The CalmWithDom Podcast
Hey I'm Dominik, an Emotional Intelligence Coach for highly sensitive women ready to break their cycles of overwhelm to cultivate stronger relationships (both with themselves and others).
On this show, we do deep dives into how to best understand and leverage your sensitivity to thrive with tools such as shadow work, emotional intelligence skills, and more. My approach is psychospiritual because I truly believe we work best with all the language we can.
We're letting go of overwhelm and stepping into an unshakeable love of self over here, so I'm glad you've joined us!
From my sensitive soul to yours, I hope this helps.
The CalmWithDom Podcast
Your Overstimulation Is Useful. Your Overwhelm Is Not.
Watch this episode on YouTube and subscribe to the channel for more!
Hey! In this episode, I'm equipping you with the tools to compassionately meet your needs and transform your experience with overstimulation.
I'm sharing my personal experiences with overcoming my panic attacks and agoraphobia, which you may or may not relate to, but just as a fair warning - we're getting personal and rambly and ultimately, it's a good time.
By the end of this episode, you'll have practical tools to recognize and address your energy leaks, empowering you to harness your highly sensitive nature like never before.
How to make the mindset shift: “My needs are my #1 priority. I am not in danger, my needs have simply shifted.”
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Email Me: dominik@calmwithdom.com
Hey, welcome to the Calm With Dawn podcast where I help you harness your highly sensitive nature to overcome your energy leaks, to strengthen your relationship with yourself and others. I'm your spiritual emotional intelligence coach, dominic. Let's get into it. In this episode, I am talking about how your over simulation can serve you as a highly sensitive person or an HSP, how you can be overstimulated without the overwhelm and how to stop said overwhelm in its tracks. For me to talk about how useful your over simulation is, I've got to talk about how your energy leaks are a big part of why it's useful in the first place, and I use the term energy leaks to describe your symptoms. By the way, they signal to you that your needs have shifted or changed. That can look like a set of behaviors, a shaking leg when you're feeling antsy, darting eyes, not talking too much or talking really fast and talking a lot. It can feel like physical symptoms, like a tightening chest, irregular breathing, clammy hands and upset stomach, etc. Etc. It can even sound like negative self-talk, right, your thoughts, spiraling anxiety, disassociation. It can literally be anything for you. But what's important to know is they show up when a person, a situation, an interaction is taking more from you than it's giving you in return, which is what makes it an unharmonious energy exchange. Understanding what your energy leaks are is so important due to the fact that, because they signal to you and let you know, hey, you're reaching your limit soon you get to shift gears a little bit and honor your own boundaries, no matter where you are, who you're with or what you're doing. An example I use a lot is in customer service, though for this episode I wanted to use a different example. If you're at an event and getting to know someone, but the loudness of the music, the crowdedness of the room or that combination is causing you to experience energy leaks, it's a clear sign right that there's a shift in your reality and it feels pretty immediate. As a highly sensitive person, you're able to catch that shift in an instant, which is great, because now you get to, instead of ask this new person that you're speaking to about their interest or what they do for work and just continuing the conversation mid-convo, you get to speak up and assert your boundaries by saying something like hey, I want to keep chatting with you, do you mind if we move this conversation somewhere quieter, or something that I like? Even better than that is, I'm getting more uncomfortable the longer I stay in this room, so I'm gonna go somewhere quieter. Do you want to come with me so we can keep chatting? The reason I personally like the second one better is because it's a clear assertion of your boundaries.
Speaker 1:Boundaries aren't supposed to be these intimacy blockers. They're supposed to be intimacy invaders, right? Like their purpose is not to stop connection but to foster connection in a healthy way. And sometimes we can confuse communicating your boundaries and having them in the first place. You leaving the room is the boundary. You not talking to a toxic ex is the boundary. You not having certain conversations with certain people in your life is the boundary. You communicating that is just good conversation that lends to the health of the relationship, right? So the second option says I'm gonna go ahead and do this thing right now because it honors my sensitivity by fulfilling a need of mind in this moment and it's not about you without so many words, right, and it's powerful.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, in our over simulation, honoring our sensitivity looks like Communicating the boundary right, communicating the need, and sometimes that's enough. It's like how I mentioned in last week's episode about dismantling the ranking system of our needs. When you fulfill your need and take care of yourself. Everyone benefits In the example of the conversation with a new person, instead of you muscling through your energy leaks, taking it to the chin and potentially spiraling internally. But it's fine, because on the outside you look fine but really you're not present, you're out of your body, your thoughts are in a spiral. You get to nip all of that in the bud by asking a simple question. And now, because you did, because you spoke up, you get to honor this new connection with this new person and they feel seen, they feel heard, because you're attentive and in the moment and super present and, as a result, you get to connect on a deeper level and just be yourself, like you give yourself permission to be yourself, be the highly sensitive person that you are, because there's nothing wrong with that and in fact, it invites others to be as open and as communicative as you are. Right, you give them the opportunity by showing them that it's okay, at least with you, which is, which is a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you how many times in my life and two years ago, when I relapsed saying the thing right, communicating the need, speaking out loud the boundary was super difficult for me. And when you don't have the tools to deal with your over stimulation in real time, right In the moment, all of the other stuff, the spiraling, the out of body experiences, the sensory overload, the negative self-talk, the defensiveness, the fact that people are misunderstanding you because you're not communicating your needs at all, because to you even doing so is is a burden to others, and sometimes not even communicating the need to yourself Okay. It encourages this warped version of reality where you cannot be yourself. It's impossible to be yourself, or at least that's how it was for me, because I didn't have the tools that I've since developed and tailored to me. Now I know it seems very small, but your energy leaks are very important in transforming how you experience oversimulation. It's just what is your body saying to you right now. Knowing what it's saying and understanding what that means for you and not anyone else is so key to making your overstimulation actually serve you. Or, better put, it allows for your sensitivity to serve you in your oversimulation. And this brings me to my next point, which is that you can be overstimulated and experience your energy leaks without the overwhelm, without all of the things kind of meshing together and causing you to spiral, which is just how you know the best way I would explain what overwhelm even is when you know you're definitely at capacity.
Speaker 1:Anxiety is actually a great example of this. A coach of mine once told me that excitement and anxiety are two experiences of the same frequency or feeling, and that's just me paraphrasing. Arguably, excitement and anxiety are two different emotions, but what we fail to understand is that emotions are verbs, they're actions. Emotions are processes that we go through, in which, at the end of it, we decide what to label that process, which determines the experience you're having. Excitement is looking forward to the future. Anxiety is worrying about the future, but there is an anticipation for the future. That is the foundation of both of those experiences, and it's very easy to slip into one from the other, with just some key mindset shifts going either way, leaning more towards the negative or more towards the positive experience. No matter what, though, positive or negative, both of these emotions can be very highly stimulating, especially when you're in them for a long period of time. And, make no mistake, highly sensitive people can be stimulated for long periods of time, but once your energy leaks start, it's up to you how you choose to respond to that over-stimulation.
Speaker 1:To me, anxiety is an energy leak, and energy leaks feel like reactions A lot of the times. You can't control your reactions to things. They're not up to me, they're not up to you, it's just your body's way of communicating with you. I often say to the clients that I work with your mind is as quick to adapt to new environments and new situations as your body is to remember old ones, and your body will remember what your mind will quickly forget. It's not up to you what information is stored in your body, but you can find your autonomy and how you respond to that information.
Speaker 1:And what I used to do back when I was a teen is I would respond to my anxiety with more anxiety, right With worry. I was afraid of my anxiety and that response would deliver me right into overwhelm, right into survival mode. And I started having panic attacks when I was 14 years old and because I did not have the tools to honor my sensitivity and make use of my energy leaks. I battled with panic disorder and agoraphobia for a couple of years until I finally figured things out around 16, close to 17. When I first started having panic attacks, I did not know that I was a highly sensitive person. I had no idea what my energy leaks were. I was so not in tune with how my body was letting me know that I was not okay for a very long time.
Speaker 1:And the difference between panic attacks and anxiety attacks are with an anxiety attack, the trigger is obvious. You know why you're upset, you know what's going on and, yes, you may experience physical symptoms from that anxiety. It can last a long time and with panic attacks there are more they're short or shorter, very intense episodes of panic that happen seemingly out of nowhere. It's really hard to pinpoint the trigger of a panic attack and, at least in my experience, my panic attacks would be once. I you know, after years of having them and understanding them better, the way that they showed up for me is whenever I experienced change, aka whenever I experienced high levels of stimulation. For so long, panic attacks for me were like delayed responses to those things. So I could have a panic attack about something that really started in my life where it happened like months prior.
Speaker 1:And you know, you're just randomly hit with a panic attack which the physical symptoms are heart palpitations being like the primary physical symptom, irregular breathing, clammy palms just trembling, having the shakes After those symptoms. It's pretty individualized really, but for me, I would lose, my eyesight would go, my hearing would go, I would sometimes I'd have straight up, I'd pass out not really faint, but pass out for like seconds at a time Just a very highly highly stimulating, intense physical experience which, honestly, when I first started having them, it's exactly what I would imagine. As someone who has never gone through a heart attack, in goodness, it's exactly what I would have envisioned a heart attack would be like, which is actually why a lot of people, when they start having panic attacks, they feel like they're about to die, because your heart is like you go from very normal to like your heart wanting to escape your chest too quickly. It's a very sudden attack, though you are perfectly fine for those of you who don't know Again, I'm more saying this for people who don't know what panic attacks are or don't get what they can look like. If you have, you know exactly what this is. You are fine. It is just a matter of soothing those symptoms and potentially even going to the hospital so you can get some rest and get hydrated, but other than that, it isn't life endangering.
Speaker 1:I don't know if that was the best way to describe that, but my panic attacks started after a long period of time of not understanding how my energy leaks showed up for me and ignoring my needs as a highly sensitive person and I say this often I mentioned that I grew up in a city and highly sensitive people who live in cities we mask a lot. I know that's not technically the term that you'd use for a highly sensitive person, but as an HSP, you are neurodivergent and masking and being adaptable. A lot of our traits are unobservable because we're very adaptable to the environments that we're in, and so it's very easy to just seem okay. When you are very overstimulated, especially in public and using public transportation, yeah, but it is very highly stimulating. And when you're highly stimulated for a long time and you have no idea what your needs are, let alone trying to meet them yourself, something like panic attacks can come up. It can happen, and so I saw an evolution of starting to have panic attacks at the age of 14, which developed agoraphobia, and for those of you who don't know what agoraphobia is, it is the fear of going to certain places and so you avoid them. You avoid. It's very different for Everyone.
Speaker 1:The way that it showed up for me was Anywhere that I had a panic attack. All of a sudden I became very anxious about going to that place because, again, you don't know what your triggers are. So I had panic attacks in the trains. I Grew fearful of even getting on trains. I had panic attacks in school. I grew fearful of going to school. I had panic attacks. I Didn't. I have panic attacks. Sometimes it's just in the middle of the street, like in the mornings on my way to school, and so, again, the the Having a panic attack is one thing and it can be highly stimulating, but when you grow fearful of having the experience, that's when something like a goryphobia can pop up out of nowhere and it can just progressively get worse. Both things.
Speaker 1:These are very extreme examples of being in survival mode as a highly sensitive person. It doesn't have to look like this for you, it doesn't have to look like this for a lot of people, but this is how they can show up, because Panic attacks, those are like survival Instinct. You know, survival mode reactions to the world, to the situations that you're in. That's where our fight, flight, freeze, fawn and all of the other Responses that can show up show up because you feel like you're in danger. It is very scary going through that stuff because when you don't understand why and so, while these are extreme examples, it was very key in my journey For me to understand I had control, even in those moments of Survival mode.
Speaker 1:Once I understood, because when you start getting panic attacks and you You're trying to figure out how to Deal with this thing without taking medication, which was very frowned upon in my family and I myself as a kid, just there there was this stigma around taking medication and so Naturally, I I was. I was afraid of it, I was afraid of taking medication and I wanted to use other methods of Dealing with it. And the one thing that you learn when you start getting those attacks is your fear of the panic attack makes panic attacks happen and makes them worse. And because I learned that I had to learn to shift my mindset whenever my symptoms for panic attacks started up, once I felt that I was getting heart palpitations or my my chest was tightening and it was hard for me to breathe, instead of freaking out, which is exactly what I would do at first, my thoughts would sound like oh my god, like why does this keep happening? This again? I just panicked, like my thoughts sounded panicked, even though this was like the fifth time in the last two weeks that I had Gone through this. It's just as daunting as the very first time, but I Didn't have to respond that way and it took practice to stop responding to a very like Intense and highly stimulating experience. But eventually it gets done.
Speaker 1:With practice I was able to shift my mindset. It turned into any time I experienced those symptoms, you know, the thoughts in my head sounded like oh okay, this again, I know what to do. It's time to shift gears. I've got to take a step back, maybe. Whatever it is that I'm doing in the moment, whatever it is that I'm trying to achieve in the moment, whether I'm, you know, commuting somewhere and I have to get To a place at a certain time and I, you know you don't want to be late it's like, fuck that being late, being on time, is not the priority anymore. The other example that I use a lot in other episodes I've mentioned doing customer service. You know, making the customer smile is not the priority anymore. Fuck that. You have to just shift gears and Take your needs and fulfill them.
Speaker 1:In changing your mindset, it does naturally change your response. You're not responding in panic. You can feel panicked as a reaction. You can feel startled and unsettled as a reaction. That's okay, it's it. The point is not to grow numb to over simulation. The point is not to Never feel panic or fear ever again. You just let them be your reactions and choose how you want to respond to the thing. And it's always easier said than done, but it is totally doable with some practice, and so I'm grateful for that experience. I guess because it took Experiencing very extreme levels of survival mode to utilize this tool, which I utilize all the time now. So here's how you can start building those tools for yourself in moments of over-simulation so you do not have to go through intense experiences of overwhelm in the future.
Speaker 1:There are three major tips that I have right. The first one is make note of your common energy leaks. This is going to be super important, and I mean all of your energy leaks. What symptoms come up for you when you stop feeling? Okay, and it can be very subtle Sometimes. The most subtle ones are the most important ones to make note of, and the point of knowing them is so that you are at ease when you're experiencing over-simulation. I just wanted to mention that because it's easy to when you start doing this work, when you start making even subtle shifts and trying to harness your highly sensitive nature in real time. Again, it's easy listening to someone kind of tell you what to do, going out into the world and making that thing your own and adjusting it and tailoring it to your needs. It's harder because you have to work out the kinks of the thing, and that's something that I see all the time when I'm working one-on-one with my clients. It's definitely easier to have someone in your back pocket that you can check in with, which is why I really like these three tips of making note of your energy leaks.
Speaker 1:So physical energy leaks like physical symptoms, mental symptoms, emotional symptoms. What emotions are you feeling? How is your inner dialogue? If you have one right, what thoughts come up for you when you're not okay? How do you know you are not okay If you don't know how to start listing these things down, writing them down, asking your loved ones like how do you know I'm not okay? Sometimes it's the people around us who can catch things about our little shifts in behavior that we may not perceive ourselves, and that's very normal.
Speaker 1:The second thing I want you to do is make the mindset shift right. And the thing that I say to myself you don't have to use this, by the way, I am going to have it down in the show notes as well, because this helps me a lot but what I like to tell myself when I'm experiencing over simulation and I'm noticing energy leaks pop up for me at any given time, I tell myself my needs are my number one priority. I am not in danger. My needs have simply shifted. It's so important to phrase it that way, at least for myself, and I've seen it work for my clients, which is why I'm even mentioning it now. It may be helpful for you Understanding that when your energy leaks are showing up, sometimes it's hard to hold two truths at the same time, like, yes, I am not okay right now and no, I am not in danger right now. I am safe, and that can be hard to just jump into that mindset ourselves, but it's totally doable. These are just some words that I repeat to myself even now, when I'm not feeling like myself.
Speaker 1:The third thing I want you to do is to go ahead and meet your needs, whether it's just by opening your mouth and communicating the thing to someone that you trust or the closest person to you, or if it means stepping back, stepping away from a situation, taking some time like even mental and energetic time away from whatever situation may be stressful, maybe it's work things leave home at home when you go to work, leave work at work when you go home, kind of thing. Whatever, in whatever version, you need that that'll help you meet your needs best. Meet your needs with compassion, not frustration. A big pain point that I have experienced and that I've spoken to so many highly sensitive women who have gone through the same thing. Your sensitivity can Can be such a point of frustration If you are not showing yourself Compassion, if you are not compassionate towards your need to your needs, any and all needs, if you do not allow yourself to be the highly sensitive person that you are at any given moment, if you feel that by being a highly sensitive person, you are a burden to those around you and those that you love, or the situation at hand, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:These energy leaks are going to hurt so much more and that over simulation will turn into overwhelm, and when we're overwhelmed, no one's really cool to be around. When they're overwhelmed no one is is the best person to be around when they're overwhelmed and as highly sensitive people, it's hard for us to show up and be our best selves and be the highly empathetic, highly flexible, adaptable, understand, understanding versions of ourselves when we are not meeting our own needs and we're not allowing ourselves the the the opportunity to be imperfect, to be human. Because to be a highly sensitive person is a very normal and natural thing and it's seen everywhere and all species in on this earth and You're not doing anything wrong and it's okay to not be okay and all the other cliches you may not like to hear. Do not feel a frustration when you're going through tough things, like in my Real-life example of having panic attacks and my first, some of my first thoughts being God, why does this keep happening? Like, why am I this way? To be frustrated at yourself is not gonna make this experience any easier for you. It's gonna go much smoother when you are compassionate to yourself and you're like okay, I know what's going on and I can take care of me right now and if I need help, I can also take care of that to you right as in asking for help. Those are the three tips make note of your common energy leaks, get to know them. Make the mindset shift. My needs are my number one priority. I am not in danger. My needs have simply shifted. And number three meet those needs with compassion, not frustration.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the calm with dawn podcast. I hope you enjoyed and there were some golden nuggets that you can take with you. If you have any questions or I need anything at all, reach out to me. I am calm with Dom on Instagram. I would so appreciate it if you would leave your review and rate the podcast, as that Really helps the show. That's all for today. I will see you next week.
