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

Ep. 174 Why Sensitivity Isn’t Your Problem—It’s Your Superpower (If You Learn to Use It)

• MJ Murray Vachon LCSW • Season 4 • Episode 174

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Do you ever feel so overstimulated in public that your mind blanks out—even during important moments?

This kind of emotional and sensory intensity is a normal part of being a highly sensitive person.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  1. Easy, science-backed coping skills to reset your overwhelmed nervous system
  2. How to manage overstimulation in emotionally charged midlife events
  3. Ways to turn your high sensitivity into a superpower without burning out

🎧 Take a few minutes to learn practical coping skills for midlife anxiety—you’re worth it.


🔗 Links & Resources

Rebecca Hunter, MSW
• Website: rebeccahuntermsw.com
• Podcast: takeouttherapy.com

Dr. Elaine Aron, Ph.D.
• hsperson.com

Sensitive: The Untold Story
• Official Website: sensitivethemovie.com
• Watch on Amazon Prime Video
• Watch on YouTube

Send us a text




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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.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

In this episode, you'll discover coping skills for highly sensitive people. 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. Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we explored what it means to be a highly sensitive person with HSP expert, Rebecca Hunter. Today Rebecca is joining me again for a powerful follow-up conversation. We want you to step into the superpower of who you are and really understand this temperament let's start with a quick check-in from Monday's Inner Challenge. I invited you to take the HSP quiz by Dr. Elaine Aaron for yourself, or perhaps for one of your children that you have an inkling might be a highly sensitive child. if you did. how did it go? Did anything surprise? You? Did some puzzle pieces about that question. Who am I begin to fall into place in a new and enlightened way? Whether you have known that you're highly sensitive for years or you're just discovering it this week, today's episode is gonna give you some concrete coping skills so you can feel more calm and capable. I wanna begin by saying thanks for coming back to creating midlife calm, and Rebecca, would you just reintroduce yourself and give us a recap of what it means to be a highly sensitive person?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Absolutely. I'm happy to be here again. I'm Rebecca Hunter. I'm a therapist. I've been in private practice for 15 years. I specialize in anxiety and I work with lots and lots of people who consider themselves to be highly sensitive people. 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. Absolutely. And also a lot.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I wanna begin with a clinical story that I had this week in my office. I had a midlife dad who went to his son's college graduation, and his son received the highest award at the graduation, and the midlife dad missed it all. He was pretty overwhelmed by the circus of the graduation. He knew his son was up for the award and he was really worried about what it would be like for his son if he didn't win it. When his son's name got called. He blanked out. He didn't faint, but his mind was so overwhelmed that. It took his wife 45 seconds later to shake him and say, are you okay that is a very common experience. Different place, maybe different gender, different age, and as a clinician, if you were gonna help that man get ready for that event where he could have been present, what would you have encouraged him to do?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

That is a really common experience and think of all the things that were going on at that graduation. Most graduations are outside, we have voices, from. 360. All the colors, maybe some wind and weather. It's so much. What I would help him with first is to learn to reset his sensory system more often. The difference between a highly sensitive person and someone who's not as sensitive is the highly sensitive person is like, oh, there's a tree. Oh, there's a leaf. Oh, there's a branch. Oh, that person's talking. Oh look, there's a blinking light. Highly sensitive people need to learn to take breaks. It means eyes close, brain off, taking in the world differently and just giving your system a break. And actually there's ways to take those breaks right in the middle of life and all of the things that are happening.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I like the word reset. Be super practical. He's in the middle of this. He knows he has to reset. What would that look like?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

What it would look like is him being willing to close his eyes to give his eyeballs connected to the brain. A little break. What it would look like is him taking some deep breaths, which, a lot of people are like, come on. Everybody's always saying, take a deep breath, blah, blah, blah. Here's the thing. Highly sensitive people, they take in so much input that their nervous system gets jacked up and they don't know it's happening. When you describe the experience of your client, he went into fight or flight. He was completely in his natural state of the body's I'm not gonna be able to take all this in. So we're just gonna shut it all down for a hot second. Listen, if we don't run the body. The body will run us. If we don't run our minds and exercise discipline, they will run our lives. I would very simply say the reset looks like, come on back in to yourself and the air that you breathe, and feel your butt in the seat and place your attention on your big toe of your right foot. Just come on in. See what's happening in your body and work with that. But most people just ignore it. And try to push through. And that does not work with highly sensitive people at all

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

because then they could end up like this man who went to his doctor. And had all these tests because he actually thought he had blacked out. Then they were saying to him, this is all in your head. And he ends up in my office and I do have him take Elaine Aaron's test and he scored super high. And all of a sudden it was like, I've missed so many important things in my life. And isn't it amazing that your reset, it's that easy.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Most people think it has to be more complicated and that doesn't work for me. And all these really limiting thoughts before they even give it a shot. It takes 10 practices. To get that down.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

And is the big toe significant or can you focus on something else?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

No, you just play with your attention. Where am I policing my attention? Is my tension outside of me or with me? When we are a highly sensitive person, we tend to be really good at taking care of other people, not so much nurturing within. It's about stepping into a different relationship with oneself, don't you think?

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I think that is so well said. Especially because anyone in midlife. Did not have this information growing up. Children who are deeply feeling kids, as Dr. Becky calls them. Tend to have really intense emotions. My daughter is a deeply feeling kid, and the day before she left for college, she literally was laying on the kitchen floor crying. And she said to me. I wished you had told me that childhood would pass so quickly, I would've savored it all. Beautiful. I thought what 18-year-old even thinks in that way? A deeply feeling kid. A highly sensitive person because they actually see in 360 Yes. It's awesome. It's, they see in 360 and she had a good cry. She felt good at the end of it, I felt very validated. Look at you. I am so pleased that you wanna savor your childhood. That's gone by too fast. And then she went on with her life. Yeah. But if I didn't have the education I'd had, I might've said to her get up off that floor. What Are you acting like that you're 18 years old, you shouldn't be laying on the floor crying. A little bit of information is super helpful.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

We could do five. Podcast episodes, the impact of growing up as a highly sensitive person, but as an adult in midlife, what I would say is emotions are for real. They're completely acceptable and you ought to feel'em and highly sensitive. People oftentimes have learned the opposite. I'm too much. I've got too much motion. I'm too sensitive. So they shut it all down? I would say that's the kind of longer term thing that you and I are probably working in our offices to help people with is yeah, you have to express emotion. There's all kinds of ways to express our emotion and we can learn all the different ways.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Often that intense emotion, which isn't understood or put in context leads to people saying things that create a lot of shame.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Yes.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

They're often. Managing their shame more than they're managing their brain. Given that most midlife people who are HSPs, I think have been shamed a lot. About who they biologically are. Listen to the first episode. This isn't just some idea that Rebecca and I put together. This is a highly researched, temperament type based in biology. How do you help people who come to you who are very shame-based about the nature of their brain?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I think education is key and like you said beautifully sometimes that's a one session deal. Sometimes people come in and they're like, I'm so messed up, and here's all the reasons why. And then we educate them and we're like, actually, friend, you're not really messed up, but your brain just works different. So can we work with that? I help'em understand themselves and come from there. We are not in the business of helping people fix themselves. We are in the business of helping people know themselves and work with themselves. I teach people to work with how they are to make a lot of room for that because it's real.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Have you seen the documentary Sensitive?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Yes,

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

if you're someone who is HSP or this podcast is making you wonder, take the time to watch that and I'll link it in the show notes. Because it has lots of dimensions. It's a father, it's a child, and it's a lot of the tension that occurs in homes of people. Yes. When there isn't this understanding. Of this temperament.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Absolutely. You and I just happen to be lucky because we have the information. I also have a highly sensitive kid, and you're right, it's the first thing that we have to do to heal is to validate our experience, and that movie was very validating.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

My last question is if someone's listening and they're just discovering like, oh, this sounds like me, or This sounds like my child, what's the one thing that you would want them to do to really feel more calm and more in control of this really unique temperament?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

What I work with every person, highly sensitive people included, is what are you doing with your emotions? How is your relationship with yourself going? And are you able to be present in life? Not present on your computer, but present.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

One of the tricky parts for people who are highly sensitive is that their emotions are so intense, they're very hard to hold.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

Yep.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

How do you help people build up the stamina to hold these intense emotions?

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I think it's all about understanding the connection between the brain and the nervous system and the body, and we absolutely have to start there because we can do a lot of regulation before we do a bunch of thinking. where it gets a little tricky is when the brain kicks in because then we start thinking about the emotion and we start making meaning of how we're feeling. It's really important for people to understand that to not have emotion controlling your life, you need to learn to regulate from your body first. Because if you don't, you'll have an emotion and your brain will take over and you are so far down the path that you don't even know it, having the ability to do the little resets that I talked about, and also practice some boundaries around your mind activity. That takes a little bit of time to learn, but the thinking is what gets us in trouble, doesn't it?

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Yes. It's really well said. Emotions are physical sensations. Most people think they're thoughts. But they're physical sensations that manifest themselves in an emotion that lead to a thought. So the disruptor is to ground your body. Do breath work. I call it notice. Oh God, here it comes. Name I feel it. Where is it at? It's on my body and tame. And you tame through breath, work, notice name, tame. When someone is highly sensitive, it happens fast and it happens intensely. That's why the brain loves to take over.

Rebecca Hunter MSW:

I want everybody to understand who's listening that's identifying with this material to understand that they have so much power. We have control over what we bring in a lot of times, and for highly sensitive people, they don't have a ton of control over all the inputs. You're gonna see the blinking light. You're gonna smell the weird smell first, I promise. But you have control over those inputs and the news, people like to know what's going on, but there's lots of ways to get the news that aren't gonna jack up your nervous system. I would say be empowered over what is coming in and care for yourself as a human being. Because the container can only hold so much friend. It can't hold everything.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

That's really well said. The one thing we haven't said. It's people who have this temperament tend to also have the IT factor. They have a charisma that tends to be incredibly important in family, incredibly important in work. They often are super connectors and they notice things about people that other people don't notice that are positive and special. They make amazing managers, they make amazing teachers because of that. They make amazing therapists because of that. But if you don't modulate. The amazing gets overwhelmed and the sparkle doesn't come out. I want to also end, if you're listening to this, working with a therapist that knows about this temperament is essential. Over the years, I've had many clients come and they've worked with really good therapists and made good progress, but this wasn't integrated. And it's one simple question that you can ask a therapist, and that is, do you have a background in HSPs? I will put Rebecca's online coaching practice. She's an expert in this temperament. I will also put her podcast, which I really like. I actually listen to it to get ideas and to just. Not feel so alone in this little podcast world of ours called takeout therapy. I wanna thank you. What we looked at in this episode today how did come to terms with your highly sensitive personality by having some super simple coping skills that are free and that you can use. Anywhere. And in doing that, you really step into your superpower that is unique to each person, but also includes a lot of sparkle. Maybe it's highly sparkly person would be a better way to end this podcast. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.