202: When the World Feels Too Loud: Supporting Your Nervous System as a Highly Sensitive Person

When the World Feels Too Loud: Supporting Your Nervous System as a Highly Sensitive Person

Do you ever feel overstimulated by the world around you?

Maybe certain foods make you feel foggy, strong smells overwhelm you, loud environments drain you, or crowded spaces leave you anxious. If you’re a highly sensitive person, these reactions aren’t “in your head.” They’re signals from your nervous system.

In this episode, we talk about how to start listening to those signals and supporting your body so your sensitivity becomes a strength instead of a drain.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why highly sensitive people often feel overstimulated by foods, sounds, smells, and environments
• How your nervous system communicates through physical and emotional reactions
• Why pushing through overstimulation can lead to burnout
• The connection between emotional processing and physical wellbeing
• Small ways to support your nervous system so you feel calmer and more grounded

Challenge for the Week

Start noticing how your body responds throughout the day.

Ask yourself:

• What environments, foods, or situations leave me feeling drained?
• What helps my body feel calm and supported?

Then make one small adjustment—drink more water, step outside, take a few deep breaths, or add a moment of quiet to your day. Small changes can make a big difference for highly sensitive people.

Work With Me

If you’re a highly sensitive person who feels overwhelmed or emotionally reactive, I’d love to support you.

My 12-week one-on-one coaching program helps highly sensitive people learn how to regulate emotions, set boundaries without guilt, and create more balanced, energized lives.

Visit:
www.maryannwalker.life to apply to work with me now

FREEBIE: Are you ready to state boundaries without fear and anxiety? Click now to get my FREE boundary setting master class! https://maryannwalker-life.kit.com/ef2bbf6158

Transcript

0:17

Well, hello and welcome back. So today I wanna start with a question. I know we talk a lot here on the podcast about how to navigate your high sensitivity when it comes to relationships, but do you ever feel just overstimulated by the world? For example, maybe you're highly sensitive to the foods that you eat, or different sounds and smells in the room. Maybe you're really aware of the stagnant or the buzzing energy in a room. If you are a highly sensitive person, then this sensitivity, it's not just in your head, okay? This is your nervous system trying to talk to you, and today we're gonna be talking about how to listen to and how to better support your own body so that your level of sensitivity can become a superpower for you rather than a drain. So welcome to the podcast. My name is MaryAnn Walker, and I help highly sensitive people learn how to honor their sensitivity so they can live more balanced, energized, and fulfilling lives. In fact, I have a 12 week one-on-one coaching program that is designed specifically for you, where I help people learn how to navigate their own levels of sensitivity, how to state boundaries without feeling guilty, and how to make requests to get their own needs met without feeling anxious. So if as you've been listening here on the podcast, or if as you're listening today, if you find yourself thinking, well, yeah, I know that this has been a problem for me for a long time now. I'm highly aware that this is a problem for me." But you aren't quite sure how to create that change for yourself, come and work with me. I do have a few spots becoming available for March, and I would love to support you so you can come to my website, www.maryannwalker.life and let's get started. All right, so because you are a highly sensitive person, your body and your nervous system, they have different needs than the general population. Okay. Highly sensitive people account for about 15 to 20% of the population, and y'all we're just built different, okay, let's just say it that way. So, while, yes, you can power through when you really need to. I want you to notice that when you do choose to power through instead of listening to your body, then it can often take a serious toll on your body because you aren't only sensitive to the moods and energies of other people, but you're also sensitive to just everything that's going on around you. So for me, I know that I am highly sensitive to sugar. When I eat sugar, I get a little bit puffy. It also impacts my mental clarity. I get a lot of brain fog when I've had too much sugar. It makes it harder for me to think. And I just feel kind of gross, and I'll be honest, I wish that knowing this about myself would make me stop eating sugar altogether. But since I plan to continue to eat sugar, it's just really good information for me to have that. Okay, well now I really should limit my sugar intake because I know what the impact is going to be. Okay. It's really important to, especially as a highly sensitive person, to identify what has a negative impact on you so that you can kind of limit those exposures and take care of yourself. I have a daughter who is highly sensitive and she is impacted greatly by her sleep quality. So when she's going to work one night in the evening and she's assigned to close the store, and then the next morning she's assigned to open the store, then everybody at home knows that, okay, it's gonna take her some time to recover from that. When she has that sleep deprivation, when she has a different sleep schedule and her sleep schedule's interrupted, it impacts her mental health. She gets stomach aches and she just requires a little bit more isolation in order to recover. and maybe for you then it shows up similarly with sleep deprivation or with eating sugar, or maybe you have a high sensitivity to caffeine. So when you partake of caffeine and then you hit a traffic jam, then you might notice that you're a lot more anxious than other people. Your thoughts start racing. Your heart starts racing, and your palms start to sweat, and you know that you're safe in the moment because your car's not even moving, but your body is acting like you're being chased by a lion, and Can be quite a lot for you. Or maybe fast food or junk food, they really leave your system feeling depleted. Now, for me, my husband knows that when I'm sick, especially, I need real food, not frozen chicken nuggets and not drive through french fries. I need real quality food. Now for him when he has. Sick. His comfort food is things like hot dogs, ramen noodles, and canned soup. That works very well for me. That's super easy, but when I am feeling sick, I know that I require different things. So if he's not able to cook for me, then it doesn't matter how sick I am, I know I'm going to get up and I'm going to make real food for myself because I know that my body needs real nutrient dense foods in order to get well again. So maybe for you then it's small things like a noisy office or strong smells or crowded spaces. They can really feel overwhelming in a way that most people really don't experience it, and so they might be confused at your big reaction. They're like, well, no, it's not that big of a deal. But for you, it's really upsetting. Your sensitive body, it responds very quickly. To external stimuli, and this is why being highly sensitive, it can often feel like a full-time job just to manage yourself, right? Because you're either managing the symptoms that you're experiencing from your sensitivity, or you're investing so much energy into resisting the fact that you're experiencing things because you think, no, but this shouldn't impact me, this smell, this drink, these lights. They shouldn't be that big of a deal. So you resist the fact that you're having a big reaction to it. So you continue to power through, even though your body is saying, whoa, this is too much. This is overstimulating. I'm feeling anxious. Please stop. Please don't give me that anymore. But here's the thing, is being sensitive to all of these things, it doesn't mean that you're weak or that you're lesser in any way. It just means that your body is highly sensitive to what does and doesn't serve it. And when you think about it that way, isn't that a pretty amazing gift? Because your body is letting you know not only what it needs to survive, but what it really needs to thrive. So yes, it may feel overwhelming to be so sensitive to foods, to lights, to sounds to smells. And also, and I really want you to listen to me closely on this one because this is a super big deal. Not only are you highly sensitive to those things, but you are also highly sensitive to acts of self-care, to nourishment, to healing. You are very quick to respond when you actually give yourself the nutrition that you need. When you give yourself the rest that you need, when you actually start drinking water, like you know that you should, and maybe part of you does know that, oh, well, yeah, I know it doesn't keep much to keep me going, so that's why I keep powering through. But when you power through instead of giving your highly sensitive body the care that it needs, that's when your body's gonna start to rebel. Because you can either slow down and take care of your body now, or your body is going to force you to slow down and take care of it later. Now, it's really hard for me to find any firm statistics on this, but anecdotally speaking, I will say from what I've seen in my practice, highly sensitive people seem to be more prone to chronic illness. They seem to be more prone to autoimmune disease, and for many then those things came on after a significant trauma or after a significant hardship, and it was because they were attempting to power through for a little bit too long that their body just eventually started to shut down as a form of self preservation. Their body was basically saying, Hey, I'm still here. I need some care. I need some maintenance, please. I know that you're busy trying to manage everybody else's needs right now, but I have needs too, and you are not listening to me. So your body will continue to get louder and louder and louder until you actually listen. And that's really kind of the paradox here is you are often the last person to give yourself the care and the attention that you need, but you are also the person that is most likely to benefit from a little bit of care a little bit of attention. And when you benefit everybody else around you benefits. When you tend to yourself, when you take even small steps to nurture your body, your nervous system, and your energy levels, it doesn't just impact you, it impacts everybody around you. So think about it like this. I know you and I know how much you love to serve other people, so it's not just about putting on your own air mask first and taking care of the person next to you, but it's more like you are the pilot and it is crucial that you put on your air mask first because it's because of you that everybody else is gonna feel stabilized, that everybody else is going to be able to get to where it is that they need to go. Through regular self-care, you're better able to show up as your best self. You're more grounded, and when you are more grounded, you're less emotionally reactive. So many highly sensitive people come to me because they feel like they're a little bit too emotionally reactive. Take that as a sign that it's time for some self-care. It's time to turn inward. It's time to figure out, okay, what is my unmet need? And fill that need. When you're feeling more grounded, when you're feeling more centered, when you take care of yourself, you have an easier time protecting your energy through kind and clear boundaries, for example. You're more steady, you're more clearheaded, and you're also more intuitive. I know that so many of my listeners are very highly intuitive, and when you take care of yourself, your intuition is just gonna go through the roof and everybody around you is going to benefit from your wisdom and from your presence. And this is when your calm becomes contagious and your clarity becomes more available to other people as well. So for you specifically, every tiny act of self-care, like taking a few deep breaths, drinking water, moving your body gently, choosing nourishing foods, they have a ripple effect that reaches out far beyond yourself. You are not being selfish, okay? You're actually creating more space, more patience, and more presence for not only yourself, but for everybody else that you're interacting with. Emotions live in the body, and this is true for everybody, but because highly sensitive people experience the emotional world so much more intensely, it is especially important for highly sensitive people to tend to their bodies so they can better process the depth and breadth of emotions that they experience every single day. Your body really does hold onto a lot of stress, overwhelm, and anxiety, and if you are not taking care of your physical self through sleep, nutrition, movement, hydration, then emotional processing is going to become heavier and harder. Now, something that was really interesting for me to observe when I was working as a reflexologist was seeing how much the emotions can impact the body in a very physical way. So for example, when somebody would come to me with back pain, it was often because they were carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Or maybe they were bending over backwards to help other people. Okay? These are very common phrases that we use, and we use these phrases because we recognized even from early on that these things really do impact our physical bodies as well. So these phrases are information they tell you what emotions are actually doing to your body. When somebody would come to me with a stomach upset that had just been bothering them for a while, it was often because there was a situation or a relationship that they were really struggling to digest. See the patterns here? Sore throats were often attached to cutting remarks made by another person. A loss of voice was often attached to a fear of abandonment if they stated a boundary or if they spoke their truth. Your physical body is very much linked to your emotional body and working with somebody who understands that connection, it can help to heal both a lot of physical and emotional wounds. By supporting your body, you make it easier to process emotions. You make it easier to set boundaries. You make it easier to show up more fully in your relationship. And when you do that, then your nervous system, it starts to trust that, okay, I can see now that you can handle life. Now without my over-functioning. Your nervous system will start to calm down once it learns to build that relationship of trust with you. So here are a few ways that you can start nurturing yourself today, even if you're short on time. Number one, begin to notice what triggers your body. And maybe you're gonna wanna write these things down, but take some time to check in with your body as you're eating, as you're drinking, and take some time to notice how those things feel in your body. Notice if there are certain sounds or certain smells or certain things in your environment that are creating a reaction for you. Make a list and show your body that you are listening to what it is that it is telling you. Make a list of those things that are kind of aggravating you and see if you can change some of those things pretty simply. And that leads into number two. Okay? After consulting with your list, then start to make some small adjustments. So this might be swapping out a candy bar for a chocolate covered date. It might mean adding more water into your day. It might mean cleaning one room in your house and lighting a candle in it so that it really feels good to you. It might mean swapping out your light bulbs. Do you need more music in your life? Do you need more silence? How about your movement? Do you need rest or do you need more movement? For a long time, I was so attuned to other people's needs that I wouldn't even know what it was that my body needed until I saw somebody else fulfilling their body's needs, unapologetically. And I gotta say, my mother-in-law is amazing at this. We will all be sitting around on couches, comfy, cozy, and then she'll just regularly stand up, go and get herself a drink of water, and then she'll either stretch or lift weights while we visit. So give yourself permission to do the same thing if your body needs it, don't wait for somebody else to give you permission. Just listen to your body and build that relationship of trust. All right. Number three, build in micro self-care moments. So maybe this is taking five deep breaths between meetings. Maybe it's having a glass of water. Maybe it's taking a short walk on your lunch break. For me, I love to jump 100 bounces on my rebounder and fix myself a cup of tea between clients. Other days, then I'll maybe work in 10 minutes of stretching and yoga between my clients. And this not only helps my body to feel so much better, but it also helps me to clear my mind, and it helps me to be more present with my clients. Again, it's that ripple effect. It impacts everybody when you're able to show up for yourself. All right, number four, check in with your emotions and your body. Ask yourself, what am I feeling physically and emotionally right now? Is there a connection and how can I meet the needs of these emotions and these physical sensations in my body? Take a moment right now and just see if you can name three emotions that you're currently feeling, and then ask yourself what those emotions need. And this can be an especially interesting exercise to do if you're an empath, because sometimes these emotions, they really are coming up out of the blue, and because we have no idea where they came from or what's going on, then we often don't know what it is to do to even process these emotions. Now, I recently had a very interesting experience with anger. I just felt so angry for no particular reason, and I am not an angry person, and so this was really strange for me. I didn't know what this anger was here to show me. I didn't know if it belonged to me or to somebody else. I had no idea where this anger was coming from. But I also know that anger often shows up when we have a belief that no things shouldn't be this way. Something is wrong, it shouldn't be this way. And so even though I couldn't identify where the anger was coming from, maybe it's perimenopause, maybe it was something I was picking up empathically, I have no idea. But I took some time to journal on it and to work through some of the things that I had recognized that Oh yeah, that didn't go as planned. Yeah, that's not the way it's supposed to be. That shouldn't have happened. And I just sat with it and I worked to process it, and then that anger, it really loosened its grip, and shortly after, I just felt so much better. If you are detached from your emotions, there is no way that you can process them. So take the time to identify what emotions you are experiencing and then ask those emotions what is needed. To be absolutely honest with you my favorite place to do this is when I'm driving in the car all by myself. I know when I'm driving I don't have much going on, and so I just use that space for emotional processing. And sometimes that processing includes tapping. I'm a big fan of tapping, so if you're interested in that, let me know. I think tapping is a wonderful tool, but see if you can build in some emotional awareness into your day and just see if it makes a difference for you to even just name the emotion. Tiny, consistent steps will absolutely add up over time. And supporting your sensitivity, it doesn't mean that you need to live in a bubble. Okay? Supporting your sensitivity means living in a way that really honors your sensitivity so that you can show up more fully in life for yourself and for other people. So if you are ready to build more sustainable routines that honor your sensitivity, reduce, overwhelm, and help you to really show up more fully in life, I would love to support you. You can email me at maryann@maryannwalker.life to inquire about working with me one-on-one, and consider sending me that email, your first step towards creating a more balanced and peaceful life for yourself. And also please remember that your highly sensitive body, it is an amazing gift and it is giving you so much beautiful information. And as you support your body, your body will support you. So start small, but start today. You deserve it. All right, I hope you have a great week and let's talk soon. Bye now.