Are you a sensitive person?

by The WellBeing Team October 19, 2010

There are bright lights and lots of people. Music is pumping and there is plenty going on. It is a feast for the senses. Is this setting your idea of heaven? Or would you be looking for the exit before too long and go home feeling exhausted and drained? If you are a highly sensitive person, then highly stimulating environments are taxing on your system. You might enjoy them for a while, but they drain you; you get overwhelmed by it all. Too much stimulation for too long and you will get tired, irritable or distressed.

Our culture is so loud and fast-paced that we think it’s normal to live this way. Ads scream from every available space, music blasts from every corner and we are swamped with a barrage of electronic information every day. Some people think they thrive on this heightened stimulation. People with mid-range sensitivity can tolerate it (but even they get worn down). For the highly sensitive person, though, it is very depleting.

Many people are highly sensitive without even realising it. Because there is an implicit pressure to appear “normal” and fit in with the status quo of our loud, busy culture, many people use stimulants such as coffee, sugar, energy drinks and alcoholic beverages that artificially keep them going. Your highly sensitive nature may be camouflaged and propped up by the use of these stimulants.

It’s interesting to note that after oil, coffee is the most traded commodity on the planet. Human beings love their stimulants! Perhaps the whole of humanity is actually exhausted but doesn’t even know it.

The risk with using artificial stimulants is they don’t protect you from the barrage of stimulation around you. In fact, they increase its impact on your body. They mask the exhaustion you will be feeling deep within. And if you don’t recognise how depleted you are, you won’t take the necessary steps to protect yourself. It’s better to acknowledge your sensitivity and work with your true nature. An attitude of self-care will promote wellbeing and may prevent illness in the future.

Are you highly sensitive?

You may have seen the Hollywood version of a highly sensitive person at the movies. They are the empath employed by some national security organisation to deliver intelligence information that wouldn’t be available to the typical spy or action hero. The empath can read people or situations and can sense an atmosphere. It’s not that they are psychic; they’re not picking up information from some other plane of reality. But they can sense people’s intent or determine whether a location was the site of some highly charged event. They deliver this information to their employers to help in tracking down the bad guys.

The movie empath is not all that far off the reality. A highly sensitive person is indeed someone who is very aware of the subtle signals in their surroundings. It’s like the skin between them and the outside world is thin compared with other people. For example, if people have been arguing in a room, a highly sensitive person will pick up on this atmosphere. Someone who is not sensitive will just carry on regardless without noticing the energy of the place.

Highly sensitive people are receptive to the stimulation around them. They notice the sights, sounds, mood and tone of everything they encounter. They can sense the energy of people and places and therefore have access to this subtle level of information coming in all the time. For example, they will notice how someone they meet is feeling that day, what emotion the person may be hiding and what their true opinion about something is regardless of that person’s polite demeanour or pleasantly spoken words.

Highly sensitive people are also tuned in to their internal world and notice their own inner feelings and reactions to things. It’s like they can’t filter the stimulus from the outside but they also can’t hide from their own internal reality. This can lead to self-consciousness because they are acutely aware of their own feelings and reactions in ways others aren’t.

While our culture is not necessarily suited to highly sensitive people, there are many roles where this ability can be very useful. Someone with a sensitive nature might be suited to a role as a philosopher, therapist, teacher, artist, doctor, researcher or writer. Research shows that people in general become more sensitive as they age, so sensitive people may find they have more people who understand their point of view and share their depth of experience in later years.

What are the benefits?

The most obvious benefit for a sensitive person is they have access to levels of information that are not available to others who don’t tune in to the subtle energies of the world. Sensitive people are clairsentient. This means they can sense what is going on within themselves, with another individual or within a group.

When people are young, this ability can sometimes lead to confusion because they energetically feel the truth about what someone is saying, even though the person’s words may not match this truth. The person says one thing, but the sensitive person picks up something else. Similarly, we may encounter people whose true intentions are not really good but are hidden behind a “nice” act.

Once we learn to trust our “read” on a person or situation, we can use this knowledge to navigate the world. This may mean we choose friends wisely, choose healthy living places or contribute useful information to the work world.

A sensitive person’s experience of the world is rich and deep. They look for meaning and purpose in life. When they don’t attend to their wellbeing they will become aware of this more quickly than others, so can remedy the situation before it worsens.

For men especially but also for women, sensitivity can have a negative connotation. It’s not accepted in our culture and implies weakness, fragility or lack of courage. “What’s wrong with you?” can be the refrain from others in response to perceived “over-sensitivity”. The sad result is that some sensitive people repress their true self to fit in with others. Do this for too long and the result is depression and alienation.

“I think I was born into the wrong era. Or the wrong country. I’m just not built for our culture. It’s too loud and extraverted. I don’t fit in and I can’t find my place.” Claire* was a 38-year-old office manager who had changed jobs a lot because she had trouble finding a work environment that suited her gentle nature. As is the case with many sensitive people, the modern open-plan office did not suit her. There was too much constant stimulation. Claire also found many workmates loud and crass and their gossiping, joke telling and brusque manner bothered her.

While sensitive people have the benefit of noticing signals others don’t, the downside is they can therefore be overwhelmed in ways others are not. Like Claire, sensitive people may feel overwhelmed and drained in a busy work environment. This can also lead to feelings of anxiety when too many “signals” come in at once if there are lots of people and noise around.

The difference in sensitivity can lead to difficulties between people when a thicker-skinned person makes crass, rude or robust remarks that offend or upset the other person. To them it’s just part of the jousting that goes on in everyday life; they mean nothing by it and they say the sensitive person should “learn to take a joke”. The problem is it’s always assumed that the sensitive person should be the one to calibrate to the other person’s way of being, not the other way around. If we instead listened to sensitive people, maybe work environments would be kinder and gentler. That would actually be better for everyone’s wellbeing!

Robert is an executive in his mid-40s. It took him a long time to recognise his sensitivity, but it helped him make sense of his behaviour. “I went to a shopping centre on the weekend to buy some bedding. There was so much to choose from it was overwhelming. But I gave it a go. And I had picked out something when it all just became too much. So I put the item back on the shelf and hightailed it out of there. I couldn’t stand it any more. The bright lights, the noise, the people. It was just too full-on. I can’t stand those big shopping centres.”

Some may describe sensitive people as “shy” because they don’t put themselves out there. But shy people actually are open to engaging with the world; it’s just that they don’t impose themselves but wait for the right moment. This moment often doesn’t come, though, because others don’t allow the silence or space for someone else to say something. There may be too many others talking or too much else going on. If you are a sensitive person, you may have this experience in groups or meetings. You never get your say because to do so you would have to speak over the top of others and this is not in your nature.

Managing your sensitive nature

The key for a sensitive person is to remain centred in his or her own self. This is essential for managing in the world. The first step is to develop an attitude of self-care. You have to develop gentleness in the way you treat yourself, especially given the world often won’t be gentle with you. This begins on a really practical level. It is essential to get enough sleep so your body can recover from its encounter with the world. It’s also helpful to maintain a daily rhythm the body can relax into and feel secure with.

Be kind to yourself. Have downtime that isn’t about interacting or achieving things. Consciously choose to make your breath become gentle. Reconnect to the fact that you yourself are gentle. Take regular walks since rhythmic movement helps the body regain equilibrium. And get into nature where you get a break from the stimulation of the urban environment.

The sensitive person tends to tune in to others’ opinions about them and then uses this to determine whether they are doing well in life instead of tuning in to their own self. This makes them hungry for approval and external reinforcement. Instead of deserting yourself like this, you need to become your own ally.

There are two ways to be your own ally. First, you need to keep bringing your focus away from others and back to yourself. Go back to noticing your own gentle breathing when with others. Don’t let yourself take on the breath of others. Second, create an energetic boundary between yourself and others. You can do this by:

Feeling your feet on the ground
Angling yourself slightly away from someone you are talking to
Limiting eye contact a little
Moving subtly but frequently so you don’t get locked in to another’s energy
The above strategies will also help you not to tune in to other people’s moods and emotions. If you get too influenced by someone else’s stuff you walk away feeling drained or frayed. Long-term, this can begin to feel like you hardly exist because other people’s issues and personalities are so much louder than yours.

Sensitive people can also become too hooked into their own feelings and reactions to things and take it all too seriously. They are at risk of:

Over-processing their feelings
Dwelling on feelings too long
Becoming morbid, maudlin or overly sentimental
Making dramas of things
Taking everything too seriously
Being highly reactive to small things said or done by others
Excessively ruminating about minor issues

All these things drain your energy. So sit quietly when you are emotional and breathe gently. Just let the feelings move through your body. Don’t feed them or heighten them. Wait until the body sensations calm down. Then talk quietly and realistically to yourself about the situation. Then move on to something else entirely.

Even though you may be sensitive you still need to develop a certain robustness so you don’t use your sensitivity as an excuse to avoid things in life. While you don’t want to send yourself out to be over-stimulated through too much work and too many social events you also don’t want to be over protective by not taking steps out into the world. You don’t want to bully yourself but you also don’t want to mollycoddle yourself either. There needs to be a balance. It is like being a good parent to yourself. Just as you wouldn’t want to force a child to try things, you also don’t want a mother that inhibits and fusses.

Claire, who I mentioned earlier managed over time to find her balance. She would still go out to events but would go there early before people got too drunk and would promise herself not to stay too long. She found the balance by making the effort to go out yet not getting over stimulated by staying past her tolerance level. She practised self-care but didn’t let her sensitivity become an excuse for avoiding life.

A sensitive humanity

All people actually have the capacity to be highly sensitive, but some have just closed down this ability. Admittedly, it does seem easier to survive the harshness of the modern world if you are robust and thick-skinned. But it doesn’t mean this is the truth of how we are or how humanity is meant to be.

Sensitive people can be the early warning system within a civilisation. They let people know when something is wrong because they feel it before anyone else. They know things aren’t right. They notice lies, they notice illness and they notice emotional distress. They notice that all is not well even when others carry on as if all is OK. Maybe if everyone stopped to feel the world as a sensitive person feels it, with its distress, suffering and emptiness, then we would demand change.

A thick skin just keeps people immune to the truth. So don’t be beaten by bullies and bravado. Stay true to yourself and true to what you know. When the world is ready, it will listen. You will be tomorrow’s leaders!