by Jadzia Jagiellowicz, PhD (Psychology)
I’m driving to Montreal. It’s a 6-hour drive and the entire way, one idea keeps spinning through my brain, “Why didn’t I finish writing my book chapter before I left? How stupid was I to think that I’d have time when I got to my relative’s home. I should have known that I’d be busy when I got there. Now I’ll miss my deadline. My collaborators will be mad at me and never ask me to work on anything together again.”
I turn on the car radio to try and drown out the incessant babble inside my brain. Nothing works. The thoughts won’t stop.
If you are a highly sensitive person ( HSP ) this may be the story of your life. It is normal for the highly sensitive to have negative thoughts that keep circling around their brain. There is even a name for this phenomenon i.e. rumination. Highly sensitive people are biologically pre-disposed to react more strongly to their environment, including having more intense negative thoughts.
Negative thoughts lead to negative emotions like fear and anger. Let’s do a little experiment. You are heading for a parking spot and someone pulls into it right in front of you.
You think “What a jerk. They could see I was trying to get into that spot”
How do you feel? Annoyed? Angry? Unimportant?
Then the person opens the car door and carry a vomiting child into the building across the street. You notice the building is a doctor’s office. You think “Oh, that’s why they were in such a hurry. Their child looks really sick and they wanted to get them to the doctor right away. They couldn’t wait for another parking space to come available.”
How do you feel now? Are you feeling better about the situation now that you no longer interpret it as someone out to get you?
Below, is some help for anxiety, help for depression and help for highly sensitive person symptoms. I hope it helps you learn how to stop negative thoughts and manage your stress. Good luck!
How to Stop Negative Thoughts
Your brain ruminates in order to try to understand and fix a problem you have. As long as you store the information related to your stressful experience as negative thoughts, you will continue to try and “fix” the stressful experience by ruminating. Unfortunately, rumination leads to both anxiety and depression . This is how this happens: Replaying the negative thoughts associated with a stressful experience (rumination) after it is over can activate similar pathways in the brain as the actual experience. This can keep the stress reaction “switched on” even if a stressor is no longer there, causing the experience to be perceived as more distressing than it actually was. Fortunately, programs based on replacing the negative thoughts with new more positive thoughts and behaviours can decrease the rumination. If there are no negative thoughts left in your memory about the experience, your brain will stop ruminating. I have developed a program called Technique for the Reduction of the Intensity of Emotion ( TRIE ) , which includes Talk-Backs i.e. positive things to say back to yourself when you start to ruminate.
Keeping Healthy
It is much harder to keep those negative thoughts at bay when you are already stressed by all the little annoyances of daily life. Highly sensitive people, especially, have trouble dealing with all the stimulation e.g. loud sounds, bright lights, demanding people, that they can run into in a typical day. So, how can an HSP stay chill when there is so much around to bother him/her?
Building in regular scheduled time for activities that are crucial to HSP well-being can make the difference between mental health and mental and physical illness.
Stress Management
Mind-Body Interventions
As well as negative thoughts, your body also stores the physical sensations associated with a stressful experience. Thus when you remember the stressful experience again and again (rumination), you actually re-experience whatever physical experiences your body went through e.g. sweating, tense stomach, heart palpitations, tense muscles. This may be the reason some mind-body interventions such as yoga, breathing techniques and focused-attention meditation can benefit stress management.
Time Alone
Highly sensitive people simply must have time alone, or at least time to immerse themselves in their own deep thoughts and interests. If their brains aren’t allowed to fully explore something, they feel rushed and edgy, like they have been given a piece of chocolate cake to eat, but are only allowed to take one bite. But how can time alone ever be found?
There is a way highly sensitive people can actually create more time during their days. Since HSPs notice all the details of a task, they end up doing a lot of work on a task before they are satisfied it is complete. A very simple, but not at all easy, way to create more time is for HSPs to make a list of the most important parts of a task, and focus on those only. A good way of deciding on what is most important is to think about what the person you report to needs from you. Writing a report for the district manager? What metrics will she/he need to see in order to make a decision. Preparing a lesson plan for a Grade 2 class? What do your students need to be taught to get them to the goals listed in the curriculum your school board uses? Do exactly what you will be evaluated on, and not one teensy bit more.
Now, use that extra time to do something that makes you happy. …… and make sure that you allow yourself a good chunk of time (hours, not minutes) to immerse yourself completely in it.
Nature
One of the things that makes HSPs very happy is spending time in nature. Scientific research shows that time in nature is good for everyone. Doctors in countries including Scotland and the United States even write prescriptions with instructions to spend a specific amount of time out in nature. The national parks in these countries are part of this Nature Prescription Program.
I don’t even think the natural space needs to be outside. Some offices and shopping malls have “green walls” or courtyards with tropical plants and trees. Even if you cannot get outside due to illness or disability, your brain should benefit just by looking at pictures of nature or imagining a walk in your favourite natural area. Athletes imagine themselves going through the movements of their sport before a big competition and this visualisation helps performance. This research suggests the same nerves should light up whether we take a walk in our mind or whether we do it in real life. Take a look at the pictures on my website www.highlysensitivesociety.com and see if they inspire you to picture an imaginary nature walk.
Vitamin D / Light Therapy for Depression
Older, smaller studies have reported that Vitamin D, but not light therapy, helps for Seasonal Affective Disorder. Newer studies, including statistical reviews of all the literature, called meta-analyses, which are considered the best type of scientific studies, show conflicting evidence. Some report that Vitamin D does not help with depression, and some state that it does.
Sleep
There is more and more evidence that sleep is crucial for the mental health and mental well-being of everyone. Sleep is necessary for encoding memories, and new evidence suggests the brain is flushed of toxins (tau proteins) related to dementia during sleep. The work has implications for understanding the relations between sleep disturbance and psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease, and may even point to new approaches to diagnosis and treatment. Although I’m not aware of any literature relating sleep to the Highly Sensitive Person Scale for adults, there are many studies using a questionnaire related to over-sensitivity and under-sensitivity in Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). SPD is related to the old category of Autism. Highly sensitive people are different from people on the autistic spectrum in some ways, but both types of people can experience sensory over-sensitivities. According to HSP expert Elaine Aron, HSPs generally have lower levels of over-sensitivity than do people on the autism spectrum. Sleeping problems were also more common in highly sensitive children.
Even if there are no scientific studies specifically on HSP adults and sleep, it is still a very good idea to follow good sleep hygiene. The Mayo Clinic is a very good source of medical information. Here are their tips for good sleep.
Scheduling Stress Relief without Overwhelm
If you are anything like me, you are probably holding your head in your hands by now, overwhelmed by trying to schedule all these activities. Again, this is a common reaction from highly sensitive people, who do everything in a very detailed way. So, here are some tips
1. Pick two or three from the list above to start with. Schedule them in your daily and weekly calendar. Then come up with a plan for how you will get other people to respect your choices. See my tips in 3.
2. Nature. You don’t need to drive to a forest or a field to get some time in nature. Combine your nature time with another activity. If your neighbourhood has a park, walk through it on your way to work, or walk your dog in the park, if it is safe. Is there a green space near your workplace where you can eat lunch? Or try an imaginary walk while looking at nature pictures, as I outlined in the Nature section.
3. Time alone. Schedule the event on your calendar, and don’t change it to accommodate someone else’s plans, whether that be family or friends. Tell people about your “me time.” During your “me time”, don’t check your phone. Arrange for your children to be driven to events by someone else during your “me time.” Getting other people to go along with your needs is often a matter of continuing to put your own needs first until others realize you mean what you say. Changing the patterns of how others relate to you can take some time.
4. You can contact me here to find out about my services and to book a free consultation to see whether I can help decrease your anxiety, depression or negative thinking (rumination ). This will help you see whether we are a good “fit”. The research shows that one of the key factors in whether people get better is how well their mentor understands them.