Are You HyperSensitive?: Discover All Keys. Dr. Juan Moisés De La Serna

being able to express themselves with phrases such as, “Is it okay if we do so?” or “I suggest everyone give their opinion”.

      Other qualities of highly sensitive people are the harmony with nature, animals, the beach, or plants. Highly sensitive people discover that nature has an effect on them that transmits them calm and relaxation.

      The High Sensitivity or Sensitivity of Sensory Processing is expressed as an awareness of the subtleties of stimuli, and the excess of stimuli manifests in their behaviour. This extreme sensitivity can be associated with perfectionism, the intense and excessive way to generate ideas and vulnerability to noises, smells, or textures. We can relate it to creativity, the ability to understand others and feel what others feel, the sense of justice, and respect for the other person.

      Dabrowski observed how creative people showed higher levels of empathy, moral responsibility, self-reflection, and sensitivity. During times of crisis, they show symptoms related to internal conflict, feelings of inferiority, guilt, anxiety, or hopelessness.

      Other more current research (Aron, Aron and Jagiellowicz, 2012) has shown that what we previously thought was introversion, shyness, empathy, hyperactivity, creativity, and other behavioural factors, when they come together in the same person and are shown to have been born with them, form a trait that has been called the Trait of the highly sensitive person. Although people born with this trait have a lot in common, each one also has their uniqueness and above all, each forms their personality depending on the life that they live.

      The main characteristics of the highly sensitive person, present from birth and lasting throughout the existence of the individual, affecting in turn all areas of their life are as follows (Aron, 2010):

      1. Depth of cognitive processing. It is the most peculiar trait of the HSP, although it cannot be directly observed it is inferred from their behavior, and inferred from their thinking.

      An indicator of this appears as a deep and intense reflection on each new situation in the subject’s life, collecting a lot of information from around them and thinking about it deeply before acting, which leads them to arduous decision-making and requires more reaction time for each task.

      This reflection leads to a stronger emotional reaction, where everything else affects them, they also manage to generate unusual and creative ideas due to this passionate and underlying way of processing information. They can also show a surprising degree of knowledge about themselves or others, a sense of long-term consequences and a great capacity for cognitive interpretation in the face of conversations or tasks.

      2. Over-stimulation. For the HSP the high level of stimulation leads them to high levels of arousal, so at the environmental level, they feel more stressed by noise, chaotic situations, meeting deadlines, etc.

      Regarding social stimulation, they feel more emotionally affected by perceiving more the details of the environment, which manifests itself by showing unusual nervousness, ongoing complaints, or problems with changes.

      In cases where very high levels of arousal occur, this will be reflected in an increase in the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, generating a fight-flight response and thus causing discomfort and poor performance, since cognitive ability decreases generating confusion or affecting short-term memory, which can occur for example when doing tests, speaking in public, talking to strangers, playing sports, or are observed during a workout.

      3. Emotional reactivity. Highly sensitive people have a greater ability to respond emotionally to every event in life, i.e., they feel more intensely positive and negative emotions, as well as being characterized by their inevitable feeling of empathy for others.

      HSP are very sentimental people, who are excited about many things, and can present nostalgia of the past, feel compassion for the most disadvantaged, or cry more easily of joy, sadness or simply gratitude, they can also be more tending to be affectionate, to laughter, to subtle irony or to find in some kind of artistic creation the meaning of many things.

      Emotional intensity as an indication of high sensitivity can be observed in exaggerated behaviours, in which the person appears to be at the end of the emotion generated, manifesting an eye-catching or “antisocial” lack of emotional regulation.

      4. Sensory Sensitivity. Highly sensitive people notice subtle details that other people overlook, such as signs of nonverbal communication or small changes in a place, so sensory sensitivity arises from the processing of stimuli, not from the sense organs themselves, and such sensitivity is expressed in such a way that the individual is more impacted by the entry of sensory stimuli, such as annoying lights, intense odours, unforeseen noises, or rough textures.

      In certain cases, it can also manifest itself as a low sensory threshold, with the ability to differentiate subtle sensations or with a low tolerance to the entry of sensory stimuli. It should be noted that when talking about perceived sensory stimuli, we mean both positive and negative. An individual may not tolerate the smell of a certain perfume, be able to distinguish the ingredients when trying a new food, or always wear sunglasses to protect themselves from the light they consider intense.