High Sensitivity, Part 2

In a different article, I wrote about the trait of high sensitivity and how to learn more about it. I don’t believe many people in our culture are aware of the trait of high sensitivity. This character trait isn’t valued in the dominant culture, and it’s often pathologized. I suspect that many highly sensitive people experience overstimulation from time to time without knowing what’s going on with them. They may be aware that they’re in distress, but may not know the cause of their distress—and therefore don’t know how to care for themselves in the midst of it.

What do you do when you’re feeling overwhelmed with distress? If you’re like most people in our culture, you start blindly looking for ways to try to get it to stop. That often means turning to an addictive substance or behavior to try to drown out the feeling. My own #1 drug of choice is black tea with macadamia milk, which (I know) isn’t a logical choice because it jacks up my energy even more. (Since writing this article in 2011, I’ve also discovered that it’s very high in oxalates, which can be problematic in myriad ways in large doses. I’ve mostly switched to white tea, which is lower in both oxalates and caffeine.)

If your comfort substance is food, that’s where you’ll naturally gravitate if you’re feeling distress and you don’t know what you’re feeling. One of my coaching clients (who gave permission for me to share this info) experienced a significant shift in his relationship with food after learning that he’s a highly sensitive person (HSP). Before learning about being an HSP, he’d go out into the world, would get overstimulated, and would come home, overeat, and then go to sleep. That was his automatic way of dealing with the overstimulation.

Once he found out about being an HSP, he started to recognize that being out in the world is naturally going to be overstimulating for him. That piece of information has allowed him to consciously figure out ways to avoid or handle overstimulation instead of defaulting to an unconscious behavior pattern. Now when he’s overstimulated, he takes deliberate steps to still himself. He may do something meditative such as looking out a window at nature or sitting quietly to get calm. His awareness of his HSP nature allows him to take steps to care for himself and has helped him break the cycle of unconscious eating. In his words, “Now that I know what’s going on, I have choices about how to calm myself.”

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