Thursday, April 24, 2014

HSPs: Creativity and Anxiety

When it comes to increasing our happiness, there are so many things that we can do. We all know the theories. But how do we choose among all the areas that we can possibly work on? Where do we begin? In my search for a directed way, I pick up The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky and leaf through its pages, guessing which happiness activities would be recommended for me to start with. 

I am pretty sure letting go of over-thinking - what Lyubomirsky calls rumination - will be one of the top ones. My mind seems locked in one place, playing its never-ending loop. 

But the test reveals that this is not an area I should focus on right now. Among other things, the right happiness fit for me is working to increase "flow" experiences. These are the kind of experiences where you would get so absorbed in an activity that hours could pass by without you noticing. 

As I think about this, it occurs to me that what I've been asked to work on is something that would also alleviate my over-thinking. But there's a subtle distinction in emphasis. Over-thinking is a by-product of a vacuum. 

Not being engaged creates dissatisfaction and breeds the damp environment where thoughts fly like mosquitoes.  

So how do we get into this flow, instead of stagnating? Lyubomirsky says that finding such experiences is essentially about finding the right space between boredom and anxiety. If an activity is not challenging enough, we will get bored. 

If it is beyond our level of expertise, it will cause overwhelm and anxiety. But if we have enough skill to practice it, we can engage and learn. The practice itself is the goal. It is intrinsically rewarding. We love doing it.  

One way to get into a flow state is to focus our attention. Lyubomirsky quotes William James who once wrote, "My experience is what I agree to attend to." Lyubomirsky says: "This is a revolutionary thought. What you notice and what you pay attention to is your experience; it is your life. There's only so much attention that you have to go around, so where and how you choose to invest it is critical. To enter the state of flow, attention needs to be directed fully to the task at hand." 

So, when you are intensely absorbed in something, you are basically directing your attention to the task (for example: Painting). You are not thinking about any moment in the future - what you want to have for dinner, the meeting you have next week. You belong to the moment.        


Lyubomirsky asks us to learn for ourselves what brings flow and engagement to our lives. Like many adults, you might think that you would always prefer leisure over work. But Lyubomirsky points out that for many of us, work brings an experience of efficacy and self-mastery while undirected leisure activities, like watching T.V., can cause boredom after a certain point. 

So, when we are thinking about flow, we need to question our level of awareness. It could be true that our work provides us with few opportunities for flow. But it could also be true that the kind of play we are engaging in does not create good feelings. 

Once we have understood what activities help us flow, we can start asking other questions. If you are an HSP who is prone to anxiety and over-thinking, some experimentation might be in order. What is the root cause of your over-thinking? 

Could it be an absence of a creative outlet? Is your empty mind filling up with unneeded thoughts. Could you direct your attention elsewhere? 

For those of us struggling to channel our sensitivity into the world, maybe we've got cause and effect mixed up. Maybe we are not "not creating" because we are anxious. Maybe the truth is that we are anxious because we are not practicing our creativity. 

Listen to this post!

Friday, April 18, 2014

Recovering Intuition

"Compliance causes a shocking realization that must be registered by all women. That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear."                                                                                                            - Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

What does "wild" mean to you? Does it only mean crazy, irresponsible? What does "nice" mean? Does it only mean good? In the fierce "Women who run with the wolves,"Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes invites us to take a journey into the wild with her - a journey back to our instinctual selves, that self which knows what is good for us and doesn't keep falling in the traps in the forest.


Most women have felt these traps as they've walked on the forest floor. It's only once we've snagged ourselves - cut ourselves, our values, bits of ourselves - that we start to give up our naivete.

How did we lose our ability to make our way through the forest? Where is that inner voice that tells us which turn to take, when to stop, how to spot traps? Dr Estes tells us that we may never have learnt to bond with this inner voice. She tells us of the "too-good" mother in the psyche. As a little girl growing up, you needed this sweet, maternal voice. The voice that said, "Go only this far." "Be safe." "Be careful." But once you grew up, you needed to be initiated into the ways of the wild. You needed a stronger, fiercer mother whose femininity extended beyond nurturing and hovering over the little one.

Dr Estes says, "Many women are stuck halfway through this initiation process - sort of hanging half in and half out of the hoop. Although there is a natural predator in the psyche, one who says, "Die!" and "Bah!" and "Why don't you give up?" on a rather automatic basis, the culture in which a woman lives, and the family in which she was raised, can painfully exacerbate that natural but moderate nay-saying aspect in the psyche."
   
If the "too-good mother" still lives on in you, you might be scared of taking risks, of going on your quest into the forest. The perimeters of your world will be small, closed. Your work is to dissolve this inner, too-nice voice. It could also be that you have never known this voice, and in your hunger for knowing it, you haven't looked around you and seen that the landscape has changed. What you need now is a different kind of encouragement, a voice that tells you: "I believe that you are capable of making good decisions."

If this kind of initiation process, a mother or motherly figure telling you that you can trust your intuition, is missing in your life, what can you do? Is your intuition irrevocably broken? Not so, says Dr Estes: "The breaking of the bond between a woman and her wildish intuition is often misunderstood as the intuition itself being broken. This is not the fact. It is not intuition which is broken, but rather the matrilineal blessing on intuition, the handing down of intuitive reliance between a woman and all females of her lines who have gone before her - it is that long river of women that has been dammed."

If you are such a woman, as a result, your grasp on your own intuitive knowing may be weak. But by exercising your intuition, you can strengthen and ultimately fully recover your intuitive gifts. Dr Estes asks: "What does one feed the intuition so that it is consistently nourished and responsive to our requests to scan our environs? One feeds it life - one feeds it life by listening to it. What good is a voice without an ear to receive it?"

You might have been that woman who only realized after the fact that you "should have" listened to your intuition. You sensed that something was wrong, but went along because you wanted to be nice. Now, when you sense something, follow that feeling. What makes you uncomfortable? What makes you feel right? What arouses your curiosity? Follow that soul voice and cook up your ideas. They will take you back home. 

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Being an HSP Writer

Putting myself out there hasn’t been easy for me. When I started this blog, I was scared of criticism, scared of making mistakes. One of my weaknesses is over-thinking, so I tried to control the future with my mind. 

But after I decided to just do it and see what happens, I have sometimes easily and sometimes, just about hobbled through writing this blog.


As a writer, the constant tension has been between my nature, which is very reserved, and the fact that I write from a very personal space. This tension paralyzed me in the past. What’s different this time is that I realize that I need to hold this tension inside and use it to refine how I express myself in my writing.

As an HSP, I care about how my writing affects the people in my life and their privacy. Every personal experience is not grist for the mill. Before I started this blog, I consciously decided that I wouldn’t write about close family and friends. I have mostly kept to that promise, except that I have written about my husband quite a bit (hopefully in the positive light that he deserves).

One thing that I have learnt from this constant push and pull as well as a few mistakes is that the best test for deciding whether to write about something personal is this: Does it take more courage to write about it or to say it out loud in my own life? Writing is not a space to confront what we should confront personally. And yet, there are certain personal truths that we need to say out loud.

If you are an HSP writer, it is important to learn to discriminate between these two. You won’t find writing pleasurable if you find that it’s creating disharmony in your life. But you will not find it useful if you hold back from saying the truths that give your writing meaning.  

Sometimes, even when these truths involve just us, we often hesitate to say them. For me, hanging in the background is the specter of that age-old Indian refrain: What will people think? When I wrote about washing dishes here at home in America, it felt like a minor risk. Washing dishes is lowly work in India. When I wrote about not wanting to sing the Ganesh aarti (prayer), a prayer that countless Indians know by heart, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Even though I knew that a prayer that says that God can confer the gift of a son (not a daughter) to a so-called “barren” woman is crafted by mere human beings, not God. 

The voices in my head said: “Keep quiet. Be obedient.” Keeping quiet and being good felt like the same thing. Maybe as you write, the voices in your head will scream in a similar way. But if we were to go behind these voices, strip them down, we see that what they are really saying is: Shame on you for airing the skeletons in the closet. We would have liked you better if you had kept quiet.

Yes, they probably would have liked us better. But when we keep quiet and implicitly agree, we start forgetting what we truly believe in. Exercising our voice is about preserving our own integrity, instead of bleeding into someone else’s values.

Once you begin your own journey as an HSP writer, you will find that you have many more such questions and tensions to be resolved. One of my other questions was: “What if I write something today, and then I stop believing it later on?” How could I be consistent? And then, I found my answer in a quote by Mahatma Gandhi in which he says that in his search for the truth, he was free to change his mind anytime. He didn’t aim for consistency in his search. This comforted me. I was asking the wrong question. I could write from my present understanding. I didn’t have to preserve outer appearances.  

This was an important question for me to answer. As HSPs, we become suspended when we feel that we don’t have the right answers. We are loathe to make mistakes, and when we are scared or doubtful, we are likely to freeze. So, whatever questions you have, it is important that you take the time to address them, and move forward knowing that you can find answers to any other questions that may come up in the future. 

I am just at the beginning of my journey. New doubts, new fears keep on coming up. I have to remind myself that what feels overwhelming today will get easier as I learn to tackle it. As sensitive people, we can over-exaggerate the feelings of overwhelm by focusing on our fears. The key is to shift the focus to the present, to just do the next small thing. Gradually, it brings us to a place where we have greater mastery and increased confidence to do bigger things. 

Sunday, April 6, 2014

HSPs: Giving, Not Overgiving

Are you someone who gives a lot to other people? You accommodate, you give without thinking what’s in it for you. Maybe you are an HSP or empath who identifies so much with other people’s feelings that you take on their pain. Giving and compassion are your primary values.

But sometimes, you wish that they weren’t. This thing – this thinking about others first, putting them before you – can leave you feeling depleted. On one hand, you want to give. This is who you are. On the other hand, you feel trapped. You realize that it often works against you.

In my corporate career in India, I made all the mistakes that go along with giving in a way that harms you, instead of propelling you forward. I am empathetic, so I expressed that. But I also played too nice and gave to colleagues in a setting and culture where it was each one for themselves. Looking back, I feel that I wasted precious years. I gave in a way that made me vulnerable to people who were blatant takers. I used up my energy in helping other people fulfill their own agendas.

Maybe you’ve done this too. You can’t seem to give in a way that actually feels good. Is it possible to change? Won’t not giving make you feel inauthentic?

For someone who is both an empath and an individualist, this tension between being good to others while staying true to myself has been ever-present. Fortunately, I am finding answers now. In his hugely comforting book, Give and Take, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant introduces us to a concept that can help natural Givers shift to giving in a way that empowers them instead of depleting them.

Grant talks about becoming an “Otherish Giver.” Otherish Givers are people who value giving, and who also value making an impact, and so want to use their time in a way that promotes that objective. In that sense, they actually have a strong sense of self. They are not “selfless." 

Research says that Otherish Givers contribute more than purely selfless givers. Their giving is directed, not scattered and they get energy from seeing the impact that they are making. This spurs them on to making bigger contributions. They don’t crash and burn like selfless givers. 

While reading Grant’s book, I realize that we need to strip the common belief that the self is always wrong. For people who have the capacity to be caring and compassionate, the self is exactly what needs to be expressed.  

Grant also emphasizes that givers need to guard against the Takers and Fake Givers of the world. Most givers learn how to do this through hard experience and trial and error. But once they have learnt to differentiate, Givers need to give up their naivete and move from a place of understanding that everyone does not operate like they do.

Becoming more discriminating, more otherish is possible. To do this, what we need to do is expand our definition of what we can and cannot change in ourselves. If we are too attached to simply being nice to everyone, we’ll fail to see when our giving becomes ineffectual.  

If you are a selfless giver who has a fixed mindset, you might think to yourself: I just can’t do this. This is who I am. Then, the real question to ask is: Are you giving because of an underlying value or because it is a compulsive habit? Are you giving because you are too attached to other people thinking well of you?

Adopting what psychologists call a growth mindset can make you more otherish and more productive. Having a growth mindset simply means that you believe that you can change aspects of yourself that are not working and that are coming in the way of your higher values.

By becoming more mindful of who you give to and when, you will be able to translate the best of who you are into the real world instead of letting your energy be used up by whoever wants it first.