When Feeling Everything Feels Like Too Much
You sense things that others seem not to notice…the energy in the room, in a person, or in a situation. You feel the vibes, and everything else too, and you feel it all really deeply and intensely. You may notice subtle changes in someone's voice, facial expressions, or energy. Crowded places, clutter, loud environments, conflict, tension, or too much stimulation may leave you feeling drained and exhausted. You may sometimes feel so drained or activated by these things that you need to leave situations and spend a lot of time alone to recover from draining or activating environments.
You feel so many things that other people don’t even notice, or if they do, they seem like tiny, unimportant things to them, and they may think you are exaggerating or being overly dramatic. You may have even been called “too sensitive” or a “drama queen” more times than you can count. If this resonates with you, it is likely that you have been highly sensitive your whole life, and when you compare yourself to those around you, you may feel like something is deeply wrong with you that needs fixing.
What if there is nothing wrong with you? What if you aren't too sensitive, too emotional, too dramatic, or too easily overwhelmed? What if your nervous system is simply experiencing the world in a way that is deeply attuned, perceptive, and sensitive, and what you need isn't to change that, but to understand it and to learn to manage it properly?
What if your nervous system is simply taking in more information than most people, and sometimes it becomes too much to process? A highly sensitive nervous system can feel like living with the volume turned way up. You may experience sounds more intensely, notice subtle shifts in your environment, absorb the emotions of people around you, and feel deeply affected by experiences that others seem to move through with ease. This level of sensitivity can be exhausting when we don’t understand it.
This Kind of Sensitivity Can Feel Overwhelming
Our nervous systems are constantly receiving information. They take in what is happening within us and around us: sounds, light, scents, touch, facial expressions, tone of voice, physical sensations, emotions, memories, and all kinds of changes in our environment. For a highly sensitive person, this kind of continuous stream of information can feel especially intense.
The issue isn't that something is wrong with you or your nervous system. The issue is that the nervous system can become overwhelmed when the amount of input exceeds the nervous system’s capacity to process it. This is where sensitivity and dysregulation can intersect and create issues.
You might notice yourself becoming irritable, anxious, exhausted, withdrawn, scattered, or unable to think clearly. You may feel like you need to escape. You may suddenly have no tolerance for noise, conversation, demands, or other people's emotions, and most of the time you may not even understand why you feel the way you do.
You may look around, assessing your current situation, and see no obvious clues as to why you are feeling what you’re feeling, and your mind may tell you, “You’re fine- what’s your problem, anyway?” Your body is telling you something else. Your shoulders tighten, your breath becomes shallow, your jaw clenches, your body stiffens, or your stomach contracts. You may feel restless or exhausted, or both at once. You want to crawl into a quiet room and close the door.
These aren't signs that you're broken or failing. They may be signs that your nervous system has reached its capacity.
You Don’t Need to Become Less Sensitive
One of the most important shifts we can make is moving away from the idea that sensitivity is a problem to be fixed. There is nothing wrong with you, and you don't need to become less sensitive. You may simply need more nervous system capacity. This is a crucial difference.
When we have access to greater nervous system capacity, we can experience the same things without becoming as overwhelmed by them. We can notice what is happening without immediately absorbing things. We can feel deeply without being overwhelmed. When this happens, sensitivity can become more of a resource than a burden.
Highly sensitive people often bring extraordinary gifts to the world - they may be deeply empathetic and compassionate. They may notice subtle details that others may miss. They usually have strong intuition, creativity, emotional depth, and an ability to deeply attune to other people.
The goal isn't to turn down the volume on our sensitivity - if we do, we lose access to the gifts sensitivity brings. The goal is to help our nervous system know that it doesn't have to respond to every signal as though it is an emergency.
Midlife and the Highly Sensitive Nervous System
So many things shift for women in midlife - things that once felt manageable feel like too much, social obligations feel draining, noises are more irritating, and our tolerance for conflict decreases. As a result, we may need a lot more quiet, solitude, personal space, and time to ourselves.
This can be confusing and upsetting. We may wonder, more than ever, what is wrong with us. We may wonder if we’re going crazy. We’re not sure why we can’t handle what we used to be able to handle so easily.
Asking what is wrong with us isn’t the best question. Instead of trying to hold on to or “get back to” the way things were before, a better question to ask is, "What is my body asking for now?" Once we hit midlife, we find ourselves with less energy to tolerate what we did before, and less energy to hold back our anger or irritation. In addition, midlife can be a time when we become less willing and less able to override the signals of our body, mind, and spirit.
Years of adapting, caretaking, pushing through, managing other people's needs, and ignoring our own signals have a way of catching up with us right at midlife. The adaptations and coping mechanisms that seemed to work so well for us before suddenly don’t work at all anymore. We need something different now. We need to find a way to slow down, find more quiet spaces, more time alone, more authentic connections, and spend our energy and time in ways that serve who we are now and who we are becoming in this new phase of life. Learning to listen to these signals and learning a new way of relating with ourselves can become an important part of healing.
Befriending Your Sensitivity
One of the greatest shifts is going from asking: "How can I get rid of this?" to asking: "What is this trying to tell me?" or " What does this part of myself need?” Asking this kind of question creates space and curiosity, and curiosity creates choice. Curiosity is the opposite of fear and resistance and is a way to start to meet ourselves with more kindness.
Instead of fighting the sensation in your body, you can become interested in it. When you open to what is here through curiosity, it allows what is here to soften, to quiet, and it allows it to move through you instead of getting stuck. Instead of judging your need for solitude, you can give yourself alone time, and instead of assuming you're overreacting, you can pause and feel what needs to be felt, listening to the messages it is trying to send you. Instead of absorbing everyone's emotions, you can become more aware of what belongs to you and what doesn't.
This is where sensitivity can begin to feel less like a scary burden and more like a relationship with yourself - a relationship with your body, your nervous system, and what makes you uniquely YOU.
Building Capacity Instead of Pushing Through
Let’s face it - trying to push through all the time is absolutely exhausting, and it doesn’t even work well as a strategy.
Somatic healing offers a different approach to overwhelm. Instead of asking, "How can I make myself tolerate more?" or “What can I do to fix this?” we can begin asking, "How can I help my nervous system feel safe enough to experience more without feeling overwhelmed?"
This might mean learning to recognize the early signs of overstimulation rather than waiting until you are completely burned out. It might mean slowing down and creating more time for stillness throughout your day. You may take inventory and notice which environments support your nervous system and which ones consistently drain you. Perhaps you can learn how to return to the moment and a connection with your body over and over again when you notice you’re becoming activated.
Your sensitivity is information…it is your body trying to communicate with you. These messages do not mean something is wrong with you. It means something is right with you. It means that you have the ability to deeply sense what is happening in the moment in the environment. Not everyone has such a gift.
The signals themselves are not dangerous, and the more you can distinguish between discomfort and danger, between intuition and fear, between genuine exhaustion and the old habit of overriding yourself. It is possible to create a relationship with your nervous system that allows your sensitivity to become a source of wisdom rather than overwhelm. You may find you may simply have been carrying more than your nervous system had the capacity to hold. Healing isn’t about feeling less, or about only feeling good feelings; it is about creating enough safety, space, and capacity to finally feel what we feel without being consumed by it.
