119. Stop overthinking with Lori L. Cangilla

In this episode, we discuss overthinking with Dr. Lori Cangilla, a licensed psychologist and highly sensitive person.

Discover the Singularly Sensitive approach and learn practical strategies to release yourself from the grip of overthinking.

Tune in and embrace your sensitivity on the path to success.

Chapters

00:00 - Intro
01:53 - Lori's Life Journey
03:47 - Why Do We Celebrate Sensitivity?
04:34 - What Is a Singularly Sensitive Approach?
06:47 - Defining Overthinking
07:30 - Does Overthinking Differ for Highly Sensitive Individuals?
08:19 - How to Begin Overcoming Overthinking
10:10 - Recognizing When Overthinking Becomes Unhelpful
11:30 - Is It True? "The Speed of Your Decisions Determines the Speed of Your Success"
12:51 - Access Lori's Free Resource [Link Here]
13:52 - The Benefits of Journaling for Sensitive Individuals
15:03 - Is There a Secret to Successful Journaling?
17:25 - Embracing the Best Aspects of Being Highly Sensitive
18:20 - Lori's Final Message to Highly Sensitive Individuals
19:29 - Outro

Lori'sFree Resource: click here

Know more about Lori's work at:
www.singularlysensitive.com

Connect  on her social media account:
Instagram: @singularlysensitive

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Transcript

0:00

Hi, it's Frida Kabo. I've had some great conversations with awesome people, and I thought, why keep the conversations in the archive? I want to share them with you. So here is one of the conversations from the sensitive success summit. Enjoy. Welcome to the sensitive success podcast, where we explore the unique challenges and opportunities that comes with being a sensitive changemaker in today's world. I'm your host, Frida Kabo, and I have spent the last decade recreating my life. I moved from Sweden to New Zealand and now live in the beautiful bush with my husband and two kids, homeschooling and creating a life and business that works for me with the help of my sensitivity and support others to do the same. I'm excited to share conversations with experts, thought leaders, and fellow sensitive people who also see the world through the lens of sensitivity. Thank you so much for being here, because it means that you're creating sensitive success too, which is precisely what the world needs. Let's get started. One thing that we as sensitives are prone to is overthinking, and today we're going to dig into the subject with the expert Dr. Lori Cangilla. Lori is a licensed psychologist and an introverted, highly sensitive person. She created the singularly sensitive approach to empower bright, introspective HSPs to embrace their sensitivity and find creative, holistic, mindful ways to build lives, to Of meaning, purpose, and contentment. Her book, Wander and Delve, a journal for bright, creative, highly sensitive people four inching their way, is available to help you build your own singularly sensitive life. I'm so excited to have you here. Welcome, Laurie. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here too. So start by telling us a bit about your journey and how you come to do what you do. Yeah, so I have been sensitive my whole life and I grew up in the 70s and rural Pennsylvania in the United States. It was not a particularly friendly place to be sensitive. It wasn't very well understood and it wasn't until I encountered Dr. Elaine Aaron's work in the nineties where I really started to recognize that there wasn't something wrong with me for being sensitive. I was just built differently than the majority of people. And. My discovery of her work coincided with me being in graduate school for psychology, but it wasn't her work wasn't covered in my graduate program. And in fact, I remember talking with a professor about it, who was rather skeptical about the concept and thought, well, another 10 years, the evidence won't be there that this is actually a distinct concept. It's a form of introversion or it's a form of anxiety or something like that. And obviously, we know that that has been it. Disprove in that professor's view. And you know, certainly we know that, um, there are so many highly sensitive people. So as I've worked as a psychologist in various settings, I've just naturally been drawn to working with my highly sensitive clients. And within the last five years, I've really started to focus on seeing highly sensitive people exclusively. And so work with a lot of highly sensitive therapists, because not surprising, a lot of therapists are highly sensitive too. And it's hard to do this work as a highly sensitive person. So I have a real soft spot for therapists who are trying to hold all of this emotion while they're pretty sensitive too. Yeah. I love that. And, and yeah, it just shows that everyone needs support, no matter where we are. Yeah, definitely. A good therapist should be making use of therapy. Yeah, because then, you know, it works, right? Yeah. Great. Yeah. So this is the sensitive success sandwich. Why did you want to say yes to this and come and celebrate sensitivity with us? I really believe that. Despite all of the challenges that can come from being a highly sensitive person, there is so much good that comes from it as well. I think we are living at a time where the world needs more people who care deeply about each other, about the environment, and really want to, to build really deep. respectful communities. And so the chance to be a part of this and help to spread the word about all of the, the balance to all the things that we think of as the downsides of being highly sensitive, just was a really exciting opportunity. Right. I'm so excited that you're here and celebrate with us. I know you're passionate about this subject as well. You talk about the singularly sensitive approach. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah. So I, you know, Sort of have been reflecting on what I do with my clients over the years, and it really breaks down into three different areas that I cover. And one is to do some exploration. So doing some reflecting, thinking about how you do things, learning about yourself, moving from that exploration stage into an experimenting stage. And it's. About really trying to discover what works for you. And I keep the spirit of that very playful, very permissive. So there's no such thing as a failed experiment. There's only things that we've learned about ourselves and maybe decide we don't want to try or, or want to move forward from. And then a third phase of the work, which is doing some integration. So taking what we've learned and thinking about how do we apply that moving forward? And I focus this specifically for highly sensitive people, because I think we have that tendency to overfeel and overthink, and we can get lost in those thoughts and feelings and not figure out a way forward. So my approach is really designed to help balance the ways that our brains work and the ways that our hearts work with a desire to help people make changes in their life to really like get out and do something a little bit differently that makes their lives better. Mm hmm. Love that. So important. And yeah, such, such a powerful approach as well to experiment and really evaluate and see what, what, what do I like, but also see it as an experiment, not take it too seriously, but try different things. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I'm someone who naturally takes everything too seriously. So I think this is partly coming out of my own awareness that so many highly sensitive people, we are, um, We have a serious core to ourselves, and that's not a bad thing, but it can make change hard because we, we do get really hung up on, well, what's going to happen? Am I going to do it right the first time? Am I making the right choice? So my approach is really designed to help people learn to loosen that grip a little bit and feel freer to make changes. I love that. And yeah, one thing you talk about is overthinking. So what is overthinking in your definition? Yeah, I think it's the way that we can go from thinking deeply about something into a stuckness or a painfulness where we're not, We're not coming up with any new insights. Our thinking isn't moving us forward to changing the way we feel. We're not feeling relieved from how we're thinking about things. We're not motivated to take any action. So overthinking is just a stuck, painful sort of place to be in. Sometimes people describe it as analysis paralysis or inertia, those ways that our thoughts are no longer serving us. We're kind of at the mercy of our thoughts. Mm. And is it different for highly sensitive? I think everybody, whether they're highly sensitive or not can overthink. I think it's a difference in how prone highly sensitive people are to doing the overthinking. Our brains are wired differently. Um, we have more brain activity across all parts of our brain, even at rest. So our brains are just really active. And when you take that overactive brain, well, not even overactive brain, but just very active brain. And you, get to thinking about things. And you pair that with the way that highly sensitive people are very attuned to their surroundings. They take in really subtle details. It becomes almost this inevitability that at times we will engage in overthinking. Yeah. So if someone is feeling, yeah, I overthink things, where can we start? One of the things that I really like to encourage people to do is bring some mindfulness to what's going on. A lot of people will say, yeah, I know I overthink, um, and I do it all the time and it's this way, but oftentimes we aren't necessarily aware of what sets us up to get into overthinking. So I invite people to, to sort of notice what's happening in their bodies. Are they feeling tired? That can be a big thing. Trigger for overthinking. Are they feeling pain sickness, something that's keeping them sort of physically uncomfortable. I also invite people to look at what are the circumstances where this overthinking is happening. So many people who overthink are prone to perfectionism. They want to get all the right details and find the exact right solution. And it's very hard to stop thinking about a subject until they have that perfect idea of where they're going. So that can be a way for people to start to recognize, Ooh, anytime I go through a transition in my life, I start a new job. It's the start of a school year. I go on vacation. I come back from vacation. Those are times where I overthink. And when we know those things about ourselves, we can begin to recognize the potential is there for overthinking and to start, start taking some steps. Yeah. So I feel like there's a fine balance because as you say, we process things deeply and we, we think a lot and we want it to be really good. We have high standards and perfectionist can easily lead into perfectionist, but there's also like a. A positive side to it. So when do we know when we passed over from that helpful side to the unhelpful side? That's the really tricky thing because I don't think it's something that I can necessarily look at somebody else and say, you're overthinking this. I think it's much more of something that's subjective and we figure out for ourselves. And I think it has to do with that sense of, am I stuck or am I really still working through something that is unsettled for me? Yeah. Absolutely. And oftentimes, as I work with people and they practice just noticing what their overthinking experience is like, they get better at knowing where that fine line is for themselves and when they've crossed it. And ideally, we want to try to prevent that. Ourselves from crossing that line, but I also think it's inevitable. It's highly sensitive people that sometimes we're going to do this, right? I mean, I've been doing work with clients for 20 years. I still overthink at times. It's not something that we can necessarily avoid, but when we feel that stuckness, when we feel heavy, when we have the sense that if I tried to explain this to somebody, Okay. They wouldn't understand why I'm still thinking this way. That's, those are probably clues that we've, we've crossed that line and we're getting very, very close to crossing that line into overthinking. Hmm. Yeah. I heard someplace that the, the speed of your decisions determine the speed of your success. What would you say about that? Yeah. I mean, I think that that is one of the beautiful things about highly sensitive people is that so often we are slow to make decisions because we are really weighing all the pieces of information. But as we do that, I think we come to those really profoundly creative, valuable decisions So I think it's okay to be slower in our thinking process. I think that is one of the things that is a real payoff, um, as a highly sensitive person. Most highly sensitive people are not impulsively deciding something that they regret because they're giving it that thinking time ahead of time. Mm. Yeah. I love that. And again, it's that finding that balance. Where do I need to think things over, but also where do I need to make a decision? And I think that's where talking it over with somebody else who understands high sensitivity can be helpful. It doesn't necessarily have to be a therapist, but it could be, it could be a coach. It could be just a friend or a relative, a partner who's knowledgeable about high sensitivity or who is highly sensitive. Because I think those people who are attuned to what it means to be highly sensitive are not as prone to rush us there. They have more patience for our process. And you also have a free resource around overthinking. Tell us a bit more about that. Yeah. So I put together, it's called Singularly Sensitive Skills for Overthinking. And I subtitled it Seven Skills for Releasing Yourself from the Power of Overthinking. Because I think that really guides my philosophy. It's not. A philosophy of stopping overthinking once and for all and thinking we'll never do it again. I wish if I can figure that out, I would share that idea with everybody. But I think releasing ourselves from the power of that overthinking by using different skills that help us in a holistic way. So there are approaches to help us be mindful, be in our bodies. Use nature to help ourselves play around with how we're looking at our situation and some other skills that we can use. Hmm. Perfect. Great. We'll put the link here as well. So go and check that out. You also created a book and use the tool of journaling. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how that can benefit a highly sensitive person? Journaling is, is fabulous for all people. I sort of feel like I'm a crusader to get everybody journaling in some way. And it can be very brief, a word or two a day. It could be writing a response to one prompt that's maybe a sentence long, or it could be more of a. Traditional sort of brain dump where you just write freely until you get out whatever you need to get out. But my book is designed to provide some prompts to help people start to know where to go. So it's again, organized around those ideas in the singularly sensitive approach of explore, experiment, and integrate. And it helps us to, to get creative approaches to whatever kinds of problems or situations that we were having. So for someone who's Feeling like they're really struggling with overthinking being able to go through those some of those prompts and help yourself to externalize some of that thinking can be a way to break some of that power that it has over you. Yeah, I definitely agree. Generally, so, so powerful but I also know that many people struggle with journaling that trying it. Is there a secret to succeeding with it. Yeah. I think the only secret is to really make it very customized to your life. I don't think there's a one size fits all approach. Even my book, as much as I would love everyone to love my book and use my book and think it's great. It's not going to be for everyone. So I think being really clear about what works for you and what doesn't, I'm very practical when people are trying to come up with journaling practices that work for them. So if they want to write on paper, if they want to write on a computer or a phone. Doesn't matter. Again, you know, like they like writing freely. That's fine. If they respond better to prompts, that's okay too. I have people who journal through drawing or through pictures or creative methods. And all of those things are fine because the point of a journal is to help you externalize your internal experience and get enough distance from it that you can think about it and view it in a fresh way. So I would much rather have somebody that journals once a week or once every two weeks. But has a really powerful experience from that because they've tailored it to their lives. Then have someone who just sort of mechanically goes through every day. I must get up and I must write a page. I mean, there may be value in that too, but I think most people, if they don't figure out how to fit it into their lifestyle and fit their preferences, their needs, they don't stick with it. So it's okay to be imperfect. It's okay to try different things and see what works. And it's always okay to come back to journaling. I'm not a perfect journaler. I'm not consistent with everyday journaling, but I always come back to it. There's never a time where I'm like, Oh, no, I'm, I'm over that. I come back to it and start fresh. Yeah. That's what I encourage clients to do too. Yeah. Same here. And I love what you're saying. It's going back to that exploring and finding what, what is right for you. Just play with it. See what, yeah. I mean, going back to that idea of it doesn't have to be so serious. It doesn't have to be so rigid or, or we don't have to make it. formulaic we can play and say, how does this feel? Or what is it like if I write on paper, if I'm usually a computer journaler or vice versa? Yeah. So much to explore and experiment with. So what would you say is the best thing about being highly sensitive? I love how highly sensitive people come to these incredible Understandings of the world, the relationships that they're in because they are thinking so much about it. You know, it's why I would never want people to stop thinking deeply. I'd rather people end up on the side of overthinking sometimes then stop doing that deep thinking that helps people just figure out incredible things and feel connected to their world in a different way. I just think that's so incredible. And knowing that highly sensitive people do that with such gentleness and such profound respect and care for the people in their lives is so powerful to me. Love that. Yes. So is there anything else that you would like to add to those highly sensitives that are listening to this? I would just add that I am at a point in looking at highly sensitive people and myself as an HSP where I have a lot of acceptance for who I am and what the traits are, good, bad and indifferent, but I didn't get here overnight. Right. And I would encourage people listening to not assume that they can just flip a switch and suddenly embrace being a highly sensitive person, but that as you continue to work on it and really lean into the strengths that it brings you, it's much easier to accept. And the more you surround yourself with other people and come to events like this, the more you get that message of, Oh yeah, there's some really great things about who we are. So there is hope there's hope that you will come to, to a deeper acceptance too. Yes, definitely love that. Thank you so, so much. Thank you for being here and sharing your wisdom with us. And thank you for the work that you do in the world. It's so important. Likewise. Thank you for bringing all of us together and giving us a chance to hopefully touch a lot of other lives and, and learn from one another as well. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Sensitive Success. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this message. And come over and connect with me on Instagram @fridakabo. And remember, sensitivity is neither good or bad, it's what we make of it. Embrace your sensitivity and use it to create sensitive success your way.