Creating Midlife Calm: Coping Skills for Stress & Anxiety in Family, Work & Relationships

Ep. 173 Why Understanding Your High Sensitivity Is Essential To Reduce Anxiety & Overwhelm In Midlife

• MJ Murray Vachon • Season 4 • Episode 173

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Do you walk into a room and immediately feel what others are feeling—even when no one says a word?
You’re not imagining it—and you’re definitely not alone.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    How understanding your highly sensitive temperament instantly reduces          anxiety
2.    Why high sensitivity is not the same as weakness or drama
3.    How the ability to “read a room” can create emotional overload and anxiety
 Listen to understand your sensitivity and ease midlife anxiety—you’re worth it. 


Links & Resources
Special thanks to Rebecca Hunter, MSW for guesting on Creating Midlife Calm
• Website: www.takeouttherapy.com
• Podcast: takeouttherapy.com
Learn more about high sensitivity & take her quizes from Dr. Elaine Aron, Ph.D.
• hsperson.com
Sensitive: The Untold Story
• Official Website: sensitivethemovie.com
• Watch on Amazon Prime Video
• Watch on YouTube


YouTube | YouTube Movies

Sensitive: The Untold Story 



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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW:

In this episode, you'll discover how to manage your high sensitivity and reduce your anxiety. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Welcome to the podcast. Are you a highly sensitive person? Maybe your partner is, or perhaps you're raising what Dr. Becky Kennedy calls a deeply feeling kid, someone with a beautifully attuned and responsive nature. In my 40 years as a therapist, I've seen how often high sensitivity is misunderstood or mislabeled, but when it's recognized and supported, this temperament reveals remarkable gifts like empathy, creative insight, and the ability to pick up on what most of the other people in the world miss. Today I'm joined by Rebecca Hunter, a therapist and host of a great podcast called Takeout Therapy. She specializes in helping highly sensitive people, embrace their sensitivity, not as a weakness, but as a superpower that can really help them thrive. By the end of today's episode, you'll discover what it means to be a highly sensitive person, why your nervous system may react more intensely to the world around you, and how your sensitivity can be your strength, especially in the stress of midlife. Rebecca, I am so excited to have you on this podcast, and I wanna begin by asking you to introduce yourself to our listeners today.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Thank you so much for having me. I really am excited to be here and talk about a subject that I'm pretty passionate about. I work with people who are considered highly sensitive people in my private practice, I have a lot of fun in my career educating people about mental health and the things that we should have learned in middle school that would've helped us out today.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I wanna begin with the basics. Can you explain to our listeners what it means when we say highly sensitive person?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

When we think of sensitive people, it's a little bit cringey. We think about that person that's causing scenes and making a big deal of everything, and that's not at all what we're talking about when we talk about highly sensitive people. These people are magically perceptive. The world is a lot and highly sensitive people. See it all. They feel it all. They frankly smell it all. They are people whose senses are so heightened that life is overwhelming and they're oftentimes really in tune emotionally, which can be a gift. They can walk into a room. They read the room, they know what's up. They also can tell when someone's not okay. There is a level of perception within a highly sensitive person that's really important to understand. It's a lot of stimuli coming in. It can be a really overwhelming experience. It can be incredibly painful at times to go through the world and be able to really feel what's happening. Highly sensitive people are deeper people than most people are comfortable with. They don't often do small talk. We know from the research that 20% of the population, has this specific. Group of traits, it's a biological temperament. It's not a problem except for the whole thing I said about the stigmatizing of the word sensitive.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

This is not just some hocus pocus or words put together, this is highly researched, it's been around for three decades. Can you explain what's going on in the highly sensitive person that at times is confusing to them because they easily can be overwhelmed and at other times is really life altering to them because they can see what other people can't see. What's the biological basis for all of this?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

This is where we have to love science because we know so much more than we used to about the brain. There's two parts to their brain. They're just more active, than it is in other people. It's the amygdala and it's the insula. The amygdala is what gets us all fired up. It makes us really alert to our environment and the insula actually is the part of us that's a little bit more nuanced. The part of the brain that. Notices, emotional tone can pick up on subtle, cues, so those two parts of the brain in this subset of the population are more active. Which makes the highly sensitive person incredibly perceptive.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I often use the image that they, it's almost like they wear caps that have sensors on them and all of that stimuli is coming in.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Yes.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

That can lead to overwhelm.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Absolutely. Because everything's connected. Great. You have a brain that fires more than other people. Awesome. Except your brain is connected to your nervous system, so you also get a little bit more jacked up than other people. The nervous system responds to what's happening in the brain. Highly sensitive people are very sensitive to all of the absolutely nutty stimulation, that most of us can ignore. They notice everything they smell. Better. They hear better sometimes, depending on the situation, imagine driving through life with the volume on high at highly sensitive people can't turn it down. It's all the time. And so they have to learn to filter and they have to learn to work with their brain and their nervous system and the setup that they have in order to navigate this absolutely bananas world that we're living in.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Your Also saying it's a five sensory experience.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Yes. One of the most healing aspects of the work that we can do is to teach people to pay attention to their senses. Forget what's happening in the brain, just be with life in this very directed way. Actually that's quite a gift. Highly sensitive people are really good at being mindful.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Yes. Oh, I can see that. Talk a little bit about the psychological aspect. If someone is highly sensitive, how does their psychological self unfold?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

It's really hard to be a highly sensitive person because. When you go through the world with a lot of empathy, you tend to give more of yourself to others than you give to yourself. You try to make people happy, if people are upset and you know how to maybe improve it a little, you're gonna work at that, there goes your energy and your emotional capacity, all of yourself. Oftentimes ends up in other people caring for other people, taking care of other people, being overly empathic with other people, it just flat out leads to burnout. It leads to mental exhaustion and emotional exhaustion, and these things hit. About right now, midlife?

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Yes.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

We're really talking about someone who cares so much about other people and can really feel into their experience that unfortunately they tend to absorb some of it. Not only are they walking around with all of their own perceptions and their own sensitivity and their own emotional load, they're also picking up. Little bits from other people as well. What do you think about that?

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I often say with my clients that your theme song is the question, is that my energy or their energy.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I always tell people you put on a backpack in the morning, right? Some of your parents stuff is in the backpack. We can't ignore that. Some of the things that have happened to you in your life, they get put in the backpack, they come with you wherever you go. But if you're going out in the world and you're putting all this other. Stuff from other people in your backpack, that's too heavy, man. You gotta put some stuff down.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

That's a great image. In your clinical work, what are the common. Ways that people present in the early stages of understanding this temperament of theirs,

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I specialize in anxiety. And that's what they present with. Because anxiety is. Basically a load that we're carrying that we don't know what it is, but it feels so heavy and it feels so awful. I would say that's the number one thing that people think they're coming into therapy for. Because you know as well as I do, when people come in. Their idea about what's going on isn't always the root of things, right? It's just what shows up in the mirror for them every day. It's burnout. It's I can't anymore with you people. It's resentment. When we're not able to use our filter of what's getting put in our bag, we start to get hacked off at the people in our lives and say why are you taking so much? Which then leads to disconnection that's the root of why people come in, because they don't feel connected to the people in their life, and it's really painful.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Would you say HSPs tend to feel overly connected to what's going on inside of them?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I think so, yeah. And what's happening for others? They are literally experiencing the lives of other people. You take a highly sensitive person who isn't super aware of what's up with them, and give them a teenager who's going through some high school drama. they will literally go through. All of it with emotionally, physically in their nervous system, their digestive system, like they're back in high school. It's incredibly stressful.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Yes. I often joke with my HSP clients and the two have become one. It's learning how to get some space, but it's really easy to get overwhelmed.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Absolutely.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

This is a podcast for people in midlife and they are caring a lot. From your clinical experience talk about why often HSPs feel so burdened and burnt out in midlife.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I think that. Midlife is the reckoning, isn't it? It's when we have. Just the most minute amount of mind, space and mental capacity to step back and go, what is going on here? Everything's coming to a head in our midlife, right? So when I think about midlife, I think about kids in a crucial period of their lives, it's about education, it's about their social lives, it's about their careers, we're at this point in our lives where. This journey with our kids is ending and remember graduation week? Oh my gosh. It's like there's so much going on, there's also a lot of in midlife financial stuff that comes to a head and time sensitive stressors, We're getting to this point. What are we gonna do now? So all of that combined. Makes this time of life kind of a reckoning for all of us and highly sensitive people because all the ways that they've been dealing with their life all this time, that's all sitting in that backpack. And it's now 150 pounds. I also don't wanna skip over the. Colossal impact of perimenopause and menopause on midlife women because these hormonal shifts totally amplifies all of the sensitivities that highly sensitive people already have.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

That's a really important point. I did an episode midlife and hormones. I think it's episode 140 and that made me put a sign in my office for all my clients to have their Vitamin D checked. One of my clients who's highly sensitive, her vitamin D was incredibly low. Yeah. And it, It was a physiological issue that she was. Interpreting through a psychological lens. Because she has a lot on her plate, but she also unconsciously helps herself to things on other people's plates. It's a lot to carry. I'm glad you brought that up, because midlife really is a time to try to check in with a doctor and get. Your levels on all the important hormones and vitamins because it is a backpack that people are carrying, even if they're not an HSP.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I think you bring up a really important point, people think there's something wrong with them. People think I should be able to handle the life better than this. I'm not doing a good job at this. And it, that's not the whole story.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

One of the things is when people really understand this temperament, and it's not a label, Almost within a day, their self-criticism goes down.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Yeah.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

My HSP clients walk into my office and they turn off, the overhead light because it is too stimulating for them. Prior to knowing this. They would be asking themselves, what's wrong with me? Why is this light bothering me? And they might say it to their friends and family members who would be critical of them, or tags in clothes and then they're like, oh no, if someone is a diabetic, they use insulin. Nobody's saying that's a character issue. I don't want people to think that their temperament, is a character issue.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Because they might think that they're not capable, and that is not at all the case, right? We're all super capable, but we have got to understand ourselves.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Every week on my podcast I have an inner challenge and my inner challenge this week is in the show notes. I'm going to do the link to Elaine Aaron's two tests, your Self test if you're thinking you're highly sensitive, or her quiz for children if you're parenting, or a caregiver of someone who is highly sensitive. Because knowledge is power when I work with teenagers now, who are highly sensitive, it's a whole new game compared to people who are starting to understand this in midlife. The same thing for a parent to understand how to parent a highly sensitive kid just decreases meltdowns tenfold..

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Doctor Becky is helping so much. She's such a good resource.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I want our listeners to know Dr. Becky and Elaine Aaron's are really talking about the same thing they're both incredibly helpful resources.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I'd also like to validate the listener by saying. If you're highly sensitive in midlife, you were highly sensitive as a kid. And that is a really difficult experience.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Yeah. Today on the episode, we looked at this really through a biological lens. I want you to understand what it means for your temperament. But also that there's a psychological component that you do look at the world differently. You understand and see a lot more than other people do, and sometimes that's overwhelming. But if you learn to harness it, you learn to understand it, you learn coping skills for it, then you really get to step into the magic of this temperament. Rebecca is going to join us again on Thursday. For a follow-up episode where we talk about coping skills for the highly sensitive person. Thanks for listening, and we'll both be back on Thursday with creating midlife calm.