The Healthy Sensitive's Podcast

Pacing Our Creativity

If you want to run a marathon, you can't do it by sprinting all 26.2 miles of it. You need to know how to pace yourself. You need to know when you can push, and when you need to dial back. You need to know when you have to stop at the rest table and get a sip of water, and when you can push past them and get to the next rest stop. 

It turns out the same applies to our work. Even (perhaps especially) our capital "W" work. Our passion project. Our practice. Our dharma.  Highly sensitive people are a creative lot. They are tremendously productive. The trouble is that we sometimes allow our enthusiasm to override our need to recharge. We take on more than we should because we WANT so badly to do it all. Be it all. Help all the people. Write all the books. 

In this episode, I'll discuss the importance of learning how to pace ourselves - even in the things we love most. Or, rather, I'll share my challenges with it and invite you to propose solutions should you have them.

Walk That Talk - Conversation with Katie Hodges

So often when we see people going off and daring greatly...we only see the fruits of their labor LOOOONG after they are a big success. We don't see the long process it took to get there. We don't see the trials and errors. In this episode, Katie Hodges (an entrepreneur, coach, mother, and bold leader in her community) jumps on the podcast with me to talk about living a creative life, being brave, and most importantly...being willing to be vulnerable and messy in the service of building something new. She's my she-ro and I feel tremendously grateful to have had her on the show. I hope you enjoy our goofy, messy and very real conversation. 

Making Failure a Practice

I'm all about supporting my fellow HSP's and Introverts who want to live BIG...live their BEST lives (the trick being finding a way to do it that doesn't drive your health to the pavement). But there is one complication that needs discussion: failure. As in...what if I put myself out there and fail? 

Avoiding failure doesn't really seem like a viable option. Any time you take a risk, you're going to experience failure AT SOME POINT. Most people understand this. But HSP's tend to have a particularly hard time with failure and criticism. 

So what is to be done about it? How can we take risks without getting pummeled? 

In this podcast I won't talk about avoiding failure...instead, I'll talk about how to fail better. This is a conversation about changing our relationship with failure so that we stop being afraid to fail, and instead embrace it as a necessary step toward success.

Discipline, Independence and Detachment

Resolutions. Goals. Achievements. Dreams. 

It's lovely to talk about them and imagine what it might be like to bring them to life. But what does it really take to make it happen? And what if you work and toil only to discover that the goals you put in motion don't manifest the way you thought they would? Or what if they don't provide the joy you thought they would? 

In this episode I'll talk about how discipline can lead, counter-intuitively to freedom; and how the best way to achieve a dream may be to completely detach from it. 

Goals

It's not only a new year, but a whole new decade...not to mention an election year. It seems like a great opportunity to try new challenges. There is just one problem...did you know that 80 percent of people who have New Years fail to maintain them by February of that same year? 

Sooo...what is that other 20 percent doing differently? How might you learn from their success? 

Come and find out!

Christmas

Many highly sensitive people report feeling ambivalent during the Christmas holiday. This is true regardless of whether one actually celebrates it. It makes sense. It's an awful lot of sensory overload. Music and lights and traffic and shopping extravaganzas. It can feel a bit much. In this episode, I fess up to my personal ambivalence about Christmas. I also speak to the history of Christmas. You might be interested to know that celebrating in over-the-top ways has been a things for years. As in...hundreds of years. Long before we were celebrating as "Christmas." If you are looking to find a way to possibly strike a truce with this famous (infamous?) holiday, join me!

Loneliness

Everywhere you turn, now, people are talking about "loneliness." Not only is it a problem...apparently it's a full blown epidemic! 

In this episode I'll talk in more detail about what loneliness actually is. I'll discuss how it relates to our health and longevity. I'll talk about how this relates to HSP's in particular. Finally, I'll talk about some of the things I have tried, personally, to reduce the sensation of loneliness when it arises (as well as the research that backs up its efficacy). 

The Shadow Side of Sensitivity

You've probably heard it at least once: "You're too sensitive." 

Can one actually be too sensitive? 

In this episode, I discuss some of the shadow traits of many people with sensory processing sensitivity. I talk about why those traits are so common with HSP's and what we can do to offset some of those less desirable characteristics and make improvements on how we navigate the world. 

Emotions

We all know the story. In our brains, we are constantly fighting between our emotions and our rationality. It's why we find instant gratification so alluring (our emotional brain is trying to win out). It's why we are enamored with characters like Spock (he's beaten out his emotions). But what if we are wrong? What if everything we thought was true about emotions and the way we express them are ...false? What would this mean for research on highly sensitive people? In this episode, we'll talk about Lisa Feldman Barrett's research and her book "How Emotions are Made." We'll talk about what that means for highly sensitive people (both with respect to how we interpret our own emotions as well as how we interpret the emotions of others.)

Labels

Who are you? 

That's a question that has been plaguing philosophers for years (and one that still pulls at us even now). In this episode, I talk about the kinds of labels we use to describe ourselves (gender, race, class). I invite listeners to gently challenge the idea that any label can fully encapsulate what it means to be you. This is even true for the label of "highly sensitive person." Use labels only so long as they are useful...and be willing to hold them very lightly.