Welcome to the Highly Sensitive Person Podcast, a podcast for people who experience the world intensely.

Join me on a journey of acceptance of our highly sensitive person traits.

Welcome to episode 73 of the Highly Sensitive Person Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly. A couple weeks ago, I got a message from somebody who asked me to do an episode about dealing with house guests, which is the topic of today's show, is how to deal with people staying at your house and how to

be a better house guest when you're staying at someone else's house. Especially during the

holiday season, you may find yourself staying with friends or family or with friends or

family staying under your roof. Depending on the situation, this might make you really excited

and happy, but likely it probably

stresses you out a little bit too. Look, it's not normal to spend 24 hours a day with somebody.

Okay, maybe with your partner or your kids, but it's not normal to suddenly spend every

minute with friends and or family members for days on end.

And we all know that it's not normal. So why do we act like it is?

Politeness gets in the way and can cause visits to go sour.

It can look rude to say that you need time away from your guests or your hosts.

But for introverts, it's just how we are. We need

alone time to recharge. Sometimes we even need time away from people that we absolutely adore and

like to be around. Personally, I can think of two family trips I've been on that started out as

so much fun. But after the four day mark

of being together every second of the day, inevitably, some of us started to get grumpy. And it's

because we didn't have enough time to recharge alone. Even today, it makes me sad to look back

and realize that such great trips were marred by

too much togetherness. I'm determined not to let it happen again. I learned a lot from those

trips. In my mind, five days is the absolute limit to a good visit in most situations. Any longer

...