Episode 182: 10 Ways to Prevent Overstimulation as a Sensitive Person
Sensitive people can get overstimulated more easily than most, due to triggers such as a loud and crowded place or too much demand for your attention. In this episode, I share 10 ways to avoid or manage a dysregulated nervous system from the book “Sensitive: The Hidden Power of the Highly Sensitive Person in a Loud, Fast, Too-Much World” by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo. Tune in for actionable strategies you can start using to feel calmer and less stressed every day.
Topics
Importance of self-awareness in recognizing signs of overstimulation
Taking Breaks and Self-Care
Calming Sensory Input
Comfort and Cognitive Activation
Creating a Personal Sanctuary
Setting Personal Boundaries
Links
✨🏕️Join Rachel Meltzer and me in Brave New Path, a very intimate retreat, designed for quirky creatives obsessed with self-growth and ready to reignite their spark! Go to selfgrowthnerds.com/retreat to join🏕️✨
👉 Can't join us physically for the retreat? My online program The Courage to Start New is coming back this fall! Go to selfgrowthnerds.com/courage to learn more.
Resources
📚Book:
🎙️Podcast:
Transcript
[AUTO-GENERATED]
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:06]:
Welcome to the self growth nerds podcast. I'm your host Marie, a courage coach, creative soul and adventure seeker. Since thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, I'm on a mission to help you embrace your most confident self so you can achieve your dreams too. If you're eager for deep conversations, big questions and meaningful connections, join me on the quest to discovering how we can create a more magical and memorable life. Hello nerds, how are you? I'm doing okay, I'm getting better. I went to Las Vegas for a work conference with my friend Allison and then it took me a whole 2 days to come back home. The conference itself was 2 days but it took me 2 days in airports and planes to come home because there was a a massive Microsoft cloud outage. I don't know if any of you suffered, the consequences of that.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:01:09]:
I know I have some friends who also got stuck in airports and had their vacations delayed. So it took me 2 days to come home and then somewhere along the way I caught the flu and it's been a week, I'm still not fully recovered yet so you might hear it in my voice. That was the price to pay for 2 days of fun in Vegas. Now today we are talking about confusion and overwhelm, which I see a lot in many of you these days, which is why I wanted to address it. Before we jump in though, I want to remind you that there are still some spots left for the Brave New Path retreat taking place in October, more specifically October 4th to October 7th in Quebec. So very close from where I am, it's about an hour and a half from the Montreal airport. And we're offering a shuttle that goes from the airport all the way to the beautiful chalet where the retreat is taking place, tucked in the middle of the woods. The perfect place to get clear on what you really, really want.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:02:22]:
This is what the retreat is about. It's for those of you who feel lost, who feel like you're just going through the motions, but your life has lost its excitement. You feel like something is missing. You wonder, like, is this all there is to life? You feel very blah. We're going to reignite your inner fire, help you figure out your next steps and help you find the courage to go all in. Plus, we're gonna spend time outdoors together. You're gonna make new friends. We're gonna have really deep conversations and you're gonna leave feeling reinvigorated.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:04]:
So if this is what you need, go to selfgrowthnerds.com/retreat. All the details are there. So go to selfgrowthnerds.com/retreat. And also I want to announce that I'm going to host a second cohort of my 8 week course, The Courage to Start New. So if you cannot come to the retreat, but you still want help stepping into the next chapter of your life, then this might be perfect. It's an 8 week group coaching experience. It's very affordable, and it's for those of you who feel like you are at a crossroad in your life and you need help making decisions that are in alignment with who you really are instead of the person that you're expected to be by others. You wanna make bold decisions for yourself that are not informed by fear.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:03]:
This is the only way to create a life that feels like you, that feels like home. This is what this course is about and I'll be there every week to coach you. We start 1st week of September it's gonna go all the way to the end of October. You can reserve your spot at selfgrowthnerds.com/courage. And if you've been wanting to get coached but you're you were afraid that 1 on 1 would be too expensive, then go have a look at this. You'll be surprised at how accessible it is. Okay? Now, let's dig into today's episode. We are talking about confusion and overwhelm.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:48]:
When something is wrong and you're thinking about what to do, there's so many different possibilities, you don't really know what would be best, you get lost in overthinking, worrying, stress analysis paralysis you might write a bunch of lists and you're just going in circles You won't come up with a wise answer from that place. You will only come up with fearful answers. With short term solutions. Because your mind in those moments is like troubled water. Picture stepping into a lake and shuffling your feet. The sediments at the bottom of the lake will rise and make the water brownish. Right? You can't see through the water anymore. It is the same thing inside your mind.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:05:44]:
You can't see clearly unless you slow down and get still. Wise answers, answers that are aligned with your soul, will come to the surface but only if you calm down enough to let the water settle. The remedy to confusion and overwhelm is not more thinking, it's not more research, and it's not more advice seeking, please. It's not calling one more friend to know what they think about the situation. The remedy to confusion and overwhelm is stillness, is slowing down, is tuning in. I'm not telling you to go on a week long vacation. Even in a busy life, you can create pockets of stillness. You can cancel a plan so you can take a bath and sit in silence.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:06:45]:
That's what I did last night. I felt very overwhelmed. And I don't love cancelling plans. It made me feel like a a bad friend, but sometimes it's necessary. Your mind will tell you that you can't do that. Your mind will tell you like it told me last night, you're a bad friend or you're a bad partner, bad parent or whatever. I dare you to challenge that. To trust that people who love you, they will understand.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:13]:
My friend understood. That it's not the end of the world if you don't show up. That you deserve to take care of yourself. So find something in your schedule that you can cancel or remove. Create space. Then take a bath or take a walk. Just lie on your bed and look at the ceiling. No phone.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:38]:
Phones are the enemy of stillness. You can also take a drive or wash the dishes or use a guided meditation on Spotify or YouTube or put your feet in a river, bake bread, go for a bike ride. Whatever is going to bring a little bit of inner peace. And once you have quieted the noise there is a magic question that I love to ask myself and to ask my clients. This question is what would I do if I trusted myself completely? What would I do if I trusted myself completely? Quite often, an answer will come, or a piece of an answer, if you listen. You know what to do more than you give yourself credit for. But you're scared. You don't trust your own wisdom.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:08:36]:
That's what's going on when you're confused and overwhelmed. And I want you to notice, when the answer attempts to rise to the surface, how it doesn't even take 10 seconds before your mind drama comes back with all the reasons why it's a bad idea and it wouldn't work. That is what I observe with the people I work with. An idea will be whispered from the depths of your being and then the mind drama will take over really fast. But think about this, think about that. There's a whirlwind of obstacles that's going to to consume your thinking really quickly. Let's call that part of you the risk manager. Okay? It's thinking about everything that could go wrong.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:09:24]:
I want you to give your inner risk manager a name. Call it Robert or something or Nancy. I don't know. And then ask Robert to take a step back for a moment. If you are confused and overwhelmed, chances are you give, like, 95% airtime to the worst case scenario. I want you to give more airtime to not even the best day scenario, but just a different scenario. A, it might work scenario. Instead of focusing on always it could go wrong, ask yourself, what if I could make it work? What could that look like? I want you to journal about that.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:10:09]:
Because if you're just thinking about it, I guarantee you that the risk manager is gonna come back with force. I want you to write at the top of the page in your journal, what would I do if I trusted myself completely, then write down whatever comes up, and then on the next page, write how could I make this work, And start brainstorming for strategies. If it helps, you can draw 2 columns, and in the first column, write down all the potential obstacles, all the reasons why you think it might not work. Your brain is really good at that. And then challenge yourself in the other column to come up with strategies for each obstacle. Sit with maybe. Maybe this could work. Maybe I can pull this off.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:04]:
Maybe I'm actually stronger than I think I am, instead of going straight to, no, this is impossible. This is all gonna go wrong. Okay? Do this. Then get back to your life. Let some time pass. Your mind will keep processing in the background. Then create more pockets of stillness. These pockets of stillness act as check ins with your wisest self.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:38]:
It gives your wisest self space to speak up. You might need many of these moments of stillness before it does, because you might have lost the the the connection. This this part of you might have grown very quiet over time if it felt ignored, if it felt neglected. And so you need to build trust again. You need to sit there and let that part of you feel confident enough to speak again. Just imagine a child that's been shut down by their stressed out parents over and over and over again. Whenever they had an idea, their parents said, no. We don't have time.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:12:28]:
What what are you saying? Just get in the car. They learn to stay quiet. Right? And when their parents calm down and they decide, okay, I want to I wanna change my approach, I wanna become a better parent for my child, the child is not going to feel safe, feel comfortable sharing ideas right away. They're going to be hesitant. They're gonna be fearful. It's gonna take time. The adult is going to need to prove to them that they have actually changed, that they are open now. And it's the same thing happening inside of you.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:13:13]:
So it might take time, and that's okay. If you feel rushed, find a way to reduce the impression of rush in your mind. For example, if you think, well, I need to figure this out by next month, it's not going to work. This turns your mind into troubled water like I was telling you about. You can reframe this by telling yourself, you know what, right now, today, in this moment, I am okay. I am safe. This matters because you cannot come up with wise answers from a place of rush, from a place of panic or stress. I know you feel like you don't have time to slow down, but if you don't take time, you will only come up with short term solutions and remain stuck in the same cycle.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:05]:
You must prioritize stillness. There's no magic pill. And if you need help with this feeling, go listen to podcast episode 128. It's called When You're in a Rush, Grounding Yourself for Better Decisions. It's a great add on to this episode. So I was saying you must prioritize stillness. There is no way around it. Because this is where you will receive your best answers.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:35]:
This is the only way you will see clearly. But then you must also develop self trust. Because without self trust, you won't be able to listen to the answers. You will always listen to the fear instead and take the safe route and again remain stuck in the same cycle. If you need help developing self trust, a great way to get started is the retreat I'm hosting in October, the Brave New Path retreat that I was telling you at the start of this episode. We will teach you tools to identify your truth and then to calm down the freak out that arises within you when you want to step into your truth. Willpower is not enough. We're wired differently.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:15:27]:
We're wired to stay inside the cave, and when we venture out, our body tells us to run back to safety because it doesn't want us to get murdered by a predator. This is still in our DNA and so we must consciously, intentionally learn how to override that, how to rewire our brain so that we can go against the current. If you want to join us at the retreat, go to selfgrowthnerds.com/retreat to book your tickets. And if you cannot join us in person but you still want to do this work, then check out my 8 week course, The Courage to Start New. It's live. It's going to start the 1st week of September. And the link to book your ticket is selfgordonerds.com/courage. Now before we go I want to do 2 things: summarize the journaling exercise that I gave you and leave you with a quote from the mindfulness teacher Corey Muscarra.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:35]:
So funnily enough the journaling exercise starts away from your journal. The first step is to do something to get still, to quiet the noise. I gave you lots of examples of what you can do earlier in the episode. And if you need extra help, one of the most popular episode of this podcast is episode 111, 111 How to be calmer, 3 strategies to reduce stress. Once that's done, you can sit down with your journal and on the first page you're going to write what would I do if I trusted myself completely? And then you're not gonna think. You're just gonna let the words flow out of you like a download from the universe. Okay? A brain dump, no judgment. And then on the next page, you have 2 choices.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:17:33]:
You can either write down how could I make this work and then brainstorm strategies. Or if you feel a lot of resistance from your inner risk manager, then write down, make 2 columns and write down all the potential obstacles in the 1st column. Then in the 2nd column I want you to brainstorm strategies for each obstacle. And that's it. That's it for now. You don't need to make any decisions. I just want you to open your mind to different possibilities instead of just focusing on the fears. And you know what? I'll add a 3rd page of journaling in there as a bonus.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:19]:
On the 3rd page I want you to write down all the reasons why you're actually safe right now. And all the reasons why you've got this and you're going to figure it out. This is you being a best friend to yourself. I know it sounds cheesy but that is how journaling has changed my life. You can use your journal to be the friend that you most need. You can use your journal to hear what you need to hear in order to feel stronger. Okay. That's it for today.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:56]:
I hope this was helpful. Please let me know in the comments on Spotify. I'm really excited about this new feature and I want you to use it. Okay. I'm wishing you a beautiful week everyone, sending you lots of love. Bye. If you love what you're hearing on the Self Girl Nerds podcast and you want individual help finding a new direction for your life and developing the courage to make your dreams a reality, you have to check out how we can work together on self growthnerds.com or message me on Instagram at self growth nerds. My clients say they would have needed that support years ago.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:19:40]:
So if you're tired of feeling like you're wasting your life, don't wait. Get in touch now, and I cannot wait to meet you.