How to cope and regulate your emotions as a highly sensitive person

I have always been a highly sensitive person, but I haven’t always felt free to be a highly sensitive person. In fact, for a lot of my life I tried to shut it down and shove all of the emotions away into a corner of my body somewhere never to be seen again…

…or at least that was the plan.

I think everyone who identifies as a highly sensitive person has been told at least once in their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that their emotions are making someone else feel uncomfortable. I’ve been there. I can’t even count the times that someone told me I was “too sensitive” growing up. It happened a lot.

And so I started to train myself to not express what I was feeling inside. I didn’t want to make other people upset or feel uncomfortable, so if I felt an emotion starting to bubble up, I would shove it back down.

Sure, this seemed like a good idea at the time.

Looking back, though, because hindsight’s a jerk, I can see how this idea to numb myself for the comfort of others led to some pretty toxic relationships and friendships. Because I wasn’t allowing myself to feel anything, I was also not able to feel the warning signs that something was off or that someone was using me. I thought I was happy, but turns out I was just making them happy. 

Like I said. Hindsight’s a jerk.

It absolutely wasn’t their fault. They were just working with what I was giving them … which was anything they wanted because my Inner People Pleaser continued to drive the bus, so to speak.

It was just so frustrated sometimes, though, because I would be in complete control of my emotions. They’d be calm, numbed out, and I wouldn’t get upset at anything. And then all of a sudden the emotions would explode out of me, I’d cry, the person I was interacting with would wonder where this came from as the reaction far outweighed the situation.

But I was powerless to stop the flood of emotions until it ran itself out.

I’ve heard so many people describe this cycle as like you’re trying to keep the lid on a boiling pot of water. The more you hide your emotions, the hotter the water gets until there’s enough steam that it lifts the lid to let some out and that’s why it feels like these overwhelming emotions come out in little bursts.

That analogy doesn’t resonate with me, though, because it gives me the image of only the emotions that are typically classified as “negative emotions” even though all emotions can be either serving or sabotaging, but that’s for another day. This analogy sounds like you’re trying to contain rage, hurt, anger, and other upsetting feelings and then they bubble out often at some really inopportune times.

But, in my mind, this means that the only way you can prevent that from happening is to stop feeling as much. That way your pot won’t have as much water to boil and will be less likely to boil over.

And asking a highly sensitive person not to feel as much is like asking someone to stop breathing. It’s just how we’re wired and I can’t get rid of it anymore than someone else can stop their need for oxygen.

So instead of thinking of it like a boiling pot of water, I like to think of us managing our emotions as if we were carrying a bunch of apples. 

When we don’t allow ourselves time to feel or process that emotional “apple” we just carry it in our arms.

Overtime, the more and more we bury our emotional experiences, we hang onto more and more apples until our arms are full and we’re just trying to balance them all as best we can. But then life, as it always does, comes along and throws us off balance a little or gives us one more emotional “apple” to hold.

And so some of the apples fall off the pile, hitting the ground and rolling around in an uncontrolled way.

In this scenario, it’s all emotions we don’t allow ourselves to feel that contribute to the apples we’re trying to balance in our arms. When we don’t allow ourselves to be moved to tears by something stunningly beautiful, or when we minimize our excitement for something because we don’t want to appear “overly emotional” - this contributes apples to the pile as well. 

So what’s the balance, then? How do we not hold onto all of these apples, but also not set ourselves up for hurt and judgement as a highly sensitive person?

Emotional regulation.

Practicing emotional regulation is vital for all people, not just highly sensitive ones, but especially for us HSPs. Not every situation and scenario is appropriate for you to feel your emotional reaction right in the moment, and so you will have times where you’re holding onto some apples to keep yourself calm and able to be fully present in the situation you’re in.

There were many times in the ICU where I had to hold onto my own sadness and grief in order to be there for a patient or their family that needed strength from me, so I held onto those apples until the end of my shift…or sometimes just until I got a break and could go cry a bit in the staff room.

But then it’s equally as vital to make time to eat those apples, aka process your emotions.

It’s important to take time to recognize what brought that particular emotion on, what you want to remember from that experience, and if you felt the emotional reaction was actually yours and not a conditioned or trauma induced response. This way, you’re still feeling those emotions and honouring what they had to tell you while also keeping your arms free of carrying too many apples at once.

This emotional processing, or eating of the apple, can happen in many different ways. Some of my emotions I process during yoga, sometimes it’s with meditation, sometimes I process on my walk with my dog, some things need to be processed by journaling, and some I need to process out loud by talking to someone I trust or getting coaching or therapy. 

Sometimes I just need to cry it out, which is why my partner and I have an emotional safeword so that he knows it’s just emotional processing and nothing to worry about. I call them “onderdonk tears” - don’t ask me why. Maybe because it’s silly.

It’s important to have many different processing strategies, because not all situations and not all emotions need the same method of eating that apple (which is why we have so many different methodologies and strategies in the Creating Calm app).

It is important to make time to eat the apple.

This is the missing piece of the puzzle for myself and a lot of the other highly sensitive people I work with. It’s not about feeling your big emotions all the time, or always shutting them down and numbing out. Like so many things in life, it’s about finding the balance, choosing your moment, and working with your true nature, rather than have it work against you.

My question to you is, how many apples are you carrying right now and which ones are you ready to process and let go of?