Why Highly Sensitive People Feel Things So Deeply and What Those Feelings Are Trying to Tell You

 By the end of this episode, you’ll understand why highly sensitive people feel things so deeply, and what becomes possible when you stop treating big feelings like something is wrong with you. In this episode, you’ll discover how big feelings can show up in everyday life for highly sensitive people, why many highly sensitive people learn to judge themselves for feeling things so deeply, and what those big emotional reactions may actually be trying to show you about stress, needs, boundaries, and alignment.

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. So what do I mean by big feelings? Big feelings in daily life. There can be many, many sources for this experience, but it’s something that highly sensitive people experience on a regular basis.

Here are some examples of where this can come from. For example, emotional carryover. This means, say, for example, you had… You experienced some criticism and somebody said something to, about you or criticized something you did, and you will find, as a highly sensitive person, that this may naturally stay with you for quite a while.

And you may find that for hours or even days, this feeling or this memory keeps, uh, continuing to come up. The emotion of it continues to come up. Another good one is conflict. When you’re have a conflict, even just a slight disagreement, this can affect your emotions quite strongly as a highly sensitive person, and it may tend to linger, uh, internally for quite a while Also, emotional tension.

Doesn’t have to be outright conflict. It can be just that feeling of tension between two people. This can be something that you end up replaying and having, uh, associated with emotions, uh, in your mind. The same thing can happen with positive things. This would be like positive amplification, where you see something beautiful and it affects you deeply.

You may be moved to tears. You may continue to think about it and replay that beautiful experience and experience those beautiful emotions again and again and feel them deeply. It could happen with music, where it moves you strongly and you continue to ride on that emotion and feel that for a while, and you feel it deeply.

Any kind of meaningful moments that feel profound to you can move you. Even l- seeing some, some insight can sometimes be moving. And these are all signs of, uh, what I mean by big feelings that aren’t necessarily negative, but are very common for highly sensitive people. Even that w- when you have a connection with someone, you experience connection with someone, it can move you, again, to tears.

It can also just create this strong, positive emotion inside of you that is hard to ignore. For example, falling in love. This is experienced much more strongly for highly sensitive people than it is for others. And so this is an example of what I mean by big feelings showing up in, uh, daily life for highly sensitive people.

Another area where this shows up is overwhelm. We become overwhelmed more quickly as highly sensitive people because we’re taking in so many different things from our environment, and we are processing those, looking for meaning, and naturally coming up with lots of connections with everything that we s- we take in.

And so we, when we get overwhelmed, we can end up experiencing emotion with that. When you feel flooded, for example, during a conflict, you will feel emotion. When you feel emotional exhaustion after social situations, this is an emotion. Um, and so you may find yourself just being affected more by the things around you and by distressful environments and by just too much going on.

And so that overwhelm can lead to a feeling that culminates in an internal experience which is emotional. It’s almost as if all of our experiences move things inside of us and create an emotion as the end result so that we can become aware of it So another area where big emotions can show up is when you notice misalignment.

This could be misalignment with yourself or misalignment with, with others, but this tends to affect highly sensitive people strongly. We like alignment. We like the inside to match the outside, and we like that for ourselves, and we also like that for others. That allows us to go deep. And when that isn’t there, it’s like you, you can’t go as deeply.

So there can be a frustration, there can be a sadness, there can be a grief, there can be, uh, any number of reactions, emotional reactions showing up when there’s a lack of alignment. Same thing when, when we’re feeling, say, discouraged by some kind of meaningless work or superficial interactions or feeling a disconnection or an in-inauthenticity.

All of these things can create a quite strong emotion inside. Like if you’re planning where you’re going and what you’re wanting to do, you can be looking at your life and where you’re going or something. If you spot some kind of misalignment, it can feel very heavy. It can feel depressing, actually. “I don’t know where I’m going.

I don’t know what I need to be doing,” or, “This isn’t exactly the way I was hoping. I’m not sure it’s gonna work.” That kind of feeling like, “I’m not sure I’m in the right direction or in the right place or in the right job or in the right relationship,” that can show up as emotion. Another place where big feelings show up is in the experience of empathy.

And so we naturally feel the, or notice the emotions of others around us, and then we experience emotions ourselves in a reflective way around the, these people. And so we may sometimes have difficulty separating our own emotions from theirs, and we notice that the emotions go up and down depending on what’s going on around us.

And then finally, there can be exi-existential types of feelings where there’s just a longing or there’s a grief or there’s a purpose-related intensity or just an emotional heaviness around some kind of suffering or around injustice, for example. So in all of these, and there could be many more, this is how emotions, emotions show up for us in highly– as highly sensitive people, and they show up regularly.

They show up all the time. And so sometimes they’re positive, sometimes they’re negative, but this is the landscape of being a highly sensitive person, the internal landscape

So the problem is, is that we tend to start to judge ourselves for these emotions. And this is where the suffering begins, because suffering doesn’t come from the feelings themselves, but suffering comes from the relationship we have with those feelings. When that relationship is judgmental, when that relationship is self-critical, then it starts to become proof that there’s something wrong with us.

And this comes straight from cultural conditioning. There, w- there’s a generalized understanding that there’s a right way, there’s a certain amount of sensitivity that’s good, and anything more than that is bad. And we pick this up from our cultures, and we pick this up from the world at large. And don’t forget, highly sensitive people only make up about 15 to 20% of the world’s population.

So that means that for 80 to 85% of the people are not living this way. They don’t experience it this way. They’re not wired this way. And so when we normalize their experience, we can make ourselves, uh, we can end up judging ourselves as too sensitive, too emotional, and, and we hear them saying, “Calm down.

Come on, don’t take this so personally. What’s wrong with you?” And we start really thinking that there is something wrong with us. After all, others seem less affected, and so you may start to feel like you’re too much. “Oh my gosh, I feel so much emotion. It’s so strong.” And re- there can be a kind of internalized shame that comes as a result of that.

You may start to feel embarrassed about your emotions, or you may judge your reactions, uh, as being excessive. And so we may want to or y- try to control that, and we try to suppress our emotions because big feelings feel vulnerable and they feel unpredictable, and they can be hard to manage. And so we fear burdening other people, and we imagine that we are too much for other people.

And so this can really cause a lot of suppression, a lot of sup- uh, self-judgment, and this is when the suffering really starts to happen. Pain, like, okay, I feel a painful emotion. I feel a sadness, or I feel an anger. Like, that’s one thing. But when I’m judging myself on top of that, now that emotion spirals out of control.

So the problem is often not the emotional intensity itself, but emotional overwhelm without understanding. We think there’s something wrong, and then that becomes a concern So what are big feelings actually for? Big feelings are often amplification systems, signaling systems. They are something that orients us to what’s going on, and this helps us to pay attention and to notice things that others may not notice, but that are important not to ignore.

And this is probably due to just natural evolution. The, the scientists theorize that there’s a need for highly sensitive part of the population and then a non-highly sensitive part of the population, and they complement each other. And for us who are highly sensitive, what our role is, is to notice things earlier.

We notice danger earlier, we notice tension earlier, we notice misalignment earlier, we notice relational problems earlier, we notice environmental problems earlier, and we notice emotional incongruence earlier. So big feelings help to create attention, and they help us to be aware of problems in their infancy, so when something can actually be done about it.

And not everybody has to be aware of it, just enough percentage of the population so that it doesn’t go under the radar, so that somebody notices it, sounds the alarm, and something gets done. Also, when you look at the internal experience of emotions, strong emotions like we have, it actually gives a very strong motivation to do something.

You can’t just ignore a strong emotion, whereas you can ignore something very mild or very subtle. And so these strong emotions invite us, almost coerce us into taking corrective action, adjusting a course for ourselves, and helping to contribute to society by pointing out where things could be going in a better direction

Another really important point is that big feelings often arrive before you have conscious clarity, and this is super important. Your emotional system may recognize that something is wrong or that something’s matters that you need to pay attention to long before your mind fully understands it. And so this is like the early warning system.

It’s just a feeling. I don’t know why, but I just have a feeling. This is information. This is super important to pay attention to because this is something that can lead to where you point your mind, and then your mind will start to understand it as well So big feelings can help, uh, highly sensitive people notice when stress starts to accumulate inside the system.

It can help us understand or notice when misalignment is starting to happen or when boundaries are needed or when there’s some kind of emotional incongruence going on. We notice all these things earlier because of our amplification system that is built in as being highly sensitive. So when we see these things, when we notice these things, it allows us time to take corrective action and actually do something about it before it becomes a bigger problem.

Also, over time, this can deepen self-awareness and you can become more aligned and you can end up becoming more honest and you can end up becoming more aware of how to finally correct these emotions. I like to think of emotions on a scale of intensity from very fine, almost not there, to very intense on the other side.

And they tend to get louder and louder if we ignore them. So first comes this fine feeling, then a little louder, then a louder, and then it gets louder, and then it really comes strong. And the more accustomed we are to listening to these emotions and doing something about them, the more tools we have to take care of the situations that arise, the more we’re going to be able to nip it in the bud.

And so over time, you may find yourself, uh, being able to catch emotions in their infancy before they have to go so strong. But don’t worry, it’s like a good alarm clock. If you miss the early warning, it will just keep getting louder until it wakes you up So one other important point to think about is that big feelings are not automatically correct.

Just because it’s a feeling doesn’t mean it’s correct. It is just something real is going on. And the difference is it’s not– the interpretation may not actually be correct. So the mind may think, “Oh my God, this is terrible,” and the emotion is real. There’s something going on, but the interpretation may actually not be true.

And that’s why questioning your thoughts that are associated with emotions can yield a lot of clarity. You can start to sort out what is actually true and what is just exaggeration or misinformation, which can happen to us and to anyone else as well. So think of emotions as warning lights on the dashboard of your car.

Big feelings are like the big red flashing light saying, “Hey, take this in. There’s something going on. Take a look.” The light itself is not the problem. It’s the information that it’s giving you. And so you still need to use discernment to think about, is this signal accurate? Is there something that needs attention?

Is there some interpretation that’s needed? But shutting off the light doesn’t solve the issue. So this is something that I love to think about as, as just a, an analogy, that emotions are there to wake us up. And when we pay attention, they can help us dramatically. As HSPs, somehow a lot of us learned that our goal is somehow to stop having big feelings But I think the deeper goal is to understand them, to relate to them differently, and to listen to their wisdom.

Emotions are not random things. They give us information. They give us direction. They tell us when something is off. And when you check it out, when you look at it, and when you have tools to be able to work with emotions that are at the same time respectful of the emotions, but also not just taking their immediate interpretations as truth, then you can start to clarify what is going on.

Something’s off. What is it? And as you look closer, you may start to see what’s actually holding you back, what’s actually causing the emotion, and you may start to be able to address the deeper issue that that emotion is pointing to, that it’s arising from. And when you are able to use emotions in this way, they can be amazing diagnostic tools for unearthing what is hidden from the conscious awareness and then beginning to find and bring conscious awareness to the areas that are confused or are misaligned or have some kind of thing that is causing the emotional alarm to go off.

So your feelings are not evidence that there’s something wrong with you. They are part of how your nervous system protects you and guides you and informs you and orients you, and they help you to recognize what’s important and where the difference is between what is feeling right and what is not feeling right, what is feeling balanced and what is not feeling balanced.

There are these fine little feedback mechanisms that let us know what’s going on inside. And as highly sensitive people, we have those feelings amplified. We have an amplification of those natural emotions that allows us to be aware of things that others don’t always notice. And this is a major advantage for us.

So the feeling I’m left with today is that feelings, emotions are information. As highly sensitive people, we get more information than o- than others, and this helps us to fine-tune our own lives as well as the world around us The natural amplification of feelings in highly sensitive people allows us to work on the level of prevention and correcting imbalances before they become too big.

In this episode, we looked at how big feelings can show up in everyday life for highly sensitive people, and we saw so many different areas where these come from. It could be anything from emotional carryover to overwhelm to, uh, noticing meaning and misalignment to empathy. And we then looked at why many highly sensitive people learn to judge themselves for feeling things so deeply, and that is because we’re in the minority and most people don’t have this kind of strong feelings on a regular basis the way we do.

And so we may start to think that there’s something wrong with us, and that may be reinforced by what other people think of us as well And then finally, we looked at what those big emotional reactions may actually be trying to show you about stress, about needs, about boundaries, and about alignment. And the basic simple idea is that emotions show us information.

They tell us when we are aligned or when we’re not aligned. They show us when we’re believing something that isn’t true for us or when we’re actually believing something that is true for us. We are aware of when we’re doing something that, mm, that actually is helping us versus something that isn’t. So emotions are a sensitive feedback mechanism that allow us to actually prevent issues if we pay attention to them.

And as you mature over the years, you’ll find that you can start catching your emotions, like noticing the emotions earlier and earlier so they don’t have to become as big as, uh, as they do when you don’t listen to them. But that said, you will probably always feel emotions strongly. That’s just part of being highly sensitive, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

So thank you for listening. It’s always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.