Vibrant Days….
Flourishing with Sensory Processing Sensitivity
October 2016
Relate
10 Life-Changing Tips for Highly Sensitive People
WRITTEN by ANGEL CHERNOFF
“And those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Nietzsche
Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weak or broken. But to feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the characteristic of a truly alive and compassionate human being. It is not the sensitive person who is broken, it is society’s understanding that has become dysfunctional and emotionally incapacitated. There is zero shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being ‘too emotional’ or ‘complicated’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more thoughtful, caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your feelings, smiles and tears shine a light in this world.
Of course, that’s easier said than done, because it can be so confusing, right? … Why you get overwhelmed by run-of-the-mill tasks that others take in stride. Why you mull over slights that ought to be forgotten. Why subtleties are magnified for you and yet lost on others.
It’s like you were born missing a protective layer of skin that others seem to have.
You try to hide it. Numb it. Tune it out. But the comments still pierce your armor: “You’re overthinking things. You’re too sensitive. Toughen up!”
You’re left wondering what on earth is wrong with you.
I know, because I was in my mid-40s when I stumbled across the term ‘highly sensitive people.’ This led me to discover how delicious it feels to be one of thousands saying, “You do that? Me too!”
Since then, I’ve learned that many sensitive people feel isolated from others. They feel misunderstood and different, and they usually don’t know why. They just don’t realize that they have a simple trait that explains their confusing array of symptoms and quirks.
There’s even a scientific term for it: Sensory Processing Sensitivity. Dr. Elaine Aron, a psychotherapist and researcher, estimates that 15-20{59f60c537d2e599ed690a67c103d9265f11cc7a0cf2bd0efbc3e3c577f8a61ac} of people have nervous systems that process stimuli intensely. They think deeply. They feel deeply (physically and emotionally). They easily become over-stimulated.
According to my research several successful historical figures were highly sensitive, such as Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Steve Jobs. I see this as great news, because it means us sensitive types aren’t inherently disadvantaged.
But when we don’t realize how to handle our sensitivity, we end up pushing too hard to keep up with everyone else. We try to do what others seem to handle with ease, and try to do it better than them. And this leads to problems.
For a time, we do a first-rate job of using our natural gifts: we’re creative students, conscientious employees, and devoted family members. But when we hammer on beyond our limits, doing so can eventually take its toll. It shows up in things like unrelenting health conditions, muscle tension we can’t get rid of, and being endlessly fatigued or on edge for no good reason.
If you resonate with any of this, here are 10 actions you can take to stop struggling and start thriving:
1. Quit searching for someone or something to fix you.
Sensitivity is a temperament trait, not a medical disorder. So nothing is inherently wrong with you. Sadly, though, many certified health practitioners don’t understand this because sensory processing sensitivity is a recent area of health research.
Sure, highly sensitive people are more likely to have allergies or sensitivities to food, chemicals, medication, and so forth. And they’re more prone to overstimulation, thus quicker to feel stress — which can lead to other health issues. But sensitivity in itself is not something that needs fixing.
Successful sensitive types realize that they’re not “broken.” If your mind is exhausted from busily researching yet another solution to take away your “flaws,” know that the answers to living in harmony with your sensitive nature lie inside you.
2. Tell yourself, as often as necessary, that you are not a fraud.
Impostor syndrome isn’t exclusive to highly sensitive people. Many conscientious and high achieving people fall victim to this nagging fear. But the simmering discomfort about being found out is often constant for a sensitive person.
Why wouldn’t it be, considering you’ve spent a lifetime of feeling different from others and trying to fit in? Maybe you blame your tears on dust in your eye during that cheesy TV commercial; or you sign up for the company fun run, even though you hate running and you know you’ll feel ashamed of how long your body takes to recover. But even if you grew up displaying your sensitivity with pride, it’s unlikely you escaped the cultural pressure motivating you to disguise your real self to fit the norms.
Successful sensitive types respect that their nervous systems are wired differently from 80-85{59f60c537d2e599ed690a67c103d9265f11cc7a0cf2bd0efbc3e3c577f8a61ac} of people. If you’re constantly thinking about who you should be but aren’t, and what you should be doing but can’t, understand that valuing your achievements and signature strengths allows you to show yourself as you truly are, more comfortably — even when you’re the odd one out.
3. Seek out kindred spirits (and know that you are NOT alone).
You probably feel different and alone. But the truth is, you’re not. Many have experienced confusion in isolation before discovering that hordes of people have some idea of what it’s like to be you. They’ve felt the surge of power that comes from being supported by like-minded souls. And they want to pay it forward.
The key whenever possible is to hang out with sensitive people who are already flourishing, or at least open to those possibilities. They understand not only how to manage their sensitivity, but also how to wield its superpowers. They know what it’s like for you to feel endlessly under siege, and they can offer firsthand experience and wisdom to help you make your sensitivities work in your favor.
Successful sensitive types appreciate and relish the strengths of sensitivity, in themselves and others. If you’re feeling unsupported or misunderstood, find a sensitively knowledgeable coach, mentor, or community who gets you … and nurture that connection.
4. Look for the hidden positivity in every situation and soak it up.
The brain is a powerful filter that molds experiences and perceptions of reality. If you think the world is a dangerous place, your brain is wired to hunt for evidence of danger. If you believe it’s a loving place, you spot more loving opportunities. What you focus on, you get more of.
As a highly sensitive person, the more negative the environment, the more you suffer. But the opposite is also true — the more positive, the more you thrive (even compared to others).
Thoughts are stimuli for your nervous system. One of the most important things a sensitive person can do is acknowledge the negative (not ignore it — because what you resist, persists), but then let it go… immerse yourself in positive thoughts and situations that make you feel good, or at least give you a soothing sense of relief.
Successful sensitive types decide to see the world brimming with opportunities to feel grateful for, and to marinate in that positive vibe. If you’re feeling at the mercy of your emotions and circumstances, understand that your thoughts (and the emotional charges they trigger) are always within your control.
5. Find new spins on old flaws.
Your gifts of sensitivity include deep reflection and an instinct to see all angles and consequences. But by being so deeply tuned in to details, you’re easily overwhelmed and exhausted by unyielding stimulation. And when you don’t understand why you feel and behave in the ways you do, it’s easy to frame these as flaws.
In truth, these “weaknesses” are simply your unmet needs and unique gifts to nourish. In reframing your past and nurturing your present, you set yourself up for success in your future.
Successful sensitive types rethink old perceptions in light of their deeper understandings of sensitivity. If you’re weighed down by the hypersensitive and neglected (even, despised) parts of yourself, seek to discover the other side of the coin … where you’ll find some of your greatest strengths: intuition, vision, conscientiousness — and the list goes on.
6. Treat yourself with compassion.
As a highly sensitive person you are deeply compassionate. So much so that putting others’ comfort and needs before your own is second nature. On top of that, you’re often your own biggest critic. You push yourself hard, and then you beat up on yourself when you miss the mark. You criticize yourself in ways you’d never dream of judging others.
Controlling your nagging inner critic is essential to self-compassion. But contrary to popular belief, you shouldn’t do so by relentlessly ignoring it. Deep thinking is one of your gifts, so why not embrace that power? Take control by hearing your thoughts without judgment (after all, there might be gems of wisdom hidden deep) and then pivoting to thoughts that trigger kinder and more loving emotions in your body. From that better-feeling place, you’re better able to choose actions to care for yourself and others.
Successful sensitive types show themselves the same loving compassion that they’re naturally good at giving others. It may feel selfish or vain at first, but it’s not. If your critical inner voice is devaluing who you are, answer back with self-kindness … this is the antidote.
7. Create healthy boundaries, not rigid emotional walls.
We live in a culture that values “take a painkiller and push on” far more than it values sensitivity. We grow up hearing: “no pain, no gain; survival of the fittest; life isn’t fair — get used to it.” We admire those who show grit to prevail over their terrible plights.
As a highly sensitive person your reflex reaction may be to freeze up or struggle to toughen up. You build walls to shield yourself from hurt … Emotional walls, such as suppressing feelings or creating dramatic turmoil to distract from the real causes of pain. Physical walls, such as piling on layers of weight to hide behind. Mental walls, such as tuning out with alcohol or drugs.
Or, you may let all your boundaries collapse at once, thereby unconsciously absorbing others’ energies and feeling devoured by unpredictable events and emotions. You try to escape the feelings by getting caught up in overthinking everything: endlessly planning and searching and analyzing, while completely losing touch with your intuition. And in the process you confuse conscientiousness with overwork, empathy with over-identification, compassion with over-tolerance. So you beat yourself up about how you know you should have better boundaries. It’s a vicious cycle.
Successful sensitive types embody gentle but firm personal boundaries. If you struggle to put your own needs first (which doesn’t come naturally to a highly sensitive person), make a conscious choice to practice the skill of saying “no” with love and grace, or carving out alone time to recharge … and decide to feel good about that.
8. Tune in to your body (to avoid seesawing between emotional extremes).
Many highly sensitive people learn to ignore the messages their bodies are sending them. They switch it off to avoid overwhelm or they tune in to others’ needs instead of their own to meet what’s expected of them. Does this sound familiar?
Doing so leaves you swinging like a pendulum. Too much, too little. Too fast, too slow. Too in, too out. Back and forth between being over-stimulated and mind-numbingly bored, dieting and then bingeing, or exercising hard and then needing several days to recover. And so on and so forth.
Successful sensitive types tune in to the physical sensations in their bodies; they accept that it’s not always comfortable, but they trust their bodies to guide them. If you have a habit of hiding from feelings or passing the point of overwhelm, learn to recognize your body’s subtle signs of overstimulation. You’ll spend less time being thrown out of balance, and more time swaying gently within your nervous system’s range of optimal arousal.
9. Design healthy habits that fit your unique needs.
Eventually, it all catches up with you. Grueling hours at work, followed by hard sweat at the gym and keeping on top of chaos around home — all fueled by crappy diets and minimal sleep or downtime. It’s an easy trap to fall into because you’re simply living the way you see most people get by on.
What’s more, some seemingly healthy habits hit hard on a sensitive nervous system — like “health” foods that are heavily processed and pumped with sugar and artificial additives, or intense exercise that’s not balanced with ample recovery time.
If you allow too much stimulation and too lousy replenishment, you run the risk of chronic illnesses (as many sensitive types have learned the hard way). At the same time, if you overprotect yourself, your genius goes unexpressed, and that also can lead to stress and ill health.
Successful sensitive types practice habits that truly nourish them. If you struggle with energy or well-being issues, prioritize habits that nurture these areas of your life (such as more sleep and alone time), and limit those that over-stimulate or drain you (such as too many high pressures activities — even if they are so-called healthy).
10. Stop smothering your sensitivity.
After a lifetime of being bombarded by stimuli, it becomes second nature to push sensitivity out of the conscious awareness. Tuning out from relentless sensations, for example, so you can pretend you don’t give a darn. Toning down intense feelings (good and bad) so you aren’t on a roller coaster. Suppressing emotions to get a break from feeling anything at all.
This self-protective mechanism might fool your conscious mind, but it doesn’t fool your sensitive body. This oozes into your health, your relationships, your career, every aspect of your life … or, it builds tension inside until something has to give.
Successful sensitive types let go of the grasp for control. When you free the energy used to hold yourself tight, you free the gifts of sensitivity that have been lost to you: empathy, creativity, and heightened joy, to name a few. And you allow your true potential to blossom.
Closing Thoughts
As you’re working through the tips above, keep in mind that the key to thriving as a highly sensitive person, more than anything else, is to recognize that it’s perfectly OK to be sensitive — with its challenges and strengths.
Use your deep-thinking mind to recognize hidden understandings, and deliberately refocus on positivity and possibilities.
Use your deep-feeling body to tune in your emotions and sensations, and stay within your optimal range of arousal as often as possible.
Use your heightened awareness to dance to whatever beat you darn well please, even if that seems odd to a lot of people.
Because somewhere, others are dancing with you.
Watch
When the visible makes the unseen obvious…
Ponder
“None of us can ‘mend’ another person’s life, no matter how much the other may need it, no matter how much we may want to do it. Mending is inner work that everyone must do for him or herself. When we fail to embrace that truth the result is heartbreak for all concerned.”
Parker Palmer
Connect
The End of Solitude: Overtaken by Technology
By Arnie Kozak
I’m going to ask you to stop reading after this paragraph and try an experiment. Take out your phone, laptop, and any other devices you have. Turn on all their ringers and notifications. Sit and wait for as long as you can. Don’t read the texts or emails as the notifications pile up. Don’t answer the phone if it rings. Notice what arises within yourself. Go ahead…
…Well, how’d it go? Did it feel like an anxious energy was swelling as pings sounded and remained unchecked? Did the ambient sounds of your environment trigger your orienting response? Perhaps the devices were silent. What did that bring up? Did you sit still and remain calm with this absence of checking?
If you are like most people, the answer may be “no.”
A 2014 study by Timothy Wilson and his research group at Harvard found that people have a disquieting time just being alone with their internal experiences. Subjects were asked to sit quietly in a room without distractions for up to 15 minutes. Half the sample did not enjoy the experience and more than half found it hard to concentrate.
In one variation of the study, subjects had the option of self-administering a shock (sufficiently noxious that prior to the study they said they’d pay money to avoid it). Two-thirds of the men (12 of 18) gave themselves at least one shock, while only one-quarter of the women did so (6 of 24). One outlier gave himself 190 shocks! Lest we think this just applies to digital natives who have been weaned on technology, the study was replicated across age groups with similar results.
The lengths we go to avoid these quiet periods are documented by Michael Harris in The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. He reports that we collectively produce:
- 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
- 637 photographs uploaded to Instagram every second
- 4,000 text messages a teenager manages monthly
- 4.5 billion items “liked” on Facebook in a year
- 6 billion mobile phones worldwide
- 144 billion emails sent daily
- 1 trillion requests for information on Google
How, then, can we find and embrace emptiness in the sea of digital activity we swim through every day? The possibility of constant communication and information can make us allergic to absence. It’s not just that the technology is ubiquitous, invasive, and addicting. Its presence in our lives belies the deeper issue that the Wilson study touched upon: the ability to sit still with ourselves.
This is not a new issue. In the 17th century, Pascal warned,
“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
Louis CK echoed this sentiment when he said the following in relation to cell phones:
“I think these things are toxic, especially for kids. […] You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something [emphasis added]… Everybody [is] murdering each other with their cars… People are willing to take a life and risk their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.”
As introverts, we have more capacity to sit quietly alone, yet we—like everyone else—love and depend upon our technology.
Rainer Maria Rilke said, “The thoughts that enter, even the most fleeting ones, must find me all alone; then they will decide to trust me again.” While Twitter and Instagram are great for catching the inspiration of a moment, they cannot plumb the depths of solitude that Rilke enjoyed, writing letters by hand.
Pioneering psychologist B. F. Skinner made a career out of training pigeons to peck at spots, dance around, and press levers. He found, contrary to what one would expect, that when the food was dispensed only once in awhile instead of constantly, it created a stronger behavior—this is known as intermittent reinforcement operant conditioning. The more uncertain the food delivery was, the more furiously the birds would peck and the longer they would keep trying after the food was gone.
The very same process is at work with emails and texts (and it also explains the addictive power of slot machines). People check their phones up to 46 times per day, and the average worker checks email 74 times per day. This conditioning is what demands that we cleave to arriving information that will confirm us, connect us, and let us know that we are okay. We don’t seem to notice that most of this information is banal, irrelevant, or useless.
Thoreau observed,
“In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.”
At least if you went to the actual post office 74 times per day, you’d get exercise!
Before the Internet, we somehow managed without instantaneous communication and information. We lived in gaps of absence. This is still possible today if we can transform how we interact with our technologies.
So, here’s a suggestion:
Instead of checking your phone 46 times and your work email 74 times per day, focus on checking your breathing. Before responding to what’s in your inbox, pause and feel an entire breath moving through your body, from the air touching the tip of your nose down through your lungs and back out again.
Perhaps, after being with your breath in this way, you’ll decide to forego checking your inbox and continue working on the task at hand. This “obsessive” checking of breath creates a mindful pause, a running stitch of awareness that helps to build the buffers of absence that we so desperately need to focus efficiently and effectively.
By being more mindful around our devices, we can reclaim some of our solitude without needing to ambivalate over the very technologies we depend upon.
In this together,
Candy