Do you feel the pain of the world as a highly sensitive person?
Do you want to do something but don’t know where to start?
Do you tend to shut down when you feel overwhelmed?
Maybe you wonder if anything you do will even matter.
As a highly sensitive person who has felt the pain of the world since I was child, I get it. I know these anxieties and there are moments when I feel powerless too. The social and environmental issues I care about have felt exceedingly daunting this year.
To add to this, we’re living in a time in which most people are dealing with very real individual and family stresses. You may feel like you have enough on personal plate to serve the world around you.
Self-care and healthy boundaries are vital. It’s important to be able to recognize and honor when you have limited bandwidth. There are other times when you’ll have energy available to support others and to get active in causes you care about. There are times in which you’re energy will be best directed toward replenishing your reserves and simply tending to what’s in front of you.
I’ve been at this balance of personal and collective care for over 20 years. It took me a long time to establish sustainable ways of engaging that truly have potential to benefit the causes and people I care about and myself.
Once I did, I came to realize that taking action toward collective well-being is one of best ways to alleviate anxiety about the pain of the world.
Highly Sensitive People Who Feel the Pain of the World, Taking Action Is Key
In these current times, you’re bombarded with circumstances that lead you to feel like you have no control.
Anxiety can go into overdrive when you feel so much. You may feel powerless to do anything and stuck in a rut detached from a sense of purpose or agency.
Taking action helps to soothe anxiety because it allows the part of you that feels so anxious to experience the felt sense that you do have control over something…your actions. It also helps that anxious part witness and trust your courageous capacity.
It’s important to note that taking action need not be a burden or sacrifice that zaps your energy and lands you in depletion.
On the contrary, engaged action can be the very ground for you to empower your innate strengths and courage as you bring the depth of your humanity to life beyond your immediate circles and to the wider world to which you belong.
This can even be the place you thrive provided that you have a clear purpose and you work aligns within your strengths, energy, and circumstances.
However, it’s easy to get derailed into thinking nothing you do matters without an essential viewpoint.
Yoga Wisdom for Taking Action
You may have read my blogs or heard this teaching in my yoga classes, but it’s worth repeating a thousand times as a helpful perspective for activism, volunteer work, supporting loved ones, and even action for yourself.
This teaching comes from the Bhagavad Gita, which teaches us how to fully participate, live, and do our duties in worldly life with a stable mind and equanimity.
The primary teaching of karma yoga in this text is to do what is front of you to do because it is in accordance with that which is right and just while renouncing the results or fruit of the action. In other words, take selfless and beneficial outer action because it’s your duty or responsibility, but maintain an inner attitude of renunciation of the outcome.
You don’t control the results because there are countless other variables at play that contribute to the laws of cause and effect that cannot always be seen or known. On this same token, it’s hard to fully know if there’s a silver lining in a devastating setback.
Consider that you may plant seeds in your garden and be frustrated when a squirrel gets mischievous or the wind carries it away. Yet, maybe the squirrel or wind presented the neighbor down the street a joyful surprise and unexpected nourishment.
So many people get burned out or cynical about when their efforts don’t lead to the desired results.
From this perspective, you simply do what is within your power to support and uphold dharma, which means both your individual duty and universal natural law that benefits all living beings with the least amount of harm (ahimsa).
3 Key Considerations for Taking Action as a Highly Sensitive Person
1) Energy. HSPs take in a lot of information quickly and generally need time to cognitively and emotionally process. Get clear on what kinds of actions and environments feed and deplete your energy. If you’re new to activism or community work, this may require some exploration to learn what fits with respect to your environment, time commitment, personal style, and means to contribute. In accordance with avoiding harm, you may explore ways to take action that don’t require a long-term commitment to start. For example, you may share fundraisers with your networks, join a letter writing campaign, attend a protest, or sign up for a text or phone banking session rather than embarking on an entire training for door-to-door political canvassing. Of course, don’t leave it at doing a thing followed by inaction, but do accurately assess what suits your energy capacity, processing pace, and need for rest.
2) Time. Some people thrive on routine and like to dedicate time each week to taking action. This is a great way to stay consistently involved. Yet, for many people, time availability varies due to other responsibilities and it can be challenging to multi-task for the HSP brain (fine, all brains). There may be weeks when all you can do is donate or show extra kindness to a stranger. There will be other weeks when you give substantially more time. Sometimes your focus needs to shift in and out depending on the circumstances and that’s okay. This means being both compassionate with yourself when you have a lot on your plate and honest with yourself when you have time or it’s possible to make time. When you find yourself spending lengthy time ruminating and feeling the pain of the world, take action.
3) Strengths. Identifying and being honest with your strengths goes hand in hand with energy because it affects the sustainability of your work in the world. You may have existing skills that can be tapped and you may have skills you need to develop. Yet, you need to know your strengths and what puts you in flow in order to discern how you can be most helpful to a cause or movement. If you absolutely despise talking to people on the phone and find yourself avoidant of conflict, campaign phone banking may not be the place you start. Yet, text banking may be an option that gives you time to respond properly. If you’re a creative HSP and/or introvert, you might take action in the form of a craftivism campaign. Maybe you’re a graphic artist or tech expert, you might support an organization with creating flyers or handing the back end of their website. Keep in mind that highly sensitive people are often great at “leading from behind” by uplifting others and supporting movements rather than needing to be headliner.
For highly sensitive people who feel the pain of the world…
There’s no question this can feel heavy and cause undue anxiety. Yet, you have the capacity to help relieve this anxiety by engaging your strengths and taking action for the well-being of all without added overwhelm or depletion.
If you want some ideas for how to take action in a way that suits your strengths and energy, I invite you to check out our next workshop on Activism for Introverts & HSPs w/ Omkari Williams.