High Achiever or Just Really Good at Managing Anxiety?

Hypervigilance at work can be hard to spot because it often looks like preparation, thoughtfulness, intuition, or being “good with people.”

But there’s a difference between emotional intelligence and constantly scanning for what might go wrong.

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, we’re talking about how hypervigilance can quietly affect your career, from over-preparing and over-explaining to filtering yourself in meetings, spiraling over Slack messages, and softening your ideas before anyone has even pushed back.

We’ll explore how your nervous system may be trying to protect you, while your career needs people to feel your clarity, judgment, voice, and leadership.

In this episode, we're diving into:

• The difference between emotional intelligence and hypervigilance
• Why deep feelers often confuse fear with intuition
• Why your nervous system is trying to protect you in the exact moments your career needs you to be visible
• Questions to help you tell the difference between useful information and nervous system activation
• Simple questions to help you stop managing everyone’s reactions and start trusting your own clarity

Your sensitivity is not the problem. The problem is when your nervous system turns every room into something you have to survive.

The Energy Xchange is a podcast for highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, INFJs, and deep feelers navigating relationships, business, and personal growth.

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Book a Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit
• Book a Full-Scale Marketing Audit (Website/Messaging/Digital Presence)
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Get The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal life. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people-pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today I want to talk about something that I think affects a lot of deep feelers in the workplace, but we don't always name it correctly. What I want to dive into is hypervigilance and how it could be affecting your career in a really big way. So hypervigilance is when your nervous system is constantly scanning for danger, even when there's not an actual threat. And in a workplace setting, that danger is isn't typically physical. It's emotional, it's social, it's professional. It's that part of you that wonders, are they mad at me? Did I say that wrong? Was their tone weird in that email? Or maybe, you know, what if I speak up and they think I'm difficult? Or if I make the wrong move and there are consequences to that. So instead of just being present in the meeting, writing the email, sharing the idea, doing the work, part of you is always scanning for signs that something is about to go wrong. And hypervigilance is sneaky because it rarely looks like panic. It can look like preparation, thoughtfulness, intuition, maybe being really good with people. And sometimes, yes, that's exactly what it is. You are thoughtful, you are prepared, you might have really strong intuition about people. But often what we're calling intuition or emotional awareness is actually rooted in fear. What we're calling preparation is self-protection. What we're maybe calling being good with people is really just being hyper-aware of everyone else's emotions and trying to manage ourselves around them. There is a huge difference between emotional intelligence and hypervigilance. Emotional intelligence helps you read the room. Hypervigilance makes you organize your entire behavior around what you think the room might do or say. And that is exhausting. It makes you over-prepare for meetings, over-explain, over-apologize, over-read every email. And it also has us filtering ourselves so much that by the time our actual voice gets to the table, it's barely recognizable. If you've lived a lot of your life in fight or flight mode, which is very common for anyone who would describe themselves as a deep feeler or even an empath, you might not even recognize that you're living in this state at work. It is so obvious to me now, looking back at my 20s, even my 30s in the workplace, how much of how I showed up at work was coming from fear, fear of rejection, fear of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and the potential consequences of that. There's nothing wrong with being emotionally aware. That's a huge strength at work. It helps you read the room. Notice tension, maybe sense when someone needs more context, but there's a line. Emotional awareness says what's happening in the room and how can I respond clearly. Hypervigilance says what could go wrong, who might be upset, how do I prevent that? And how do I adjust myself so that no one has a reaction? That's the difference. One is firmly rooted in awareness, the other is rooted in self-protection. Emotional intelligence that gives us information that we can use. Hypervigilance gives us instructions. It guides how we need to now shift and act in response to that information. So let's talk about how this shows up at work. And you might recognize some of your own behavior here. And for me, I experienced all of these, especially really early on in my career. One of the ways that this showed up for me was over-preparing. And I don't mean, you know, normal preparation, caring about your work, wanting to be thoughtful. I would have full notes, like almost scripted. And I would rehearse because there was a part of me that didn't trust that I could handle the moment as it unfolded. But when you're that scripted, it's really easy to lose the plot. If someone were to ask a question a little differently or take you off track, you're suddenly not present anymore. You're scanning your notes. You know, you're trying to go back to that version that you rehearsed. And then the thing that you were trying to prevent starts happening anyway. You don't come across confident. You come across really disconnected. Another way this shows up is in email or maybe Slack communication. You get a message that feels short, vague, a little off. And suddenly your whole body feels like, oh my God, we have a situation. So now you're reading it over and over. You're wondering if they're mad. You're trying to figure out what they really meant. And then I know for me, what would happen is I would get in defense mode. I would start drafting a response with way too much explanation, you know, paragraphs long. And then before you know it, you're just, you're defending yourself against something that nobody was actually trying to say. We don't know yet what they were trying to say. Versus now, if I get an email and I genuinely don't understand what something means, I'm much more likely to say, hey, can we hop on a call real quick? I do not want to spend a day and a half spiraling. But that was my norm back in the day. And one of the biggest things that can happen that's really detrimental to establishing yourself in the workplace is over-filtering yourself in meetings or in conversations with coworkers. Hypervigilance can make it really hard to speak up because you're not just thinking about your idea, you're thinking about how the idea might land. And by the time you finally speak, your actual thought has been filtered through, you know, 12 layers of emotional risk assessment. So the room doesn't get your clearest idea, it gets the safest version of your idea. It's so diluted at that point that anyone could have said it. Your voice gets watered down by all of the reactions that you're trying to prevent. If you want to dive deeper into that, I did a whole episode on just that topic a few weeks ago about how our empathy can filter our voice and what that means for how we show up. And over time, that can absolutely limit opportunities in the workplace. It's really easy for deep feelers to confuse hypervigilance with intuition. You might have an easier time than many accessing that intuition. And I do think that's real. But when you're in a state of hypervigilance, it becomes really easy to confuse fear for intuition. You might think, I just know something's wrong, and maybe you do. But your nervous system is scanning for evidence that something is wrong because it's trying to protect you. And that's why this is so tricky. Sometimes you're dead on 100%, and sometimes you're not. So you can end up managing yourself and your behavior around something that isn't even true. And where all of this can affect your career the most is that it pulls your energy away from the actual work. Instead of using your brain for strategy, creativity, leadership, problem solving, all the good things, you're using it to scan for danger. And this is where hypervigilance can quietly start affecting your career. The cost isn't just that you're tired, although, yes, you're probably very tired. It's not just that you're overthinking every email, replaying every meeting, or spending a lot of energy trying to figure out what people meant. The deeper cost here is that hypervigilance can start to change how you show up. It doesn't just drain your energy, it can literally distort how your competence is perceived. And that can feel really unfair because internally you might be working really hard to be thoughtful, careful, prepared, and aware. You might be processing everyone else's emotional data. You might be thinking five steps ahead. Those are all great things. But externally, that may not be what people experience. When you're constantly scanning for everyone else's reactions, you're not fully standing in your own position. You are editing in real time. You're softening things before anyone has even pushed back. You're overexplaining before anyone's asked for more context. And you're probably cushioning your opinion before you've even fully said it. And in high-stakes environments, that can be confusing for people because they may not see the depth of your thoughtfulness. They're not going to see how much emotional data you're processing. They might just experience you as unsure or overly cautious or not fully owning the room. And that sucks because inside, you might actually be very clear. You probably have great instincts. You might know exactly what needs to happen in a situation. But if hypervigilance is running the show, your clarity has to pass through so many layers of self-protection before it comes out of your mouth that it just lands diluted. And this is one of the most frustrating parts of being a deep feeler in the workplace. You can have leadership instincts and still communicate in a way that makes people wonder whether you even trust yourself. And this is very common for a lot of the people that I coach now, where they have all of these great ideas, they have great opinions, they're creatives, they really have things they want to put out into the world. But they spent so many years in the workplace being in this hyper-vigilant state that no one ever got to see it. Your nervous system is trying to keep you safe in rooms where your career actually needs you to be visible. That's the real cost. Your nervous system is trying to protect you, but your career needs people to feel your clarity. It needs people to feel your judgment, your leadership. And if you are constantly adjusting yourself around every possible reaction, people may never fully experience the strength of who you actually are. So what do we do about it? This is something that I think can take a really long time to unravel, but it's so helpful to be aware that you're doing this. In my 20s, I had zero awareness of this. I didn't recognize why I was showing up the way I was showing up, why I was spending an entire night preparing for a meeting that I could have prepared for in like 30 minutes. That was just how I worked, right? I did not know where it was coming from. But when you can recognize this in yourself, you're in a stronger position to shift it. So the next time you feel yourself spiraling, over-preparing, filtering, ask yourself number one, is this information or is this activation? Are you noticing something useful or are you trying to protect yourself and bracing for impact? That alone can shift how you respond. Another great question in relation to specific people is this person relevant to the outcome of my work? A boss? Yes. A big client, sure. Um, an influential team member, absolutely. But sometimes we're spiraling over reactions from people whose opinion doesn't actually matter for what we're trying to do or for our role in the workplace. We don't need to absorb everyone's feedback. And then if you're spiraling because you're not sure what someone means, you know, when you get that short, blunt email or someone's tone is off, just ask yourself: can this be solved with one direct question, a clear email, or a quick call? Don't let things sit. The energy you will spend on it is not worth it and it will impact your work. And then lastly, what would I say if I weren't managing everyone's reaction? Get really aware of just how much you are filtering yourself. Look, your sensitivity is not the problem, nor is your ability to read a room or your emotional intelligence. The problem is when your nervous system turns every room into something you have to survive. Your workplace, your career doesn't just need your awareness, it needs your voice, your ideas, your presence. It needs the part of you that can lead, that can make decisions, express yourself, and create great things without constantly checking to see if everyone is okay with it first. Our goal here is not to become less sensitive. Like that's your superpower, hands down. The goal is to become less available to every signal that you get. If you need help with any of this, check out ways to work with me on my website. That's at just onewoo.com. I love helping people find and share their voice. I spent decades suppressing mine, and it would light me up to help you if I can. Okay, I'm gonna leave it here for today. If you are vibing with this podcast, I'd really love a review. It helps other like minded people find this space. Thank you for being here. I will chat with you next week.