Elaine Aron

ACT 1: Everyone, HSP or not, feels best when neither too bored nor too aroused

FACT 1: Everyone, HSP or not, feels best when neither too bored nor too aroused.

Too little arousal and one is dull, ineffective. To change that underaroused physical state, we drink some coffee, turn on the radio, call a friend, strike up a conversation with a total stranger, change careers—anything!

Other children were not always as nice about it. As an adult, it has probably been harder to find the right career and relationships and generally to feel self-worth and self-confidence.

Further, it is safe to say that everyone can become highly sensitive at times—for example, after a month alone in a mountain cabin. And everyone becomes more sensitive as they age. Indeed, most people, whether they admit it or not, probably have a highly sensitive facet that comes to the fore in certain situations.

Help With Feeling Okay When Out in the World and Learning When to Be Less Out.

What is this, I thought, some excuse? She said she had never thought much about it, but from her experience it seemed that there were real differences in people’s tolerance for stimulation and also their openness to the deeper significance of an experience, good and bad.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote very wisely on the subject, calling it a tendency to turn inward. The work of Jung, himself an HSP, has been a major help to me, but the more scientific work on introversion was focused on introverts not being sociable, and it was that idea which made me wonder if introversion and sensitivity were being wrongly equated.

We are often the first ones to see what needs to be done. As our confidence in our virtues grows, perhaps more and more of us will speak up—in our sensitive way.

Defining High Sensitivity—Two Facts to Remember