how to unhook your energy (for empaths/hsp)
I’m writing this in the middle of Gemini season, a season that asks us, "Who do we need to connect with to get where we want to go?" A type of energy that supports the sharing of ideas and opinions in order to reach our goals. It’s a social energy that knows the power of togetherness and teamwork. This year, though, the person we most need to connect with is ourselves. Here are a few things I’ve been doing to disconnect to reconnect with myself, and create space to hear myself outside of the noise of others/the collective mindset. Tips and tools that might also help you if you are also highly sensitive.
Nourishing the Nervous System
When it comes to disconnecting, we need to first know that it is safe for us to not be present. For most empaths and highly sensitive people, this requires work to nourish our nervous system because of the trauma our bodies carry when it comes to prioritizing others. For me, this required me to stop drinking coffee and start running. Coffee is a stimulant that keeps our nervous system on edge, and exercise is known to calm it.
Our nervous system is responsible for our fight or flight response. It controls whether we react or respond to an external stimulus when triggered. When it comes to our goals, it’s that reaction or response that either pulls us off course or keeps us on track with what we want. When it comes to wanting to disconnect from others to be able to hear myself, I couldn’t be so reactive.
Having a healthy nervous system is what allows me to not fall into more codependent reactions of feeling overly responsible for things, like worrying that if I don’t check my email I might miss a message and that if I miss a message something bad might happen. While we know that not answering an email isn’t life or death, when we have trauma around other people's needs and being present to other people's needs, that trauma sits in our bodies and our nervous systems, making us feel that it is. Until we have a nervous system capable of staying calm and steady when triggered, it’s very hard for us to disengage because the worry of something bad happening keeps us in a defensive mode, acting (reacting) in ways that feel protective, like checking the email to ensure that all is well. The act of checking the email is a reaction, and being able to stay logged out is a response. The difference between the two is a healthy nervous system that allows us to stay disengaged because it knows that everything is fine.
Creating a Buffer
The next thing I needed to implement was a buffer. As an entrepreneur with a blog and podcast, a large part of my business model requires me to be connected with the community I support. While I love this aspect of this work, in times like this when I’m being called within, it’s important to implement stronger boundaries. A buffer is someone or something that cushions you from the external world, not because you don't want to know what's going on but because your wellbeing and the quality of your work require you to be focused in a different direction. This person is in my business five days a week, on emails and any access points, which has been incredibly helpful in allowing me to disengage. It's really nice to have someone I know taking care of things within my business so that I can disconnect and focus my energy elsewhere.
A magical place we found on our walk this week!
Protection
Another thing I've been doing is making my protection proactive by including it in my morning routine. I start every morning by spraying myself down with a protection spray that includes black onyx and Celtic sea salt, as well as rolling on lavender essential oil from a local lavender farm. The lavender helps to keep my nervous system calm (protecting me from reactions), and the protection spray is for protecting my mental plane. As someone highly sensitive to other people’s thoughts, it’s important I protect myself this way to ensure I’m not pulled to do something just because someone outside of me is thinking about something they need. For example, my partner thinking about dinner and being hungry. When not protected, I can sense that and feel pulled to head to the grocery store or make dinner, even if that doesn’t align with my goals.
Related: If sensitivity to others is impacting your ability to reach your goals, we cover this and more inside of the Empowered Empath Journaling Course.
Detaching from Old Narratives
We stay tuned into the collective and collective narratives with the questions we ask (or don’t ask), and if we want to exit out of the collective to honor ourselves, we need to be asking higher-level questions. Part of my desire to disconnect lately is to remember who I am outside of the work that I do. I’m in a season of wanting to learn about the person behind the work, and something I’ve noticed is that as I’ve grown a team to support me, the need for me inside of my business has gone down to about three days a week. While this is what I want so that I can focus on different projects and new hobbies, I noticed that the more I outsourced and freed up space, the more I unconsciously felt like I needed to fill my days. I didn’t need to work so much, but I was finding reasons to work. So I had to ask, Where is this coming from? A lot of it is our industrial conditioning around the "5-day work week," and because I've had that programming growing up and seeing that was the norm, my subconscious mind was super creative in making sure that my days were filled with unnecessary "work" as a way of playing that programming out.
To detach, I needed to ask why I felt I needed to work five days a week. Where did that thought process come from? By asking that question, I started to be able to break free of it, because once we know why we're rooted to something, we can figure out where we need to cut the connection.
Setting Time Boundaries
Because being connected to the collective is related to my work and so much of my personal life is weaved throughout what I do, it can be blurry at times to know what is work and what is not. To disconnect and focus my energy on myself, I’ve started using time to differentiate different areas of my life. Time is a structure that can be an effective boundary when it comes to how we spend our days, and something as simple as using the stopwatch on my phone to tell myself "this is work" and "this isn’t" has really helped me to create those mental boundaries. The action of clicking and stopping the time tells me I am no longer working; having to go into your phone and physically click your stopwatch on or off tells your brain that you're on or off. All of a sudden, instead of feeling like I'm always "on" or working all of the time, I’m in control of my days and able to mentally, emotionally, and physically disconnect when I don’t want to be engaged.
I hope this has given you a few thoughts to think about in terms of your own life and disconnecting from others to remember yourself. I dive deeper into these and more on the Empath Podcast. You can listen to the full episode here or find it by searching for episode 54 on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you like to listen.
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Robin
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Hi! I'm Robin —
The diarist behind the Diary of an Empath and creator of Empaths in Business, a six week course teaching empaths how to turn their work into a business that works, with strategy, healing and support.
