High sensitivity: what does it mean?

High sensitivity can be a wonderful, but also debilitating quality. How does it feel to be highly sensitive?

About 15-20 percent of people are said to struggle with high sensitivity. But what exactly does this term mean?

At the beginning it should be said here directly: High sensitivity , also called hypersensitivity, is not an illness. It is much more a trait, a personality trait . Highly sensitive people perceive their surroundings differently, i.e. they perceive them much more intensely.

How highly sensitive people struggle in everyday life

Some situations are horrifying for highly sensitive people: a car driver honks his horn in the parking lot, a salesman screams five meters away, a baby is crying loudly in its pram. What sounds like a completely normal situation in public is a nightmare come true for people suffering from high sensitivity. It can cost her all her strength to deal with such everyday situations.

This is why open-plan offices are a burden, especially for highly sensitive people. Your ability to hide stimuli is much weaker, and every phone ring, chatter from colleagues or whistles from the person sitting next to you quickly become torture for your nerves.

Not only the perception of all sensory stimuli, but also of emotions is intensified in highly sensitive people . They absorb a larger amount of information from their environment. In addition, they have a different quality. Processing all this extremely intense information takes a lot of energy for highly sensitive people. As a result, you may be more likely to show signs of overexertion than other people.

The phenomenon was first officially treated by science in 1996. At the time, the US psychologist Elaine N. Aron and her husband published an article on this topic and coined the term "Highly Sensitive Person". dr As early as 1996, Aron emphasized that hypersensitivity should not be understood as an illness.

Hypersensitivity: Certain areas of the brain are more active

In contrast to then, there are now new neurobiological findings that prove that in highly sensitive people, the parts of the brain that are responsible for processing sensory stimuli are more active. However, not all those affected perceive all types of sensory impressions more intensively. While some are particularly sensitive to smells, others are much more bothered by loud noises.

But not only do the senses of highly sensitive people work at full speed, their empathy is also more pronounced. Highly sensitive people perceive the emotions of other people more clearly and are more likely to let them get to them. They soak it up like a sponge, causing other people's negative feelings to cloud their own mood.

The symptoms of high sensitivity often appear in young people. Highly sensitive children are usually perceived by those around them as shy and introverted. The reason for this is that they have to retreat more often due to the overload caused by the increased sensory impressions. The stressful feeling of being different and somehow not really belonging is a problem for many highly sensitive people. Sentences like "Don't be so sensitive!" cause exactly the unintended opposite and put unnecessary pressure on those affected. On the other hand, it is important to treat highly sensitive adults and children with understanding and to offer them opportunities to withdraw.