Mere Sense

Jennifer wants to talk to Brent. He’s been on her romantic radar ever since their first introduction weeks before. Now is her opportunity. She’s practiced her possible openings, bolstered her confidence with positive, reinforcing self-talk, and waited patiently for a chance to talk to him alone. She sees him across the room and forces her feet forward.

She takes five steps toward Brent. He looks up and their eyes meet. To her horror, she stops dead in her tracks. Before a cohesive thought can form in her mind, her body turns and her feet, in their quickest pace, skitter toward the exit.

Outside the door, she stops her progression just as she gets somewhere in the parking lot. Her heart is beating wildly in her chest. Her breathing is quick and she has begun sweating. If she could glimpse herself in a mirror, she would also see that her pupils have dilated and her skin has become either pale or flushed as her blood flow moves toward her muscles used for her escape and away from other body parts.

As her physical symptoms return to normal, embarrassment kicks in. What kind of bizarre behavior has she just committed?

The truth is that Jennifer has just experienced a fight-or-flight (or freeze) reaction to stress. Completely normal given her circumstances.

Let’s start with the fact that Jennifer is a highly sensitive person.

In Dr. Elaine Aron’s acronym DOES that describes what an HSP is like, we see why Jennifer’s reaction was completely normal:

D – Depth of processing: In the weeks between meeting Brent and her opportunity to talk to him alone, Jennifer mulled her possibilities over in her mind, thinking through every possible scenario.

O – Overstimulation: Awareness and processing of daily stimuli made Jennifer exhausted and in constant survival mode. One major stressor added on top of that base easily sent her into fight-or-flight (or freeze) mode.

E – Emotionally responsive and empathy: Her anxiety at interacting with a man to whom she was romantically attracted to built on the stress she’d created while preparing for her encounter.

S – Sensitive to subtle stimuli: When their eyes met, Jennifer’s empathy and sensitivity to subtle stimuli kicked in. She may have gleaned a responsiveness to her in his eyes, overwhelming her already overloaded emotional barometer.

What can you, as well as Jennifer, do to better handle situations of stress?

Step One: Acknowledge Your Difference

You are not going to act like someone else. You are different. One of those differences is an overactive amygdala, the organ in which the fight-or-flight (or freeze) response originates. It is crucial you accept your differences as normal. Being an HSP is normal. It is your normal.

Step Two: Relax Your Amygdala

Meditation, physical activity, progressive relaxation, deep breathing. Set up a schedule to perform these activities daily. Yoga, tai chi or simple stretching exercises may also be effective in reducing over activity in the amygdala. It is critical to everyday health for an HSP to make time for this practice.

Step Three: Educate Others

Your gift is special. The world is slowly beginning to become aware of and realize that we do exist. And that we are normal people with different reactions to different situations. Spreading the word about our differences will help all of us (and our reactions) find acceptance.

Be courageous as you live your life. Your gifts help the rest of the population in ways they can never fully appreciate. Let your light and your love shine. But take care of yourself in the meantime.

Copyright 2021, Monica Nelson

Long ago, a woman I knew only by casual acquaintance excitedly stopped me in church one day. We were walking past each other in the hall, and I was somewhat surprised to see her there. We had met the week before at a volleyball game, an activity put together by the church’s singles’ group. She and I were one of the first people to arrive. Since I had not seen her at any of our activities before, and I could sense extreme apprehension in her, I introduced myself and asked her if she was new to the group.

She said she attended another church but wanted to get involved in our singles’ group. She said that she was very interested in joining our group but had heard that it was hard to get to know us. I couldn’t disagree with her – it seemed that way to me too when I first joined. I told her not to worry, that I would introduce her to people.

As group members began arriving, I made simple introductions. Nothing out of the ordinary. As the game started, she participated. Laughing, talking, and having fun. The volleyball players seemed to open up to her and treat her like an old friend.

Now, standing in the hallway at church, she thanked me for the introductions with much more gratitude than I felt the small act deserved. She went on to say that she had gone out to socialize with a group of people after the game, and that she had made a couple of friends. She was now here because those friends had persuaded her to join them at our Sunday morning gatherings.

She seemed to bounce away from our encounter with an entirely different demeanor than what I had originally seen in her the prior week. Her revelation floored me. It also sent a warmth into my inner being.

I learned something that day that taught me a great lesson. Every act has a ripple effect. An act of kindness, no matter how small or insignificant you may perceive it, has a domino effect. Exponentially creating goodness down the line. Not just my small act of kindness, but hers as well. Because she took the time to tell me how what I did affected her, I felt encouraged and bolder about reaching out in kindness to people I don’t know.

One of our greatest gifts as HSPs is empathy. Empathy is a superpower that allows us to step into another person’s shoes. We feel someone’s needs and pain, sometimes so thoroughly that we have trouble distinguishing it from our own.

While this does open us up to exploitation, a subject we will address in another blog post, it is also a great opportunity to show another person kindness. Perpetuate good in a world that is lacking.

Unkindness, like kindness, has the same property of perpetuation and domino-effect progression. One small act of kindness goes a long way to fizzle-out so much unkindness that seems to dominate our world.

You have been endowed with a superpower. Cultivating a practice of kindness through your super empathy has the power to transform the world we all live in.

Copyright 2021, Monica Nelson

If you are an HSP, you are different in the way you look at the world. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. And you know instinctively that it is true. But those differences go way beyond the surface interactions you have with the rest of the world. It’s why so many of us feel like we are aliens from another planet trying to live amongst a culture we can never assimilate into.

At the crux of this difference are two very important phenomena: perception and emotion. Both are intertwined and work together to determine who you are: personality, interpersonal relationships, philosophy. Basically, how you see and react to your environment.

Let’s start with perception. We get our sense of the world through our perception of it. How we see life comes to us via our senses: Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste, and Smell. When we encounter these sensory cues, our brains attempt to interpret that input. The resulting perception is filtered through many different screens. For instance, the light through which we see an object can influence the interpretation of what we see.

Perception than is an inference from which we draw our assumptions of how life is. For the average man/woman on the street, this often causes differences in the conclusions they draw from their own perception. When you factor into the mix the differences an HSP brain draws from, you will naturally end up with a perception much different than that average man or woman.

Recently, scientists have begun to discover that there are other influencers to our perception than sensory input. One of those influencers is emotion. Or how we feel at a given moment may also shape what we see. Their conclusion is that there is evidence that perception is more a rendering based on emotional experiences rather than a direct reflection. Emotion not only colors what we take into our awareness – it determines it.

This adds another layer of variance in how we HSPs view life events. We know a common HSP trait is deeply felt emotions. Emotions that touch other people — joy, sadness, being moved by what we see or hear, how quickly and deeply we fall in love, etc. – send us to the extreme end sooner and more often than our non-HSP counterparts. We are in a constant state of one emotion or another, with our emotions many times in that extreme state. What different results we get when we factor in that extreme nature. And how hard it is for the other 80% to even begin to comprehend that.

There is good to be found in this observation. Combining a deeply felt emotional awareness with an HSP’s empathy can infuse positive traits into issues we face today. Tolerance, patience, and objectivity can lead to change and a better world for all. This difference in you can not be taught. It is genetic. Use it wisely and use it well. It matters more than you know.

Suggested Further Reading:

The Impact of Emotion, Perception, Attention, Memory, and Decision-making

The Emotions we Feel May Shape What We See

Copyright 2021, Monica Nelson