Category: Featured

Are we cry-babies?

Are we cry-babies?

Highly sensitive people can be considered “weak” “soft” “pathetic” and “cry babies”. That comes from the following article, and reminded me of when I was a kid in Boy Scouts. At one of our meetings, some of the other boys got the idea to have some fun by pantsing someone. I was the chosen victim, [...]

Highly sensitive people less influenced by culture

Highly sensitive people less influenced by culture

Stony Brook University Building on previous brain imaging research that revealed cultural influences play a role in neural activation during perception, Arthur Aron, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and colleagues, completed a study that suggests individuals who are highly sensitive have cognitive responses that appear to not be influenced by culture at [...]

Sensitive to anxiety

Sensitive to anxiety

Being highly sensitive probably increases our vulnerability to anxiety. I’m sure that has been the case for me, and I have had varying degrees of anxiety for most of my life. Part of my motivation in researching and creating my series of sites is to better understand a variety of social and psychological issues that [...]

Sensory processing sensitivity: smelling books and reading vinyl record grooves

Sensory processing sensitivity: smelling books and reading vinyl record grooves

Savant sensitivity The term ‘savant’ may be most often used for people such as Daniel Tammet, who is autistic and can recite more than 22,000 digits of pi from memory. [See my post Savant abilities and learning differences relate to developing multiple talents] In his book Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, [...]

Better at noticing subtle details

Better at noticing subtle details

Photorealist painting is one form of creative expression that demands a high degree of technical prowess and attention to detail. The image is Tom’s Diner, 1993, a watercolor by Ralph Goings – from the book Photorealism at the Millennium, by Louis K. Meisel, Linda Chase. A recent CNN article on “sensory processing sensitivity” reports that [...]

Gifts and challenges of being highly sensitive

Gifts and challenges of being highly sensitive

Therese Borchard of Beliefnet recently interviewed me – her article [on Beliefnet] is titled 5 Gifts of Being Highly Sensitive and 5 Curses. She also published it for her Huffington Post column with the title 5 Gifts of Being Highly Sensitive – which has over 100 comments. Here are her two questions, and my responses: [...]

27 Tips For Navigating College As a Highly Sensitive Person

27 Tips For Navigating College As a Highly Sensitive Person

By Andrea Runyan While college can be an exciting and fruitful experience, it can also be a challenging time for Highly Sensitive People (HSPs). As the first time when many students are living away from home, college presents many potential challenges for the HSP, such as eating dining hall food; living in a dormitory; having [...]

Elizabeth Wagele: Are Introverts More Creative than Extraverts?

Elizabeth Wagele: Are Introverts More Creative than Extraverts?

In her Psychology Today blog post Are Introverts More Creative than Extraverts?, writer, cartoonist and musician Elizabeth Wagele writes about how this key personality dimension relates to creative expression. Here is an excerpt : Are liking solitude and focusing inward creative gifts? My café friends and I, mostly introverts, were discussing where our various kinds [...]

Relationships can be difficult for highly sensitive people

Relationships can be difficult for highly sensitive people

“I am shy and I don’t start relationships with people normally. I guess I have a way that can seem aloof and sort of cold. They didn’t like me that much, but I never resented it. I was different than they were.” Actor Kristin Kreuk – about being in high school. Being highly sensitive may [...]

Our High Sensitivity Personality – a video

Our High Sensitivity Personality – a video

About 15 to 20 percent of us have this trait of high sensitivity, which nurtures our creativity and social activism, but also brings challenges. Psychologist Elaine Aron and others describe it as a more finely tuned nervous system. She explains, “It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many [...]

Developing creativity: hypervigilance and highly sensitive people

Developing creativity: hypervigilance and highly sensitive people

The idea of the “sensitive artist” may be a cliche, but still basically true. Sometimes high sensitivity may be based on difficult or hurtful situations. Ashley Judd says she was a “hypervigilant child.” To fuel creative expression requires that we have an ability to be in touch with internal and external feelings and sensations. As [...]