The long version

I’ve always known that I’m highly sensitive. I was the type of kid who would cry when everyone sang happy birthday; I’d collect sap from trees in an attempt to treat their wounds; and I’d cover my eyes every time there was violence on TV. My empathy has always run deep, and my emotional state has never been hard to read.

But it wasn’t until I was in my teens that I heard the term “Highly Sensitive Person”. It described me to a tee, and yet I was filled with so much shame and remorse, I went into full denial. Growing up, I was often told that I was “too sensitive” and “a crybaby from the second I left my mother’s womb”, so I was convinced that being sensitive was a weakness. I repelled the term, and rejected the association.

It also meant that throughout my teens and early 20s, I was at war with myself. I did everything I could to try to prove to myself and everyone else that I was tough, that I was strong, and that I was capable of anything I set my mind to. Born was a perfectionist control-freak with so much underlying anxiety and self-doubt that for the better half of my student life, I struggled with every eating disorder under the sun and regular panic attacks.

Into my early 20s, I had overcome the eating disorders, but the anxiety got worse, and stress started manifesting itself in the form of gut issues, eczema, hives and insomnia. Part of the problem was that I was so good at “faking it”, that on the outside it seemed like I had everything together. I got good grades, had a vibrant social life, found work easily, and always smiled. But behind that smile was a lot of pain. I was overwhelmed with life, I was anxious about my future, and I felt like a total imposter in my present career as a Marketing Manager.

I felt like at any moment someone was going to expose me as the fraud that I was. That one day people would see just how imperfect I am, how imperfect my life is, how sad I was, and how off track I really felt.

I’ve always been ambitious, and at least at school and university, success wasn’t hard to attain. But adult-life was no joke. Busy chasing a definition of success that simply didn’t align with my values or my vision, I was running further away from my dream and closer towards burnout. Until I reached it and was forced to change.

As many of us can relate, pain was the catalyst for change in my life. The pain of not being able to sleep properly, of constantly having emotional outbursts that took a toll on my relationships, of ruminating on my decisions for days if not weeks on-end, and just generally over-exerting myself in ways that just weren’t healthy brought me to a deadend. I felt defeated and knew that if I didn’t change anything, nothing would change.

By that time I had enrolled in a self-paced programme to become certified as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, and I started applying what I was learning as I was learning it. I improved my diet, my sleep hygiene, exercised consistently, meditated and journaled. And it was working, mostly.

I still found myself getting stuck along the way. I still found myself repeating the same negative thought cycles; I still struggled to uphold boundaries; I still felt overwhelmed a lot of the time; I still felt immense pressure to be perfect; I still used food to cope with my emotions; and I still felt like a total imposter at work and in front of my first health coaching clients.

The missing part of the puzzle was my high sensitivity. I wasn’t honouring my temperament as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), and it left me blindsided while I was making all of those other healthy changes. And it’s because as HSPs with highly sensitive nervous systems, our needs are very specific. Meditation, yoga and an extra dose of veggies doesn’t cut it. But it’s not necessarily about doing more, but rather about doing things smarter.

The key, I learned – through training, research and experience – is to optimise your environment, diet and mindset while taking your highly sensitive needs into account. If you want to thrive as an HSP, you can’t do one without the other. If you want to pursue your ambitions without the stress and overwhelm, you need to take a full-picture approach. You need to work with what you have – a highly sensitive nervous system – and use it to your advantage.

You see, the other key thing that I had to learn was that setting myself up to thrive as an HSP wasn’t just about taking the right precautions to avoid overwhelm and overstimulation. It was also about using that beautiful trait I was born with and making it work for me. Once I started embracing the gift of my sensitivity, everything became easier, more fun, and so much more beautiful.

If I can do it, you can too. It’s possible for you to live your dream life, for you to reach your goals in this lifetime and for you to live a life of purpose that you are grateful for every single day. If you desire it, it’s already yours. Knowing what you want is the easy part.

Knowing how to get there is the hard part. That’s what I’m here for – to give you the roadmap for how to go from A to B; the support and accountability needed for any behavioural change; and the tools and understanding you need to thrive in mind and body as an ambitious highly sensitive soul.