When overstimulation and emotional exhaustion combine, the result is a tidal wave that can knock highly sensitive people out for a day or more. About a month ago, my partner and I had a few friends over for dinner to celebrate an exciting milestone — our first time living alone together, no housemates, just us. It’d been a busy week: moving things around, cleaning, organizing real estate paperwork, and general life stuff. We wanted to just have a relaxing night in.      I cooked pasta while everyone talked excitedly, country music blaring from the speakers. By the end ..read more

For HSPs, your greatest strengths can also be your biggest obstacles if you don’t learn to overcome them. Here’s how.  As a highly sensitive people (HSPs), our depth of emotion and depth of experience is the source of your greatest talents. They are the wellspring for your empathy, intuition, and sensory intelligence. Yet these gifts can also leave you feeling blocked at times — especially if you haven’t learned how to fully understand and harness them.  I speak from experience. After working with dozens of creative HSPs with incredible vision and ideas, I seen the same problems emer ..read more

Does it ever feel like your high sensitivity is the one calling the shots, instead of you? Here’s why — and the proven techniques to change it. I have a very rich and vivid imagination. For instance, when I read books, the movie that plays in my mind’s eye is sometimes better than an actual adaptation would be. This isn’t because I’m special; it’s a common trait among many highly sensitive people (HSPs). In recent years, though, I have begun to realize that having such a vivid inner world can be a double-edged sword, as things can linger in my mind for a long time… a very long time. For ..read more

You can’t turn traumatic memories into positive ones, but you can change the story you tell yourself about them. Here’s how. It can sneak up on me, without warning and out of thin air. I can be minding my own business, doing dishes, driving, or daydreaming, and suddenly I am 13 again, humiliated by having to leave the school carnival early because the rides, lights, and blaring music overwhelming me and making me physically sick.  Do you ever have painful memories that sneak up on you? My body often responds involuntarily to these memories, with a jolt of adrenaline that causes a physic ..read more

Any of the 16 personality types can be highly sensitive people — but each type “does” sensitive a little differently. Have you ever felt as though you might not actually be as sensitive as you thought you were because your personality doesn’t fit the typical description to a tee? For example, perhaps you’ve never been much of a crier. Or perhaps you actually have a high tolerance to pain and other physical stimuli. If so, you’re certainly not alone. HSPs come in all sorts of different forms and we have a beautiful variety of personalities.  In the past few years, I’ve been committed to l ..read more

One way to protect your highly sensitive emotions is by figuring out how your energy is being depleted in the first place. Those of us with high sensitivity are known for feeling our emotions very deeply. In fact, science has confirmed that emotions hit highly sensitive people harder, and we also have a greater likelihood of feeling others’ emotions. When our empathic tendencies are activated, almost like a radio signal, we can tune into others’ energy and emotions and mistake them for our own. On the flip side, it’s a common occurrence for highly sensitive people to feel our energy and emot ..read more

Are you deeply moved by art, music, and beauty? You might be an ‘aesthetic’ HSP — and the more you nourish it, the better.  My mom warned me that listening to music so loudly would damage my hearing.  But I was 16 and I didn’t care. I was lucky enough to have my very own old raggedy car to drive myself to school and I wanted — no, needed — to blast my music as loud as I could in order to stand every precious second of the commute. As a highly sensitive introvert, it was my way of readying myself for another overstimulating day at school.  This meant that not only was I a highly ..read more

1 in 10 people are wired to cause conflict. Here’s how to deal with them — without losing your mind. We’ve all met them. The person who can’t let anything go. The person who needs to prove that you’re wrong. The person who has explosive reactions to small things, picks fights that don’t matter, and takes two huge leaps back for every one tippy-toe toward compromise. This is a “high conflict person,” and they create most of the world’s unnecessary drama. They may lie, shout, threaten, or even shove people. They are up to ten times more common than narcissists, and may do just as much damage. A ..read more

For years, I was misdiagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. But then I discovered the truth: I’m just a highly sensitive person. Trigger warnings: Trauma definitions, medical abuse, self-harm There’s a predominating stereotype of highly sensitive people (HSPs) as being overly emotional and indulgent. After all, we tear up more easily than most, absorb others’ emotions (whether we want to or not), and are extremely empathic.  There’s also still a surprising amount of ignorance about mental illnesses, like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), despite all the information out ..read more

HSP burnout can feel like your emotions are bubbling up inside, like a volcano, about to erupt — or like everything’s gone numb. Here’s how to recognize it, and stop it. Sometimes, a highly sensitive person’s (HSP’s) life is filled with stressful events that wear them down and leave them feeling depleted. This is because their heightened sensitivity makes them feel drained even by relatively mild stimuli. So when things get to be too much, they really get to be too much. This is why HSPs burn out so quickly. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that burnout “is a syndrome conceptualized ..read more