Why Celebrate Sensitivity? Part 1: Intro to Sensitivity

"Why Celebrate Sensitivity?" Good question! So good, that I'm going to write an extended blog post series to answer it! Way to go, us! But before I delve into why sensitivity is something not only worth celebrating, but something the world desperately needs to celebrate in this moment in history, it would probably be helpful to clarify what exactly sensitivity is!

An Introduction to Human Sensitivity

The word "sensitive" gets thrown around a lot by people, often preceded by the words "don't be so..." or "you're just too..." or wait...is that just my experience? Oh...whoops.

Anyway, according to researchers who study the trait of sensitivity, when applied to a person the word sensitivity is simply how finely tuned someone's nervous system is to pick up on internal and external stimuli.

"Whoa...stimuli?? That sounds so science-y!"

Why yes, it is science-y! But not terribly hard to understand. You see, just like we're all born with say different hair colors or skin tones, we're also born with nervous systems that have different levels of sensitivity. Sensitivity researchers-- being the fun and fancy free people that they are-- have created a nice flower metaphor to help people understand different levels of sensitivity: Dandelions, tulips, and orchids.

Making up the majority of the population (approximately 40%), tulips represent people born with moderate sensitivity. They don't do well just anywhere (like dandelions) but aren't quite as sensitive as orchids. If you're in this group, you probably have never even really had to think about how sensitive you are, because since you're the majority, the world is generally set up to accommodate your level of sensitivity. But, tulips are more sensitive to their environments than dandelions, so being surrounded by mostly positive or mostly negative stimuli would likely have a relatively significant impact on your physical and emotional well-being!

Rounding out the garden are the highly sensitive orchids-- the focus of this blog! Orchid people are the group of people (estimated to be somewhere between 20-30% of the population) born with a finely tuned nervous system. Not to be confused with a mental disorder or even disease, researchers see high sensitivity as a basically neutral trait that can come with both benefits and setbacks depending on the context the person is in. Because highly sensitive people (HSP's) take in and process at a deeper level the external and internal stimuli they are confronted with, their mental health and well-being are more greatly influenced by how positive or negative their environments are. Just like an orchid, under the right conditions, HSP's have the potential to thrive, sometimes even more than their dandelion and tulip counterparts. But under poor conditions, HSP's will more quickly wilt and have a much more difficult time re-blooming than the other groups.

The first group, which researchers estimate accounts for approximately 30%of the human population are born with low sensitivity; they are the dandelions! Just like a dandelion, people with low sensitivity can thrive just about anywhere, under most conditions. Dandelion people's nervous systems don't take in as much, or don't process as deeply, internal and external stimuli, which makes it easier to adapt to many different conditions. For example, a dandelion's past and current living situations have less of an impact on their health and mental health outcomes than these factors would for the other two groups, because they take in and process less of the internal (emotions, moods, etc.) and external (family relationships, neighborhood, environment) stimuli around them. In general, they tend to have an easier go of it (emotionally) than the next two groups.

So, as you can see, a person's level of sensitivity can have a significant impact on their particular gifts and talents, but also the challenges they face in life. All levels of sensitivity have their benefits and their setbacks, but what's important to note is that the world often operates as if ALL of us have (or should have) the same level of sensitivity to internal and external stimuli, when physiologically this just isn't true! Creating a world that embraces the wide spectrum of sensitivity found in humanity and sees the value in this diversity, could do a lot to improve the mental health and well-being of individuals, organizations, and civilizations.

*A Quick Note about Categories.

Most of us love putting people into categories (<---See? I just put most people into a category of loving to put people into categories!), and categorizing things can be helpful when trying to understand phenomena in the world and in human behavior. However, there is a danger to categorization when we start to place judgements on categories or treat them rigidly. Sensitivity is a spectrum, and we might not all fit neatly into one of the categories above, and that's great! No matter how hard scientists try, every single person is completely unique in several ways, and, just like no two orchids look exactly the same, no two people act, feel, or think the same way either.

So basically what I'm saying is that while it's tempting to lump people into categories for simplicity's sake, it's worth it to realize that although general categories may exist, not everyone fits neatly into them and that if we are going to categorize humans, it's important not to place so much stock into categories that we miss the wholeness of who a person is.

How do I Know if I'm Highly Sensitive?

Another great question! Look at you! Well, there actually is a measure that was developed by the clinical psychologist who discovered the trait of high sensitivity, Elaine Aron, Ph.D. The Highly Sensitive Person Scale has been used in numerous research studies and tested for validity and reliability and has been found to be effective in identifying individuals who have High Sensory Processing Sensitivity (which is just fancy science talk for high sensitivity). If you're interested in taking the Highly Sensitive Person Scale, click here.

Conclusion

So thanks for reading through Part 1 of my series answering the question: Why celebrate sensitivity?. Hopefully, this post gave you a beginning understanding of the concept of human sensitivity. Believe me, there's a ton more to sensitivity and if you have questions or would like more information on sensitivity research, please don't hesitate to contact me by going to, you guessed it: "Contact Me" on my website! I hope you'll come back for more when I post Part 2 (of 3) of this series, which focuses specifically on the benefits and challenges of growing up a a Highly Sensitive Person