HSPs – Highly Sensitive People – do exist! Statistically about 20 per cent of the population are considered sensitive. Sensitivity is basically a neural trait, meaning the HSP has a sensitive nervous system. This means the HSP is aware of subtleties in his surroundings and stays on guard for potential “danger”. For example, dark clouds or slippery pavements. The highly sensitive person is more easily overwhelmed when he has been out for too long in a highly stimulating environment, where he has been bombarded by sights and sounds and comes home with an exhausted nervous system.
Sensitivity can be both an advantage or a disadvantage. In some societies sensitivity is highly regarded. Western culture tends to ‘look down’ on sensitivity as a weakness and parents and teachers will spend time trying to help children “overcome” it.
The HSP can feel out of step with the rest of the world, because they are in the minority. They are easily “hurt” or affronted when non-HSP people speak or interact with them in a way that the HSP would not. The HSP therefore cannot understand how others can be so direct, critical, or confrontative. Typically, the HSP will not challenge the interaction, but will withdraw and then dwell on the exchange that took place, trying to understand what went wrong, especially what did he do wrong, and why was the other person so nasty?
It is unlikely that the non-HSP will know that anything is “wrong”. His nervous system is not impacted by conflict, confrontation, and raised voices and therefore he has no awareness that the HSP now has an aroused nervous system and is “hurting”. This is the reason however, why the HSP calls him “insensitive” or mean.
What seems ordinary to others, like loud music or crowds, can be highly stimulating to the HSP nervous system and thus stressful. A certain amount of these stimuli can initially feel good to the HSP, but when it is “too much” the stimuli become disturbing. The HSP often needs time to be alone, in order to give his nervous system time to calm down, in preparation for the onslaught of stimuli that it is going to receive again tomorrow.
Most people walk into a room at a party and perhaps notice the furniture and the people and that’s about it. HSP’s can be instantly aware, whether they wish to be or not, of the mood, the friendships and hostilities between people, the freshness or staleness of the air. They will notice small things; threads on the rug, the curtain tied back untidily, the dust on the picture frame.
HSP’s do not necessarily judge these things, but they notice, and the nervous system becomes overwhelmed with all these things it has to “notice”. The HSP becomes easily overwhelmed in new environments as the nervous overarousal is usually experienced as anxiety leading eventually to the feeling of being overwhelmed.
Arousal should not be confused with fear. A person can become overaroused by nonconscious thoughts or low level stimuli but show no obvious emotion. An HSP will typically feel fearful simply with increasing levels of arousing chemicals in his body, even though there is nothing for him to feel fearful about. HSPs interpret this as an indication of their possible “craziness”, as their feelings are incongruent with their conscious intellectual awareness.
