Why Small Injustices Hijack Your Whole Day

I was standing in a gorgeous, fully renovated hotel room in Rome, the exact room I'd booked, the one with the terrace and the view, and I still couldn't let it go.

The problem was solved. I was happy. And yet there I was, rehearsing customer service speeches in the shower, revisiting the hotel's website, feeling my heart rate climb every time I thought about it. Why?

In this episode, a small "on principle" moment in Rome cracked open a much bigger question for me: why do tiny injustices hijack our entire day, while objectively bigger things roll right off? 

If you've ever been told you're "too sensitive," this one goes somewhere you might not expect.

This Episode Dives Into:

• My Rome hotel saga — and the moment it stopped being about the room
• Why a $10 overcharge can occupy more headspace than something objectively bigger 
• The uncomfortable truth beneath the need for justice
• How "you're being too sensitive" becomes a wound you carry for years
• Justice vs. validation vs. regulation — the three needs we constantly confuse
• Why your body keeps fighting a battle that's already over
• How we pile self-invalidation on top of frustration and make it worse
• What it actually takes to trust your experience without needing anyone to agree

Who This Episode Is For:

• Highly sensitive people, empaths, and deep feelers
• Anyone with a strong sense of fairness who can't always let things go
• People who replay conversations long after they're over
• Those who grew up hearing "you're overreacting"
• Sensitive professionals learning to advocate without spiraling
• Anyone ready to stop outsourcing their peace to someone else's apology

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

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Get The Empath Detox Oracle Deck
• Book a Storyboarding Session (for Creators + Business Owners)

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 lives. I'm Colleen Wallace. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spends 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. I apologize for releasing us a little late this week. I am on a cruise with my family and just trying to balance doing work with being a cool fun aunt who wants to hang out by the pool and do all the Disney things. So still trying to figure that out. Today's episode is inspired by a situation I found myself in last week while visiting Rome. I got into Rome on a Friday. I was getting in a little solo trip before this cruise with my family. I booked this super adorable boutique hotel. It's in a quieter neighborhood, looked super beautiful online, and the thing that sold me was the room, specifically the balcony with gorgeous views of the city. I was picturing myself with my laptop every morning, drinking tea, living my absolute best European life. I check in, everything's great. And then they told me that they were actually gonna need me to switch rooms two days into my trip. There was some issue with the third floor, nobody could be on the third floor. Okay. A little inconvenient, which I expressed because I specifically booked the balcony room, but whatever. But they assured me it's the same room, it's a balcony room. Okay. So I walk into the room and look, it's fine. It's a beautiful room, but it is absolutely not what the pictures looked like. The balcony in particular is a little fenced-in ground floor patio. No view. The room is comfortable, it's lovely, it's just not what I thought I booked, right? And I spent the next two days trying to convince myself that I was being dramatic. Like, look, you're in Italy, this is a wonderful opportunity. Get over yourself, go touch grass. Then two days later, I move into my original room. And guys, it is gorgeous. Completely renovated, like twice the size, this beautiful terrace that stretches the entire length of the room. There's a table where I can work, there's a little lounge area, incredible views. It's exactly what I had booked. And even though I'm super happy in this moment, my brain goes, I'm sorry, there is absolutely no way these are the same room. And now all of a sudden, I need a refund or some clear acknowledgement. I wanted someone to say that these were clearly not the same room. We're so sorry. Now I'm I'm gathering my evidence, right? I'm revisiting the website, I'm looking at photos, trying to figure out what tier my original room was in. I'm rehearsing, you know, my customer service conversation in my head. Every time I thought about it, I could literally feel my heart rate increase. And I was like, all right, I gotta say something. So I go downstairs. I said, look, I'm sorry, but if I booked a terrace room and I got room 106, which I did, I would be disappointed. Your website is really misleading. The response back was, nope, they're in the same category, same rate, same room. And oh my God, did I get triggered, you guys. At this point, like everything's fine, right? I was having an incredible trip. Nothing about this conversation was going to change the experience I was living, and yet I could not let it go. And that got me thinking about this need for justice. If you are someone who identifies as deeply sensitive, you probably know this feeling. You know, at some point, the issue stops being about the issue, right? Because objectively it's not that big of a deal. But your body can take it on like it's a much bigger threat. Our nervous system is asking for validation. My friend Nicole and I joke that we should start a podcast called On Principle. We have this entire series of text messages of just really mundane injustices or audacious behavior we've encountered. And we clearly feel this same way, right? That we're being dramatic for complaining. But then the other one, being a great friend, will chime in. Okay, but on principle, but underneath this joke that's not really a joke, but sure, okay, it's a joke, is something I have become really curious about. Why are there days when I can roll with every punch? And then other days where one little inconvenience can completely hijack my day. Because most of the time I'm incredibly flexible. Flight delayed, okay, maybe my soulmate's on the next flight. Someone's rude to me. Well, you know what? They might not be very happy in life right now. I hope things get better for them. And then other days, someone overcharges me $10 and I am mentally preparing a case for the Supreme Court. Depending on what's going on for us at any given time, our body is going to decide whether something is information or a threat, and it will act accordingly. So for those of us who identify as deeply feeling people, I think it is common to have this heightened sensitivity to fairness. You can hold space for nuance. And you probably expect systems and relationships to operate with a certain level of integrity. But justice is like the surface level story because what we're actually seeking isn't the refund. A lot of times, what looks like a need for justice is just our nervous system asking for validation. In my hotel example, if someone had said to me, you're absolutely right, our website is misleading and we're going to fix it. Honestly, that might have been enough. What we're often looking for is someone to confirm that our experience is real, that we're not overreacting, that our frustration makes sense, that we're not being gaslit into believing that we're crazy. And it just got me thinking about people like myself who've spent a lot of time in life hearing things like, you're being too sensitive. It's not that big of a deal. You're overreacting. Because eventually you start questioning your own experience. You hear that enough times and you might stop speaking up at all and just dealing with it, right? You can become afraid of the repercussions of speaking up. So now, when you finally do speak up, it's not just about the hotel room or the restaurant or the email that you got. It's about every other time you swallowed your experience because it felt safer than being called too sensitive. When this comes up now, even after all the work you've maybe done on yourself, there's this deep need for someone else to say, no, you're right. What you experienced did happen that way and it shouldn't have. And here's where our body enters the conversation. Because these emotional experiences, they don't just live in our thoughts. They live in our muscles. It's in the way that we breathe. Maybe your jaw clenches up, your shoulders shrink up to your ears. Even after the event is over, the muscles can stay tight. You know, our breathing can become shallow, our thoughts will keep looping. Now maybe you can't fully enjoy dinner with friends because you're still arguing with customer service in your head. Or you're repeating the story to your friends, right? You're keeping yourself in that loop. So back to my hotel story. Two days into the trip, I was in my beautiful room. Nothing that happened at that point was going to change the experience I'd had. It was in the past, and now I was super happy. My body had not gotten the memo, though. I was still feeling affected by it. If you've spent a lot of time in life in that fight or flight mode, your body doesn't necessarily know the difference between I lost a couple hundred bucks and my experience is being denied. The body is preparing for a battle that's already over. And a lot of times that battle is much older than the event itself. And the reaction can become so much bigger than the current thing because the feeling underneath it isn't new. Maybe it's the thousandth time that you have felt dismissed, unseen, or left wondering if you're making too much out of something. And even if this doesn't happen to you often, it can sneak in when those conditions are just right. It's almost like muscle memory. You're hit with a feeling that's familiar in your body, even if it hasn't been felt recently. And then sometimes we'll do something that's a little interesting. We start invalidating ourselves. We think, I'm insane. People have real problems. Someone lost their job today. Someone lost a loved one today. Why would I spend so much energy on this thing? So we'll start comparing suffering, which brings us to this point of self-invalidation. So now, not only can we not find peace in the thing that triggered us, we're now adding this layer of guilt on top of frustration. So it's invalidation on top of invalidation, which can make our body hold on to it even tighter. This is where I think it's helpful to separate three different things: justice, validation, and regulation. Justice, that on principle feeling says, make this right. Validation says, hey, hear me out. Regulation, on the other hand, says help my body feel good and safe again. And when we're activated, we can confuse those three needs. We might think, okay, once they admit they're wrong, I'll finally feel okay. And sometimes that's true. But often they'll never apologize. They might not even respond. And if they do, they might double down. And if your nervous system requires external agreement before it can settle, you have handed the keys to your peace to someone who might never give them back. So what do we do with that? It doesn't mean you have to stop advocating for yourself. It doesn't mean you just have to become okay with unfairness, but it invites a different question. What am I actually needing right now? If I'm speaking up to create change, to protect myself or someone else or voice something that matters to me, then yes, I want to speak up. But if I'm speaking up because I need the other person to agree before I'm allowed to trust my own experience, that's when I know I'm handing them too much power. Once I've said what needed to be said, the next work might not be getting them to understand. It's letting my body know that I stood up for myself and my integrity. And there's a bit of a paradox here for sensitive people because the very qualities that make you compassionate also make you susceptible to rumination, you know, those looping thoughts. You notice nuance, you pick up on energy that other people miss, super beautiful qualities. But they also mean you don't simply experience an event, you metabolize it. It will work its way through your mind and your body, sometimes beautifully, sometimes painfully, just depending on what it is that you're processing and what state you are in. So back to this little hotel story again. But that's where I had to separate my integrity from theirs. If that were my hotel, I would want to know that my website is misleading. I don't want people coming to my business and feeling disappointed. I don't want my team having to deal with disappointed guests. If I were talking to a disappointed guest, I would acknowledge their experience. Like that's how I operate. For me, all of what happened would have been out of integrity. But I can hold that truth and simply know that they were not operating from the same lens. Insisting that other people should operate the way that we do is what keeps us trapped in that loop. Can we trust our experience enough that we don't need other people to agree with it? For the first part of my trip, I was asking my nervous system to stay on high alert until another human confirmed that I was right. And that is a very expensive way to live, guys. We can trust our experience even when other people don't validate it. We can know what's true for us without needing consensus, and we can certainly advocate for ourselves without outsourcing our peace, without the outcome determining how we are now going to show up for life. All right, I think I'm gonna leave it at that. If you're wondering, I am 100% over the hotel deal. I'm actually feeling really silly even talking about it still for this podcast, but it did bring up some stuff that I wanted to share and hopefully it was useful for you. Loving life on this trip. I've got another eight days or so left. I just did Greece. I'm heading to Naples, part of it with family, and then a little solo adventure. So don't you worry about me. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love it if you'd share it with a friend who might also resonate with this. You can also connect with me over on Instagram at the.energy.exchange. That's with an X. All right, guys, thanks for listening, and I will chat with you again in a few days.