Strategies to Reduce Anxiety for Highly Sensitive People

Why are we more vulnerable to anxiety as a highly sensitive person? Sensitivity expert Julie Bjelland explains,

“Anxiety or high stress is actually pretty common for highly sensitive people. Much of it has to do with an overloaded sensitive nervous system.”

 “When the nervous system doesn’t get time to turn off, even away from someone’s energy in the room, this nervous system ‘engine’ gets overwhelmed…

“It’s common for highly sensitive people to have a busy mind and have a hard time turning it off to relax.”

This audio is a brief clip from a free Masterclass by Julie Bjelland: High Sensitivity and Anxiety.

Also see related article How Highly Sensitive People can deal with anxiety – a free Masterclass
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Transcript

Narrator: Julie Bjelland is a psychotherapist author and founder of the online community Sensitive Empowerment with resources for highly sensitive people.

Julie Bjelland: Meditation is such a huge training for the brain for HSPs. You don't want to wait to meditate until you're stressed out. You actually want to meditate a little bit every day because it, it will activate calming centers.

And the more you activate those calming centers, the more they grow up. Versus the more we activate stress centers, the more they grow. And we have to go through a process of actually processing, resting and restoring. This is something that we need to do on a daily basis. All that stuff you're taking in regarding your nervous system is needing to be processed.

And then you have to go through a process of actually resting and restoring too. So. With our modern society. It's common that like you get a few minutes, you grab your phone and you're scrolling, social media, reading news, things like that. Please don't do that. You really need to be, first of all, be very careful about how much news you take in.

I personally read news instead of watch it because visually if I'm watching a lot of difficult images, It can impact me a lot. And if I do that a lot, I'm actually going to have anxiety. So these are ways that we... it's a lifestyle change. It's a conscious, intentional choice to make these decisions every day about taking care of yourself.

I'm really doing things that restore and spending time quietly every day. Think about turning off, you know, think about the census. You really want to turn down the volume for a little bit every day to be able to rest that sensory system. Brain training. This is something that is so, so helpful for HSPs.

And we're going to talk more about that coming up next and spend time with other HSPs. It's why I created my sensitive empowerment community. It is so validating and normalizing and special and magical. To be together as HSPs, it's hard to describe unless you've experienced it. And this is why I have my community off of social media so that we're not getting bombarded with advertising.

There's no advertising in my community. It is a place to process, to work on empowerment and growth together. And it just pieced together are just so kind and loving and supportive. So it's a really nurturing to spend time with other HSPs and important because we are different and it normalizes our experience when we are with other agencies.

So let's talk a little bit more about what brain training is. One thing to think about with brain training is whatever you activate, grows. So if I'm constantly being self-critical and I'm constantly stressed out, I'm activating stress centers in my brain and whatever I activate grows. So if that's all I'm activating, which is what I used to activate all the time, then my stress numbers were massive.

I was walking around with such a high level of stress that I would basically have a meltdown or an emotional reaction. Every time a new stressor would come because I didn't have any space for that. So we really want to be intentional about activate in calming centers. They have brain research about this, that when you activate calming centers and we'll talk some about some calming centers that you can activate.

It will help you release hormones at the income levels that are actually calming to the, to the brain and to the body.

It's amazing that we have control over that. That was something that really excited me.

And most of all, what excited me was learning that when you are activating calming centers, it automatically deactivates stress centers because they cannot be activated at the same time.

I mean, that's very exciting stuff. To me, I felt like, oh my gosh, there was some control that I had over this. And that's what really changed my life was feeling like, oh my gosh, there's actually some things I can do about how I'm feeling. And I can reduce these challenges and start to bloom in the world.

So one of the things too about brain training that I really love is that you can actually train your brain. You can create new neurons. That allows you to pause, reflect and respond instead of react. That's huge because I used to think that I had no control over that, especially when I was really young.

I felt very reactionary in life and that impacts everything. It impacts your relationships, your career, your family, everything. So when you can actually start to develop confidence in yourself that you have this ability, it's life changing. 

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