Teach Yourself Selective Hearing: 8 Strategies to Overcome Nosiness, Drama, and Hypervigilance | Stop People-Pleasing | #147

Learn how to teach yourself selective hearing with 8 practical strategies from resilience coach Dawn Super. This guide is for anyone trying to overcome nosiness (curiosity without boundaries), getting pulled into other people's drama, or working on hypervigilance and people-pleasing patterns. Discover why being a pot stirrer is a trauma response, how dual processing and "backbrain" constant awareness affects focus, and why paying attention to other people's stuff keeps you from putting yourself first.

Includes concrete techniques like practicing not listening to the TV, using headphones to drown out conversations, the "no drama llama" reminder, and learning to be okay with not knowing everything people are saying. Perfect for former hypervigilant people, those with trauma responses affecting boundaries, and anyone who needs to calm their central nervous system by reducing external stressors. Based on real experience overcoming nosiness, pot-stirring, and people-pleasing to become someone worth hanging around with.

Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below

Teach yourself selective hearing.

This video is for people trying to overcome nosiness, those of us who get pulled into other people's drama, and those of us working on overcoming hypervigilance or people-pleasing.

This is the Daily Dose of Dawn at Dawn - videos designed to expand your thinking.

So why do we want to think about this? Because it took me a really long time to understand that nosiness is curiosity without boundaries. That's not taught in school.

Being a pot stirrer and causing drama is a trauma response. And you don't need to examine your trauma to change your behavior. You just need to act.

Welcome in to my daily dosers.

So how this came into my awareness: I am not a doctor or a mental health professional. I am a field-tested resilience coach.

I was a hypervigilant mess for most of my life. I was nosy. I was a pot stirrer and a people pleaser. It didn't make for good friendships, and I knew I needed to change, but I wasn't sure how.

So I took each aspect of my personality that I thought was getting in my way, one thing at a time, like an experiment, and I created support tools to help me reboot my personality.

So I'm what's called a dual processor. And what that means is I can sing a song in my head while typing an email completely not related to anything in the song. At some point, I just started calling it my backbrain.

And whether my backbrain developed from my actual intellectual capacity, the fact that I've been sleep deprived for four decades and had to create a lot of workarounds, or it's some other trauma response - my brain is constantly paying attention to everything that's happening around me.

Which means if people are having a conversation next to me, my brain is going to listen to them and I don't want it to.

And it's not that I don't care about being nosy or whatever - of course that's not appropriate. But paying attention to someone else's stuff keeps you from paying attention to your own stuff.

And if you don't learn to put yourself first, you're going to be stepping on yourself for the rest of your life. Okay?

So this skill - selective hearing - is a stress reducer. It helps you isolate yourself from the stressors around you so that you can help calm your central nervous system down. Because when your central nervous system is calm, you're calm and you're in healing mode and you feel more peaceful inside of you and you have less illnesses.

Okay, so here are 8 strategies I found some success with, in one level or another, when trying to overcome nosiness and hypervigilance:

Number 1: Not listening to the TV while sitting in front of it. It's a lot harder than it sounds. The words are coming out of the television and your brain wants to pay attention to them, and your task is to focus - hyperfocus - on something else so much that you teach yourself not to listen to the television.

Number 2: Wearing headphones loud enough that you drown out others and the television. This is usually my preferred thing if I'm sitting in a room where other people are having a meeting, or if two people are talking about something and I don't want to be party to it.

Number 3: Something I use kind of like a jump starter - it's repeating something in your head so that you can't hear something else. Like if you think about the little toddler when they go "la la la" so that they can't hear you. It's like that, but the grown-up version.

Number 4: Allowing yourself to hyperfocus and concentrate on something else - like reading a book, playing a game - and letting everything else drift out of your awareness. Takes practice.

Number 5: Go where people are and practice not listening to them. So go sit in a fast food place, at a food court, at the mall, wherever there are people gathering, and sit and practice not listening to anyone's conversation.

Number 6: I found this one to be incredibly effective - avoid getting pulled into drama by reminding yourself to be a no drama llama.

Number 7: Get okay with not knowing stuff people are saying. You might have heard the phrase "it doesn't matter what people think about you - what people think about you is none of your business." And that takes practice to implement something like that. So if you don't understand how to do that right away, don't beat yourself up for that, because it's not a given that you would know how to do that.

Number 8: This one is also very effective for me - be someone you'd want to hang around with. I didn't even like myself until I was 35. And it took me a long time to shape my personality into someone that I would want to hang around with. And now I have lots of other people who also want to hang around with me. And it took a lot of work to do that and a want to do it. I wanted to make my life better, and I did.

So the magnets are available in my shop. If you're on the blog, they're there. And if you're on YouTube, they're in the description.

Make it a great day. Teach yourself selective hearing.

CLICK EACH IMAGE TO SEE THE MAGNET IN MY STORE

Stop stepping on yourself to pay attention to other people's drama.

In my workbook How to Be on Your Own Side, Day 7 teaches you how to become the only constant in your life - which means learning to put YOURSELF first, not everyone else's business.

Selective hearing is just one tool. The book has 13 more.

Get it here: https://HowToBeOnYourOwnSide.com