When my son (a writer for TV) read over the script for Sensitive and in Love, he said it surprised him that it emphasized the need for downtime. It seemed so self-centered. He thought HSPs were more into helping others. They are, I assured him, and I adjusted the script accordingly. But it brings up something crucial.
When I and others are advising you to attend to self-care and your boundaries, we just assume that you spend most of your time helping others. Why? Because HSPs need their work and their lives in general to be meaningful, even more than others do. For most humans, meaningful boils down to helping others (parenting, teaching, building, farming, lawyering, healing, etc) or contributing to knowledge or culture (as scientists, musicians, artists, etc.). While others may settle for just decent pay, your work must have meaning. Your problem is not to overdo your meaningful activities.
Geez, I feel like a broken record, repeating all this about self-care over and over, but I know you need to hear it again, often. What solves over-stimulation and holds burnout at bay? Downtime, by yourself. Sleep, time in nature, meditation, prayer, music, a warm bath or a swim… Whatever works for you.
Self-Care for All
It does not help that the new buzz word among the other 80% is “self-care,” and it can seem, in some cases, to be more about narcissism or consuming extra stuff. On the other hand, what’s good for HSPs often turns out to be good for everyone. Worldwide, people are having to push themselves more to get ahead or just not fall behind. In the U.S. it seems that 30% are sleep deprived; worldwide, 50%. Let’s not even get into worldwide diet, exercise, medical care, and all the rest that determines self-care. We ALL need more self-care, and maybe HSPs helped that new buzz word surface.
Over half of the people I most love are not HSPs. Their lives are dedicated to the same kinds of meaningful things as yours or mine. And they also are at risk for burnout if they do not take care of themselves. But there’s a difference. My husband, not an HSP, managed better than I did when we used to pull all-nighters to help each other with dissertation deadlines. He is not so easily overstimulated, does not get crazy when he is very hungry, and is not as bothered by crowds. Above all, he is not noticing and processing so much. You and I feel a greater, more rapid decline when our gas tank of neurotransmitters is empty. We get cranky or feel awful, so that the people around us get us at our worst, not our best. That’s why self-care is part of our ethics regarding how we treat others.
Self-Care for the Sake of Those with whom you Work
First I should say that by “work” I mean your calling. Some of you may need to work “just for the money,” but do what matters to you on the side. Thus I will call “work” the things you work at that give your life meaning.
I should not have to go on and on about the ethical reasons for making self-care a high priority. You know about putting the oxygen mask on yourself first, before helping others with theirs. You know you work better and are more helpful when your mind is rested. You know that allowing the mundane things to drain your energy is therefore wrong, because it means the most important things do not get you at your best.
Why do you slip up and what can you do about it? I will let you answer that for yourself, or read some of things I have written about boundaries. Boundaries are crucial to self-care, including boundaries with the smart, creative, caring parts of yourself that can think up so many better ways to do things, the people you could help or network with, the good ideas to test. Often it feels like you are the only one who can do these things properly. (There’s the risk of narcissism for HSPs.)
Are you morally right, however, to take on everything you can conceive of? I know I am not. When I slip up and don’t take a break, I am a bit ashamed of myself. I do it all the time, but at least I know now that it is wrong.
Self-Care out of Consideration for Those You Love
I know that love and work can overlap in many ways, as when you are a parent or a full time caregiver, or simply love your clients or love all beings, including those you may help with your scientific discoveries. But when you come back from work mode, how do you behave around the people you live with and supposedly love? Or if you are at home all day with children, how have you behaved with the kids and with those who come home in the evening? What happens when you have not taken good care of yourself? You are irritable, yes? Fussy. Impatient. Prone to angry outbursts. Or sullen silence. Not able to listen fully. Getting sick or chronically run down so that in the end you need their help instead of the other way around. When you can avoid this (and I know you cannot always), you are morally wrong to let it happen. For some of us downtime and self-care can seem to be the real moral wrong just because they feel good, but that has nothing to do with it at all.
So the only ethical thing, really, is to turn your back on others until you have returned to being your best self. Think of a mother cat. We put her in a box she can step out of but the kittens can’t—so she can get some food and escape being sucked, crawled on, and mewed at. Familiar? Step out of the box and feel your body relax. If this is a new behavior for you, others may not like it and you may not be good at remembering to say why you are going off alone (it isn’t about them), where you are going, and when you will be back. But get better at it. Ethically, you have no choice.
Thank you for this. I hadn’t quite thought of it in that light, but it makes sense. The same way it would be wrong to spend your money on frivolities when there are necessities to purchase, or to refuse to go to work and make money when your family needs to buy food: thinking of my mental and emotional energy as something to be spent and renewed helps me let go of how it feels to insist on time alone.
My elderly parents are recovering from injuries, and I have talked to them about the importance of conceptualizing their recovery as work rather than a hinderance to work. Sitting quietly may feel like a luxury to them, but their bodies are doing hard work repairing damage, and they must train their minds to accept the burden of inactivity for a short time. Similarly, my mind needs space to recover during the day, and I must train myself to accept–& even welcome–the rest for short times while a greater internal work is being done.
I am an HSP with type 1 diabetes and a strong tendency towards anxiety and depression (on the negative side of things). On the positive side – I am creative, empathetic and know love can be a powerful force. My physical and mental health is ‘fragile’ – I spend a lot of daytime in bed -resting, recovering or trying to ride out pain. I have no employment – and manage on social welfare and the generosity of my mother. When I’m feeling particularly well – I sometimes think I could manage parttime work – but then the following day – am knocked flat again with bodily pain and inflammation. I feel guilty, upset, misunderstood…much of the time in response to this cycle and my not-working. However I also know – that as Elaine has said in this article – I would be a very unpleasant person to be around, for others and for myself, if I pushed myself into working again; beyond my bodily comfort. As HSPs – perhaps our first duty to others (and ourselves) is to do what we need to – to be our best ‘selves? To have our energy available to us to contribute to the lives of those around us; with our empathetic, sensitive strengths. Maybe it’s what everyone’s first duty could be – better relationships? Maybe I could give up feeling guilty and just be grateful that the means of my survival are there. Thank you Elaine – for you and your partners’ work in this area, it has given me the means of more self-acceptance than anything else in my life. regards, Sandra.
Dear Elaine,
>>Thank you so much for shining a much-needed beam of sunlight onto this sometimes-murky issue!<<
As someone who's prone to overthinking before and self-recrimination after overstepping her physical and/or mental boundaries yet again, I'm particularly grateful for the sense you've given me of us needing to be accountable to AND understanding of ourselves regarding our boundaries.
I finally had to give up on helping a good friend (and one who had helped me a lot in the past) sort out her impossibly-full apartment — because I would regularly outstay my staying power/stated mission-time and end up either formulating 'helpful suggestions' in a less than helpful/gentle way due or actually raising my voice to her due to either a total feeling of helplessness and over-stimulation (THINGS piled up (and down) everywhere you look!) and/or being hungry due to her inherited Calvinistic work concept of work-work-work-and-then-collapse/eating is for sissies. But it's taken me a year and a half to stop offering to help her.
This article will help me to stop revisiting this scenario with a feeling of guilt.
It's exactly what I needed today, and perhaps exactly what my friends and clients indirectly need from me, too! 😉
A general thank-you to you, Elaine, for this newsletter and for the blogs. Lovely!
Best wishes, Fran
P.S. Thanks also to MK for the reframing the received idea of 'sitting around is a luxury' into 'what you are doing is actually essential work'.
Yes, I reject the pressure for more, fast, NOW.
Thank you! It just comes right in time when I decided today that I am taking a break from ‘home’ because I am too tired and too much into my own issues. – The problem is: The other person ‘hates’ me now because I ‘escaped’ and do not behave according to her ‘expectations’… How to explain that it is the only way if I am to lead a sane and healthy life…
Hello, I’m Evelyn from Peru. As an HSP I just discovered how important is this. I’m recovering from a vertiginous syndrome due to a burnout. I blame myself for not being careful with my body and my mind, so now I’m going to work consciously on how my body gives me signals of tiredness. I remember that paragraph of your book, Elaine, in that our inner child is talking to us and saying “Please, please protect me” That piece made me cry but now I’m going to frame it and put it on a wall so I can remember it always. Thank God for your life, Elaine. Blessings…
Thank you for writing this article. Boundaries have always been difficult for me, and I seem to attract control freaks who love to come in and romp & stomp all over my life. I thought I’d learned to protect myself from this, but now, at this late stage in life I find myself surrounded by “emotional vampires”. When did this happen? LOL I find that understanding I am an HSP is going to help me remove myself from these situations, abd change my interactions. Good self-care includes self-acceptance and sticking up for myself. Sometimes I’m silent, when I should speak up for myself. It isn’t childish to do so. I’ve done it before successfully, and I can do it again. P.S. I love spending alone time, always have.
It is so true that HSPs need boundaries and to take care of themselves. I can always tell when I am letting my self-care slip and find myself getting sick or feeling really anxious. So important to take the time for yourself.
I have now been waking up and setting an alarm for four am every day. This is because I practice mantra meditation every day. I am initiated and took vows saying I would commit to a certain amount of mantra meditation daily. There is no requirement regarding what time of day the requirement is fulfilled but I choose to do the meditation early in the morning because, as wisdom shows us, very early morning is an especially spiritual time. I have been doing this for almost 20 years.
Recently I read the HSP book and these concepts are aligning so well with what I understood and misunderstood about myself for so long. A few days ago, I read an article about sleep in Psychology Today magazine where it described how the stage of sleep just prior to sunrise is a very important one- a sleep stage where the chemicals in your brain balance. The night after reading it, during the night I moved the alarm from 4 to 5. This was such a wake up call for me, and I feel guilt both around making a decision to actually and seriously try to sleep in sometimes and get some of the chemical balancing sleep, as well as around the thought that I just can’t do it. Reading this blog post made me realize that I can see the discipline (lol) of letting myself sleep in (if I can manage to do it) in terms of how it will actually bring benefit in such a variety of ways including the benefit of having a balanced brain on the occasional days I choose to get up early (as in the past) to do the mantra meditation at that special time of the early (pre) morning because I will be meditating with a more balanced brain! Thank you for being here and for showing me that I’m not an anomaly, weirdo. Thank you for letting me see the specialness in who I am and for encouraging me to take care of myself.
I appreciate these reminders. I often feel guilt when I take time for myself. I’m still trying to figure out how and what ways to wind down, for how long, but I like how you said until you are your best self. I think I know inside when I have healed and am ready again to face the world, it’s just that I forget, so thank you.
Dear Elaine,
Soooooooo intensely relatable. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. Means the world.
Thank you thank you thank you, so good to understand that this is how it really “works”. Even the mention about the narcissist tendencies rings a bell, somewhere. Eye opening this complete article!
Thank you. I feel guilt for needing self care. I work in an open plan office with 80 others and sometimes just need quiet with no one asking me questions.
So I escape sometimes By going to sit in a cafe by myself and just stare out of the window and watch the world pass by.
Or if my partner is out, I sit in silence and read, or just sit. And sometimes in the dark.
Your website has explained why I am the only one I know who seems to need this to stay sane. Thank you.
Now I can plan more of these with far less guilt.
Thank you for the reminder to take care of ourselves. I transgress this guideline much of the time, and I’m tearful as I review my current overwhelm, but it is getting better. However, I cringe at the severe language employed in the article. “Morally wrong?”
Which brings me to my next point: All of us, including non-HSPs, endure a constant struggle with properly caring for ourselves. Life is so demanding nowadays. So it’s not necessarily a matter if attentiveness, it’s also whether we can carve out the time to cook a healthy meal, luxuriate in a hot bath, and the like. My dog peed on the carpet, my doctor ordered lab tests, the new jeans I bought have a hole that needs patching, my car needs a couple of repairs, and on and on and on. It can even take effort to streamline a life. Just saying.
My lawn is littered with debris from windy days past, have to sign up for life insurance, update my resume, transport recyclables to the local dump, call a friend…
Do the dishes, take a shower…
My question has always been, “How can I expect my family to accommodate this?” If one person in the household is stressed by clutter, and the other three are not bothered by it and prefer to generate clutter faster than the fourth person can clean up, and do not wish to pick up after themselves, how can I say that the three should accommodate the one? Shouldn’t I just learn not to be bothered by clutter? If all of them need things from me at once, at an unrelenting pace, don’t they deserve a “normal” parent/spouse who can handle this? Even as a child, why should my parents and brother have catered to my sensitivities rather than expect me to behave like a regular kid who doesn’t cause inconvenience to other family members with fears and tears and difficulty with decisions and social life and other drama? How can I possibly expect my spouse to take on more work or deal with my messy emotions? It seems selfish to expect others to change for me instead of me changing for them.
Firstly, I am delighted to have stumbled onto your site and have taken the HSP test. I scored an 18 but there were a couple I didn’t click because I learned to manage those situations, mostly by avoidance and boundaries.
I was today years old (65) when I found about HSP but have known for decades that I am, what is referred to as, an empath. There are varying degrees of all personality traits, and I’m not sure how HSP is related to empathy since I just discovered this trait is a thing, so I’ll do some digging to find out. Would love your thoughts on differences between the two.
I also wondered how your relate certain personality traits to the science of the astrology. As an Aquarian, I always wrote my sensitivities off as being a humanitarian, but I could never explain how I can tell when someone is being untruthful and insincere.
It was very comforting to learn there’s a description of how I am as a human being.
Thank you for that…