitive People

This article contains affiliate links. We only recommend products we truly believe in.

The post 5 Ways to Protect Your Emotions as an HSP appeared first on Sensitive Refuge.

At first glance, self employment seems like an incredibly daunting prospect — even for the 80 percent (approximately) of non-highly sensitive types on the planet. Figuring out what to offer the world and pursuing it is vulnerable and scary, yet people do it all the time. And HSPs, with our gentle, artistic souls, often get caught in thinking that creating a successful business from the ground up is truly unattainable.

I think the reason for this, in part, is an error in what we make “success” mean. The values of the standard Western workplace don’t align with ours, but we’ve been led to believe that business success can come only by playing along at those same toxic, competitive games we’ve seen throughout our professional lives. The traditional approach of forging ahead aggressively, breathlessly running our hustle, and grinding ourselves to the point of burnout? HSPs operate in direct opposition to these methods.

HSPs are reserved, taking time to think deeply before acting. We tend to work more slowly because we are intentional with every step. And because our energy is hard-won and precious to us, we’re conscious of spending it wisely on thoughts and actions that light us up instead of grind us down.

As an HSP, I Thought Becoming an Entrepreneur Wasn’t in the Cards for Me … But I Was Wrong

As an HSP, I thought becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t in the cards for me. I believed business ownership meant living in a state of constant overwhelm, running a business on exhaustion and stress. That wouldn’t work for me — I may as well stay at my office job, right? So, for a long time, that’s what I did: pushed the business ownership dream aside as wishful thinking and tried to be happy in my office employee role.

I’d clock in at work again, sit down at my desk, and inevitably pine for the freedom and autonomy of the creative self-starter I truly wanted to be. It just seemed so far outside the realm of possibility. How could I go self-employed and sustain a business of my own making with my HSP sensibilities intact? 

I’d always wanted to be a writer. But coming from a background in medical billing, I had no idea who might need my help, whether anyone would take my writing seriously, or if I could really hack it in writing. But guess what? I did it, and I’ve broken the journey down into a three-part framework that served to plant, cultivate, and grow my independent career.

3 Steps to Take if You Want to Be Self-Employed as an HSP

1. Plant the seeds for the self-employed career and lifestyle you want.

As singer-songwriter Jewel says in her memoir, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story, “Hard wood grows slowly.” By that, she means the strongest, most sustainable foundation of success doesn’t happen overnight. To that end, to plant those early seeds, I started building my business on the side while working at my day job.

Starting slowly with a primary stream of income in place relieved the pressure to instantly become self-supporting, and prevented my HSP temperament from going into overdrive. It gave me space to consciously create the work I truly wanted, figure out exactly what to offer in my business, and identify my desired clients. I was able to set up my website, start a blog to serve as my writing portfolio, and reach out to offer my services to potential clients through networking emails and LinkedIn. 

I also gave a lot of consideration to the work culture I needed in order to thrive. Going self-employed was my chance to curate my ideal environment (when you’re in charge, you create the exact work culture you want), where my sensitivity is a strength in the workplace (as a virtual assistant for coaches, I can offer help where I intuitively see a need) and my creative, conscientious nature is valued (my clients say they love the quality of my work). As HSPs, embracing our reflectiveness and envisioning our ideal working environment (like a creative, collaborative partnership with each client) helps us decide what kind of clients we want, the kind of work we’ll do with them, and the kind of energy to nurture within our businesses.

Another must for supporting my HSP trait was setting up my workspace intentionally. I’ve found that my physical workspace becomes indicative of my mental state. If my surroundings are cluttered, my mind feels chaotic. To support myself in how I want to feel mentally and emotionally, I keep my work area quiet, open, and spacious. I have a wide, comfortable desk, a simple laptop, and a bulletin board to keep important reminders in my line of sight.

Whether it’s a corner of a room, the dining room table, or a full-fledged home office, carving out an HSP mini-sanctuary for work helps reduce stimulation, increases focus, and creates an impactful business. 

2. Cultivate meaningful connections: find a mentor and others in your field.

Working alone is amazing, but it can get a little lonely sometimes — especially when newly self-employed. There aren’t any coworkers to bounce ideas off of, relate to your latest client struggle, or proofread that email to make sure it doesn’t sound rude. Because of this, having a mentor throughout the early stages of building a business was invaluable to me. I found my first mentor via her podcast for entrepreneurs back in 2018, invested in her course, and we developed a friendly/professional relationship that we maintain to this day.

My mentor was so generous with her time and advice, more than happy to respond to my inquiring emails, and effectively coached me through mindset blocks and limiting beliefs. Investing in that inner work with the help of someone who’s been there and done that is a priceless way for deep-thinking HSPs to kickstart the groundwork required for going self-employed.

Later on, when I wanted to expand my services, I discovered a woman through another podcast who was already successfully doing what I aimed to do. Before I could talk myself out of the idea, I emailed her out of the blue and asked if she’d be willing to mentor me. She responded the same day and couldn’t have been more gracious and accommodating. Now I’m helping her grow her business, which feels perfectly attuned to the kind of work that’s important to me.

The willingness to reach out to people who are doing what we want to do is a huge asset in business. Our HSP need for meaningful connection gets fulfilled, and those on the receiving end of our outreach are often more than happy to offer guidance (entrepreneurs typically are). We may risk rejection, but here’s a secret: almost everything we do has a risk involved. Making our risks mean something is a step in the right direction.

Like what you’re reading? Get our newsletter just for HSPs. One email, every Friday. Click here to subscribe!

3. Grow your own way: protect your energy and create boundaries to maximize productivity and prevent burnout.

I’ve chosen to be a company of one indefinitely, but that doesn’t mean I’m not growing. It’s taken more inner growth than I ever thought possible to create and run my business. Incorporating conscious mindset practices (especially learning to value my work and not go out of my way to take things personally — we HSPs can react strongly to criticism) has been instrumental in every area of development. 

In addition, personal growth books and podcasts offer me completely new perspectives and open my mind to a world beyond self-doubt and imposter syndrome (which HSPs can be prone to!). I take that knowledge with me and move forward, growing my own way and making my business stronger as I go.

To keep growing, HSPs also need to protect our energy — especially when going self-employed. Led by empathy, we have a tendency to give, give, give, working late into the evening, on weekends, or on ridiculously short notice … and sometimes don’t know when to stop. But as a business owner, time and energy are precious resources to be protected at all costs. HSPs in business must build boundaries around these and stick to them with conviction.

Before I set boundaries around my time, I would check my email every time I got a notification or reply to all social media comments in real time. I did this thinking that my responsiveness made me a better, more efficient business owner, but it wasn’t easy to balance my actual client work with all these little detours. Now, I set aside specific times for these tasks, and my clients know I don’t check or answer emails after a certain time in the evenings or on weekends.

Building respite and self-care into the workday was also an HSP lesson I learned the hard way. As a self-employed writer, nobody is verifying how many hours I spend on research, how much screen time my eyes absorb, or how long I’m hunched over the desk. I’m the only one checking in with my body, coaching myself through stressful moments, and making sure I take breaks. It’s very tempting to push ahead without rest in the name of progress and productivity. But before I know it, I’ll overextend, and the downtime needed to recover negates any progress made. Plus, it makes me cranky.

It’s much a gentler, kinder, and compassionate existence for HSPs to design a working style that welcomes rest and recuperation. That could look like exercising or journaling every day before work, taking short walks when overstimulation creeps in, or taking a long lunch while reading a book. When you’re the boss, you get to decide. Overall, just make sure your business decisions are serving you and your HSP nature. 

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