Why Highly Sensitive People Struggle More with Stress — And Heal Faster, Too

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why stress tends to hit highly sensitive people harder, and why that same sensitivity can actually become your greatest asset in healing.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why highly sensitive people feel stress more intensely, and why that’s not a flaw, what differential susceptibility really means, and how it explains both struggle and rapid growth. Real life examples of how sensitivity to both pain and positivity can actually be a favorable trait.

Welcome to this edition of Self-Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Why do highly sensitive people tend to struggle more with stress than other people? To understand this, we have to.

Understand what it means to be a highly sensitive person. The scientific version of this is, it’s called sensory processing sensitivity. And what that means is that highly sensitive people process what they get from their environment more thoroughly, more deeply than other people. It’s a trait, it’s just a way we’re wired, and because of that, it can lead to.

Overwhelmed because there’s so much data coming in through the senses and then so much processing going on the inside. And so what would be a small thing for someone else gets really thoroughly processed as a highly sensitive person and can end up having a bigger impact than it does on other people.

This leads to certain limitations that we as highly sensitive people deal with. And it means that we can get overwhelmed more easily and we have to take care of ourselves as a result of we have to live within different limitations than other people. And if we don’t, we can end up stressed more than other people.

It also has to do with the emotional quality of being a highly sensitive person. One of the characteristics of this sensory processing sensitivity is an ability to pay attention to emotions in a very deep way and to be empathetic as well. So we’re aware of the emotions of others. And there’s a lot of information.

Some of it’s stressful coming from the environment where others are stressed or were in a stressful situation Emotionally, this plays into this depth of processing, which can end up creating a bigger impact of the same stressful situation. And so as a highly sensitive person, w we end up getting more stressed more easily than others.

On top of that, the final characteristic of this HSP trait is sensitivity itself. And so we’re actually noticing qualities in our environment, subtle distinctions in our environment that others don’t. And so as a result, we actually have more data as well. So if you add it all together, we have more data coming in.

We process that data more deeply. We’re naturally more emotional and pay attention to emotions in others. When you add that all together, it is very natural for us to get overwhelmed easily. There’s a lower threshold to overwhelm for us, and just knowing that can be extremely helpful because it allows us to buffer ourselves and plan for that because it’s a real part of our makeup.

If we are aware of it and we can work around it, then we actually can do very well. There’s a reason for our sensitivity. It’s not just some kind of handicap. It’s a, it’s not a problem, it just has to be managed well. So this can show up in real life with you get feedback at work and you might take it in, process it deeper.

Feel the emotion of it. If there’s any stressful thought in there, you’re going to dwell on it and you may pick up on the emotional energy of the person delivering it. All that can be overwhelmed and can cause stress. Same thing with being exposed to lots of people, crowded spaces or emotional tones in relationships.

All these things tend to stress highly sensitive people more than others. And just being aware of that can give you some guidance in terms of how much you expose yourself to these things. Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Other times you do. And if you’re aware of these limitations, then you can actually live a very balanced life in a way that works for you.

So this is why highly sensitive people tend to struggle more with stress, but there’s another side to this. This is what is called differential susceptibility, scientific word, but it basically means that we are more sensitive to stress, but we are also equally more sensitive to positive nurturing and growth inspiring types of environments.

We respond negatively, more negatively to difficult situations. And more positively to positive situations. So this is a really important thing to understand. Something that was researched recently. Michael plu and Jay Belsky did a lot of research on this between 2009 nine and 2018. And the basic idea is that people with the HSP trait are.

More responsive to both negative and positive environments. And so they’re not just more vulnerable, but they’re also more responsive to support, to care and to positive influences. And this is a key balancing factor when you add it up against the susceptibility to stress. Yes, we do get stressed more easily, but we are capable of recovering more easily from stress if we’re.

Given the right situation for that. This is means that HSPs benefit more typically from psychotherapy, from coaching, from meditation, from self-inquiry practices like the work of Byron Katie. We do well in warm, responsive environments when we have good parenting or good mentorship or good friends.

We do really well. When we’re in emotionally safe relationships, we do really well. And so it means that if we can be aware of this, we can actually use this to our advantage. The question is like, why would we have so much sensitivity? Like the mind wants to say this is a bad thing, but. In reality, it’s a very good thing because it allows us to go deep.

We can have deep connections with people, we can have deep relationships, we can have meaningful careers. We can do things that we are deeply interested in. We go deeply. And so if we can use or we can set up our environment to be supportive of us, then we have the chance of flourishing even more than other people.

So there’s, there are two sides to it, but it’s not all bad. For example a non highly sensitive person, like an average person might be relatively unaffected by either stress or support. But a highly sensitive person by contrast, might be more stressed by harsh feedback, but also more uplifted by genuine encouragement or self-compassion work.

It’s good to see both sides of the picture. So let’s look at a few things that are real life examples of how sensitivity to both the negative and the positive can actually be a favorable trait for us. First of all, I’ve already mentioned we, do we get more from therapy or from coaching or from inner work?

And that means that we’re able to go deeply in it. We’re able to actually resolve deep inner conflicts and stressors and stresses, and we can actually heal. Whereas many people, they skim the surface and may not actually touch that. And of course each person is different. Every situation is different. But we as highly sensitive people already have an advantage.

Of being extra responsive to this kind of therapy or this kind of inner work. We also have the ability to do really well in emotionally safe relationships. And when we find them, when we create them, we can actually really do extremely well. So this allows for deep connection, allows for a sense of.

Wellbeing and a place to thrive. So it’s just a matter of finding where we fit. Not all gardens in the, not all plants in the garden do well in the same environment. Some like the bright sun and thrive there. Some like it in a little more protected environment, and that’s what highly sensitive people do.

So if you can find that right environment, then highly sensitive people will also do really well and. Another aspect is we do really well in positive learning environments. So we love learning. We go deep with learning, and if we’re given or create a good environment for learning, we can end up really excelling in that in that area of study or that area of learning.

So there are many more ways that being a highly sensitive person gives you advantages. One last thing I’ll mention is just our ability to make or to be emotionally intelligent leaders or creative people or healers. That ability to tune in to the subtleties of the situation. Find a way that is nurturing and supportive to others is, and to pick up on the subtleties that others may miss.

These are. Valuable traits valuable traits. And so if we have to pace ourselves and maybe get overwhelmed if we don’t and have to respect our limits on the other side yeah, sure it’s a trade off, but for me, as a highly sensitive person, I wouldn’t trade it. I’m happy to have a few more limitations on what I can do because I know that I can go deeper, I can have more, like just have a more rich experience in many areas of my life because of the sensitivity. In this episode, we looked at why highly sensitive people feel stress more intensely, and why that’s not a flaw. It’s just a limitation. It just means that we weren’t built for extreme environments, we’re built for a certain kind of environment, and when we find that environment, we actually do really well.

We talked about differential susceptibility, which is just a scientific way of saying that we feel stress more, but we also re recover from it and grow in positive reinforcing environments better. So we’re more susceptible to the negative. We’re also more susceptible to the positive, and that has its advantages and disadvantages.

We also looked at some real life examples of how sensitivity to both negativity and positivity can actually be a favorable trait. And we saw how we tend to thrive in situations where we’re doing inner work or working with a therapist or coach. We do really well in emotionally self relat, emotionally safe relationships.

And we learn deeply when we’re in positive learning environments, and we also make really good emotional or emotionally intelligent leaders, creatives and healers. So these, this is the positive side of it. So thanks for listening. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you, and we will look at more traits of being an HSP on Wednesdays, as well as different ways to manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

On Mondays and Fridays, it’s great to be an SHSP. We actually have a chance of truly getting the most out of a good environment, and that’s tank thanks to this differential susceptibility that we’ve been looking at today.