You’ve probably heard by now how boundaries are important for maintaining healthy relationships. But setting and maintaining our boundaries successfully only happens when we are clear on what those boundaries are. If we’re not clear on them, we can slowly erode our personal agency without meaning to.

This can show up in sneaky ways. Maybe you stop to talk to a new neighbor when you really want to go inside to get back to your work. But you can sense so clearly that they want to keep sharing about their day with you, so you stay. Or someone flirts with you that you’re not interested in, but instead of stating your boundaries and walking away, you feel like you have to be nice, so you go along with it. 

What happens over time, when you let these things slide, is that you leak energy. You can literally feel tired, perpetually, from not setting boundaries! When you don’t maintain boundaries, it will ultimately lead to feelings of resentment, passive-aggressiveness, communication breakdowns, and eroding self-confidence.

And what makes boundaries challenging for highly sensitive people (HSPs) is that we are so attuned to others’ needs that we can quickly drop our boundaries without meaning to. We can easily shut down and be flustered, because there’s the possibility of upsetting the other person and not being “approved” by setting a boundary. The key is getting clear on the different areas of your life that boundaries touch, managing your energy, and keeping some canned responses you can use instead of feeling like a deer in headlights when the moment comes.

Getting Clear on Your Personal Boundaries

Setting — and enforcing — boundaries takes practice, believe me. When defining your boundaries, I’ve found it helpful to ask yourself these questions and journal on them:

• Where do you struggle with boundaries the most? 
• What behavior will you — or won’t you — tolerate? (For example, friends that don’t support you or when someone raises their voice at you.)
• What boundaries can you set around time? Energy? Relationships? Career?

After you journal on the above, you’ll probably have a lot more insight, and answers, than you’d anticipated. Which brings me to my next point…

Boundaries Around Your Energy and Schedule

Overbooking yourself is one clear recipe for burnout, especially for HSPs. We need more downtime than others, so it’s important to make sure you have blank space in your schedule, like an hour between appointments. This will help you restore your energy. It’s going to be difficult to be empowered over your schedule if you book yourself everyday of the week, with no time to just “be.” In our subconscious need for approval and nature to be there for others, sensitive people often say “yes” without giving it a second thought. 

But HSPs can be more prone to burnout this way. So make sure you always have at least two or three nights a week wherein you have scheduled relaxation time. I love making Sundays sacred. I stay off social media, dedicate my time to creative expression, clean around the house, and cook healthy meals. This helps to restore balance and gives me more energy for the week ahead.

Take as many breaks as you need to — this way, you can be balanced in your energy and not a victim to your schedule. Having boundaries around your time online and social media is also important, because HSPs pick up the energies of everyone they are connected to, even on the internet. Choosing specific days of the week to go on social media, like Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only, is a great start. Notice how different you feel on these days off! Understanding your preferences and your values will guide your boundaries. You’ll see!

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How to Set — and Maintain — A Boundary

I work as a spiritual coach, and now that you know the importance of setting boundaries, here is a conversation framework I give to my clients. You can use it to set and maintain your own boundaries.

• Always start with positive acknowledgement (if authentic and applicable). 
• State how you feel: Make it personal, and not say that the person made you feel that way. Use an “I felt…” statement vs. a “You made me feel…” one.
• State the behavior that left you feeling this way: be clear about what was hurtful. 
• State how you would like to be treated instead.
• Thank them for listening to your boundaries.

This is a simple framework that highly sensitive types can turn to anytime they feel a boundary has been crossed. This type of honest feedback is crucial in maintaining healthy relationships based on honesty, trust, and open communication — all of which we HSPs already value.

The Relationship Between Boundaries and Energy

A leak in energy will occur when you don’t set boundaries in the physical world. However, on an energetic level, as a sensitive soul, you can also have the tendency to allow others to feed off your energy (almost like a vampire). When other people take your energy, usually subconsciously, then you, without boundaries, are left feeling drained. However, there are a few ways you can protect your energy and keep your vibration high throughout the day.

• Practice intentional meditation. One way to start the day with good energy is by doing 10 minutes of intentional meditation, where you visualize a white bubble of light surrounding your aura. You can call on Archangel Michael (known as the “chief angel”) to put a bubble around you, your home, your vehicle, and your place of work. I like to start and end the day this way. It’s an easy way to mentally ask for protection from an outside guide, and one who is an angel whose duty is energetic protection!

• Recognize when you are not feeling emotions that are yours, such as collective sadness and fear. If you feel sad or upset for no reason, this could be why. Each person’s individual energy is connected, and when there is enough of the same energy and vibration, a collective energy field is created. As I mentioned before, social media (and the media in general) can be a source of negative energy that many are tuned into and affected by, particularly highly sensitive souls. To remove yourself from this type of collective energy field, you can visualize yourself stepping out of that bubble of energy, removing yourself, and instead, stepping into your own energy field of peace, joy, and love. You may imagine yourself lying in a field of wildflowers or sitting by your favorite stream — whatever brings you calm.

• Use essential oils. There are many benefits of using essential oils, like promoting a state of relaxation. An energy protection tool I recommend is doTERRA Tea Tree Essential Oil. You can dilute it with coconut oil and swipe it over your wrists and chest for daily energetic protection. Essential oils that are pure are substances with high energetic vibrations, so when they are used this way, they can create a “shield” around your aura.

• Do a grounding exercise, like breathwork. Think of the breath as being a scrub brush that’s getting in all the nooks and crannies of your energy field and clearing out stagnant or negative energy with the exhale. I find this tool especially helpful for HSPs since we pick up so much with our open and sensing energy that we don’t even realize (even when we do set boundaries). So this is a helpful, regular practice to have to maintain a clear energy field.

Setting and maintaining boundaries can definitely be more challenging for us HSPs, as we are wired to focus on our external environments and other people. So it takes being conscious of your values, energy, and relationships, as well as having a tool kit — like the above — you can turn to in order to successfully manage your energy and life.

Emily Smith is a spiritual coach who mentors high-achieving HSP women in their thirties. For more, check out her new book, Wholeness Within.

You might like:

• 5 Grounding Techniques for Overstimulated HSPs
• How to Actually Set Better Boundaries as an HSP
• 18 Things That Fill Highly Sensitive People With Joy

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

The post Why Boundaries Are Crucial for Highly Sensitive People — And How to Set Them appeared first on Sensitive Refuge.

It’s no surprise that highly sensitive people (HSPs) are more susceptible to being affected by their environment and interactions with others. Because we process things so deeply, we easily become overstimulated, whether it’s from the bright lights in a shopping mall or from absorbing a friend’s sad emotions over her breakup.  

As a result, it can be almost too easy to turn this sensitivity into an identity, the identity of a victim. Just a quick run-through of any HSP Facebook Group and you’ll see the following types of posts:

• “I’m a sponge, I soak up everyone’s energy.”
• “I feel drained, I spent all day working with clients.”
• “I can’t work full-time, it takes too much out of me. What should I do?”

These are just some of the disempowering beliefs that some HSPs hold; you’ve probably heard this from HSP friends or maybe you’ve said some of these yourself! While it’s true that you’re more sensitive, you can actually manage your sensitive gifts in ways that will allow you to be productive and empowered in your life, not drained and stuck. 

There are plenty of successful sensitive people who have learned ways to work with their gifts instead of against them. You weren’t born to be a shut-in, but at the same time you weren’t born like around 70 percent of the population who aren’t highly sensitive! Taking this into account, you can make mental shifts to get yourself out of victim mode as an HSP. But first, you have to understand what a victim mindset is. 

What Is a Victim Mentality? 

What is a victim mentality? It’s when someone sees themselves as a perpetual victim and believes that their life circumstances are due to external forces out of their control à la “poor me.” Rahav Gabray, a doctor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, and her colleagues state that it’s “an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships. As a result, victimization becomes a central part of the individual’s identity.” 

The researchers found that interpersonal victimhood is made up of four dimensions: 

• need for recognition
• moral elitism
• lack of empathy
• rumination

So if you find yourself having a victim mentality as an HSP, luckily, there are mindset shifts you can make.

See Your Sensitivity as the Gift That It Is Instead of Cursing It

One simple mindset shift is to view your sensitivity as a gift, not a weakness. When you view sensitivity as a weakness, you automatically see yourself as a victim who can be swayed by your environment. Years ago, I learned about the psychology term, an internal “locus of control.” Locus of control is what an individual believes causes his or her experiences, and the factors to which that person attributes their successes or failures. If a person has an internal locus of control, or agency, that person attributes success to their own efforts and abilities.

People that have an external locus of control vs. internal locus of control in their life were prone to suffering. They perceive their life as happening to them instead of their own internal actions directing their life. Years ago, I realized that I was living in victim mode because I perceived my outer world as a threat to my safety and well-being. 

Most likely, you’ve felt this, too, as a highly sensitive soul. What if you viewed your sensitivity as a superpower, one that allows you to tap into more information that isn’t available to most of the public? This is your superpower! What if you saw your ability to hold space for others as a gift, and your ability to experience life at a deeper level than most, to be something to be grateful for? Well, you’re in luck: Your sensitivity allows you to make people feel seen, and to connect with your intuition. It allows you to connect with animals, nature, art, and express your insights from these connections to the world. Use this gift you’ve been given, and watch victimhood fall away.

The Victim Mindset Trap: Realize That You Always Have a Choice

In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust camps, writes that even in the most dire situation, you have a choice in how you will react and how you view yourself — and what you choose to believe will help you get through challenging circumstances.

In managing your gifts as a sensitive person, you may realize that you don’t like spending time with certain people or places that drain you. That’s great! Now the next step would be committing to making new choices and actually sticking to them. We all know the person that complains about their job incessantly, but they never take action about leaving it. No one wants to be around that person, understandably. It’s similar to an HSP who constantly complains about all the things that set their system into a tailspin, but never doing anything to change it — like trying self-soothing activities such as spending some alone time in their HSP sanctuary, meditating, journaling, you name it.

Remember: You always have a choice. And, as a highly sensitive person, you will most likely have to make key choices, like getting your own room when traveling with friends, or making sure to have your grounding rituals everyday before and after your day. I find that HSPs who are empowered almost forget they are sensitive souls who easily get overstimulated. Instead, they identify more with the tools they use to feel like they can do — and be — their best every day. So get clear on what you need to thrive and commit to take the actions needed.

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Set Boundaries Around Your Energy and Schedule

Trying to do all the things and overbooking yourself is a recipe for a victim mindset. HSPs need more downtime than others, so making sure you have downtime — however much you can manage between appointments (I suggest an hour) — is necessary to restore your energy. It’s going to be difficult to be empowered over your schedule if you book yourself every day of the week, with no time to just be and have some peace.

HSPs can be more prone to burnout this way, so make sure you always have at least two or three times per week where you have scheduled relaxation time. I love making Sundays sacred, (and staying off social media), and dedicating my time to creative expression, cleaning around the house, and cooking healthy meals. This helps to restore my energy for a great start of the week. After all, when highly sensitive people get too overstimulated, they can wake up the next day with an HSP hangover, and no one likes those!

Take as many breaks you need to, so you can be balanced in your energy and not a victim to your schedule. Having boundaries around your time — including with being online and on social media — is also important, because sensitive types pick up the energies of everyone they are connected to, on and off the internet. For example, choosing specific days of the week to go on social media, like Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only, is a great start.

Your Sensitivity Is There to Help Your Quality of Life, Not Hinder It

These are a few simple mindset shifts that can take you out of having a victim mindset and into an empowered mindset as an HSP. It’s easy to feel like your sensitivity is a burden, but realize that it’s a gift: it’s there to help your quality of life, not hinder it. Realize you always have a choice to be empowered instead of a victim to your gifts, and that your ability to manage your schedule and set boundaries around your time will put you back in the driver’s seat of your life. Notice the ways your sensitivity benefits you and others, and live from that space instead of victimhood.

I’m a spiritual coach who coaches high-achieving, highly sensitive women who feel stuck in their careers to connect to their soul’s work. You can book a free 15-minute consult to work with me 1:1 here: GuideToWholeness.com/workwithme.

Want to get one-on-one help from a trained therapist? We’ve personally used and recommend BetterHelp for therapy with real benefits for HSPs. It’s private, affordable, and takes place online. BONUS: As a Sensitive Refuge reader, you get 10% off your first month. Click here to learn more.

We receive compensation from BetterHelp when you use our referral link. We only recommend products we believe in.

You might like:

• 7 ‘Rules’ for Highly Sensitive People to Protect Their Energy
• How Not to Fall into the Victim Trap as an HSP
• These 8 Things Bring Peace to Highly Sensitive People

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

The post How a Victim Mentality Affects Highly Sensitive People appeared first on Sensitive Refuge.