Powering through Panic

I am standing in the bathroom of a Fortune 500 company hyperventilating, my body buzzing like I’d just downed ten Redbulls, my brain threatening to shut down in preparation for a full blown panic attack. I have no idea how I’m going to get myself out of here in shape enough to teach a presentation skills class to 15 salespeople (all male as it happens) who may be a bit antagonistic toward me I’ve been forewarned, as they see their required attendance in my class as an affront. A big ego blow when speaking is your primary career currency!

The audience was not new to me. I’d successfully handled at least 80 such groups (the uber unreceptive variety) over the previous ten years, and yet, before every such class I felt like my insides were being electrocuted. So what did I do? What I always did: Told myself that every time I walked into that room to teach in spite of my panic, I was winning a huge battle. I was proving wrong, every person...

Okay, so you’re a Highly Sensitive Person..now what??

By way of recap, here are a few of my own take-aways from The Weight of Mortal Skin post:

• If you’ve always felt especially sensitive to stimuli, get overwhelmed easily and/or experience things very intensely, then you could be a Highly Sensitive Person.
• There is no shame in being Highly Sensitive! This is a real, researched condition with very real psychological, emotional and physical manifestations, and there are an estimated 20% of us out there.
• When you’re a Highly Sensitive Person, you are more susceptible to things like anxiety, depression, and PTSD, so self-care is especially important.

If any of that resonated for you, or you were already aware of your HSP status and are looking for ways of making the day to day of high sensitivity a little more manageable, these are a few things I’ve come up with for myself as a starting point of sorts: Simplify, Soften, Slow Down.

Simplify

First, simplify what...