Transcript for:
Understanding Highly Sensitive People (HSPs)

ah well at least it's not too crowded but the parking lot it was so stressful I thought for sure I'd be late I'd to drive around 15 times to find a spot I'm hungry uh no I don't know I just know my heart's racing and I really really wish that I could just calm down for once you know monkey mine can kill a person sometimes it feels that way when you're highly sensitive hi I'm Elaine friend and I want to welcome you to this talk on highly sensitive people and if you're here you probably know someone who's just too damn sensitive I'm one of them highly sensitive people are 20% of the population that's more than the number of people that live in China almost 1.6 billion and growing people in the world have a brain that's more highly reactive and I'm one of them it's a trait sensitivity we call it sensory processing sensitivity that's the trait that a person is born with if they are a highly sensitive person it's not a disorder it's not a mental illness it's not neuroticism and it's not even introversion it's just that certain parts of the brain work a little more reactively than other parts so we're born with it and it's something that can't be changed oh I'm a lame friend and I work closely with Elaine Aaron who's the author of the book the highly sensitive person we often teach and speak together and I wanted to tell you a little bit about Elaine Aaron because she discovered the trait and she and I were horse buddies at the barn and one day she came up to me and said Elaine you're a highly sensitive person like yeah I know I've been told my whole life thank you very much hypersensitive overly sensitive just too sensitive but turns out that I do this special kind of therapy called equine assisted psychotherapy and she thought that would be great for HSPs the nickname and so I went home I'd never even heard I didn't know my friend Elaine was famous I never even heard the term highly sensitive person when this happened so I went home and I googled her and found out that she was literally the author of the term as well as several books on the topic and from there we developed curriculum together and I became an expert in this field and it's changed my life I'm forever grateful so here's what she did elaine was in therapy one day and her therapist said you're highly sensitive and she went home and she started thinking about that and then she started she was at UC Santa Cruz and she put fliers up all over campus saying do these things resonate with you if so give me a call I'd like to interview you so she initially interviewed about 60 people and for two and three hours of peace and she found a lot of similarities so since then the aaron's her husband and her are both research psychologists and they started doing a ton of research and they looked over research for the last basically hundred years and they found evidence of this trait of high sensitivity in 15 to 20 percent of over a hundred species and basically our two strategies in the world and this is what you can find in all these different species the first one is do it right and do it once so these are the highly sensitive people they think before they act even the kindergartner who shows up to school the very first day and they'll stop in the doorway and look around the classroom what's over there oh who's playing there when I smell something is there cooking am I gonna cook are we gonna get to eat is it sweet it's not just if you're in the go for it if you're wrong you just do it again strategy which is the kindergartner who gets to the front door and runs in and starts playing with the trucks right away and so the teacher might walk over to the door of the kindergarten and say oh is he shy and in fact the parent might say no he's not shy he just likes to get the lay of the land but he jumps in can anybody relate to that so we need both kinds of people and and we think that that is why we've evolved to have about 20% of almost every species probably have this trait this more reactive brain so a lot of times we think that the highly sensitive people are introverted that they don't want to go out and be in the world and you can't really tell by looking necessarily you can't tell by her whether she's an introvert or an extrovert but 70% of highly sensitive people are introverted and 30% are extroverted but I'd like to use these words as verbs so you know I am introverted but today I'll be extroverted here on stage but I had to do a lot of self-care to be able to do that and that's what both introverts and extroverts need now here's an old study 1968 Thomas and birch found that 65% of children fit into these three distinct types the 40% are Easy's you've heard of easy babies Oh an easy toddler and easy child oh yes she's so easy those are not the highly sensitive people so 15% are the slow to warm up and 10% are difficult and we can call these highly sensitive children and adults orchids the research on animals these are just three distinct studies that give us a really good idea and so the fruit flies sitters versus Rovers so in the presence of food some fruit flies will sit and some are zipping all over the place so it turns out this is kind of crazy and hard to believe but I promise it's it's true the sitter's have more neural complexity than the Rovers they're thinking before they go zipping to the food the pumpkin seed sunfish they're in a pond studied by biologists at Cornell and they identified two different categories of these fish bold and timid and it turns out that the bold ones were the ones who were less responsive to novel things so if there's a trap in the pond that wasn't there before 80 percent eighty to eighty-five percent of the pumpkin seed sunfish just swam right into the trap and got trapped and 15 to 20 percent so there's something new let me hesitate and stay back from the trap so sometimes we might say I might say careful or impulsive primates there's of course lots and lots of studies on primates because their brains are more similar to ours and the the behavioral psychologists and retn biologists like to really look at primates in comparison to people and so with the rhesus monkeys and many different primates they've identified about 15 to 20 percent are called uptight versus laid-back and again more and less responsive to their environment so how do you figure out if someone's highly sensitive we use this acronym does do es so D is depth of processing we are deep processors deep thinkers we think maybe a little too much sometimes I say yeah you know I could let go of the D for a while yes the highly sensitive people really probably are the first to notice that you know there's issues with the climate or the highly sensitive child is the one who notices every little piece of litter but mom wishes we could just get to school rather than stopping to pick it up they're thinking highly sensitive people are thinking and processing deeply all the time and because of that they can become more easily overstimulated which is the Oh now everyone has an optimal level of arousal that's when you're just your best self you're not overly tired you're not over stimulated you're not anxious your heart rate is what feels best to you and optimal level of arousal is different for everyone right under arousal we know from the research is not good it can be boredom or isolation it can really shut you down and but I would say over arousal is the struggle for most highly sensitive people and really it's the only negative aspect of being high Lisa is that feeling of being overstimulated it makes you feel like you just can't function and we tend to go there easily and it means that we need more time all that deep processing we need to spend time taking care of ourselves in order to not be over stimulated all the time e is emotionally reactive and it also means empathy because if you're having a lot of emotions you're probably having empathy for others often the underdog be it the planet or the children or people who are struggling in a way that you're not struggling well all that empathy and strong emotional reactions because if you think deeply you're gonna have strong emotional reactions about things all of that can also be overstimulating it's challenging and I always want to say to the parents who are listening we can't expect our highly sensitive children to have empathy toward their younger siblings no that's not where empathy shows up because they're probably overstimulated by their siblings but you will find that they have empathy for the puppy or for younger children or the child in their classroom who's struggling more than they are s is sensitivity to subtle stimuli we notice every little thing the lights are too bright the temperature changed the tag in the clothes you can I'll just give you a moment to think about all the little things that you notice the highly sensitive person is the person who walks into the room and notice that if the blinds were just lowered a little bit the son wouldn't be in that person's eyes or that if they just crack the window in the car everybody would be more comfortable they're noticing every little thing at the same time when the water bottles in the case of Perrier from Trader Joe's or tinkling in the back and banging against each other the highly sensitive person can't drive another block if they are sensitive to sound and we're all as we have as many different ways to be sensitive as we have highly sensitive people okay look at the jellyfish and see if you can find the hot-air balloon I'll give you just a few seconds I'm moving on because I want to increase your stress so it's found one of the ways that our brains are more reactive is in visual scanning so we are more able to perform higher on visual scanning tests but we have a higher perceived stress and if visual scanning while you're listening to a presentation makes you feel a little overstimulated you're going to perform less well but in optimal conditions you're going to really be able to function highly because highly sensitive person brain has better visual scanning ability and discrimination so where's the turtle it's all the way to your left about 3 up from the bottom those were not pictures that were used in actual research on HSPs but it's a quick and easy way for you to see it so more activation in the brain in making fine visual distinction and this study this research has been replicated many many times so are there any scientists listening here people who really want to know the nitty-gritty details because the the research on the brain is fascinating so here is a picture that was actually used in one of the studies and you're looking for what is the difference between the two pictures and I know whenever I've been presented this research I could never see that the one on the right is missing a fencepost but highly sensitive people tend to see it more than the other 80% so these are the areas in which we have more visual brain activations secondary visual areas visual Association areas and visual motor coordination areas what that means is it's really important that 80% of stimulation comes in through the eyes and it can be really over stimulating to always have your eyes open out in the world so I gave you this picture of my therapy horses with their eyes closed because they really know how to take care of themselves and I just want to invite everyone who's here on livestream or in the room to take a few seconds to just go ahead and close your eyes when you close your eyes it doesn't matter what you do with your brain you're welcome to think or just notice what you're hearing or feel your body in the chair or take a few breaths all that matters is that sometimes you close your eyes so I like to give highly sensitive people and you're welcome to do the entire rest of the presentation with your eyes closed if you're feeling overstimulated I like to give you a little helpful hint here's an example every time you open your car door or you're about to open your car door you could close your eyes for ten to thirty seconds so when you're getting ready to go somewhere you open the door you get in you sit down in the driver's seat and close your eyes for a little bit or maybe when you're when you arrive and one time I mention this to somebody and they came back to me and they said they were doing they were closing their eyes for 10 minutes somehow the translation got switched in there in their mind and she said it's just making me late everywhere and in fact it doesn't have it doesn't matter how long it is it just matters that you close your eyes a little bit and give your brain and all that visual activation a rest here's a really interesting study and I'm giving you I'm scratching the surface of the the brain research on highly sensitive people some of how we've gotten this is they're doing the scientists are doing a lot of functional MRIs of the brain while people are doing tasks so this was looking at people in Asia and people in America it's not necessarily looking at different ethnicities so much as geographic locations and what we found they used relative tasks and absolute tasks and Asians are better at one and Americans are better at the other but they're very different do you see how on the Left the performance is very wide but as they move up the HSP scale the more sensitive they are the more alike they are until you get to this point over to the right where people who are highly sensitive the cultural differences are almost void by the sensitivity this has here's the absolute task it's almost exactly the same and this has profound implications for our world cultures and how who is it that can bring us all together but the highly sensitive people here's another one eighteen newlyweds were scanned and this study has also been repeated and and the same results in many different studies they're viewing from photos of their partners and of strangers displaying positive negative or neutral facial expressions and what happens is the highly sensitive people have a greater response to all of them okay do you get that that's the empathy and the strong emotional reactions we have a higher response to all kinds of emotional representation but it's stronger in our partners here's something that's really interesting to me while we are more strongly reactive to all emotional representations and expressions we actually and this is surprising we have a stronger reaction to positive than we do to negative and maybe you are or you know a highly sensitive person and you think this person is always negative or they're way more negative than they are positive in fact it feels that way because they're processing everything all the time so you hear a lot more than you need to hear but in fact our brains are more reactive to positive input it's a beautiful thing here's some other research and since we're at Google and YouTube I wanted to really focus on work the workplace research that's probably everyone who's watching here today on national mental health day is watching from work we are more affected by stress in the workplace that's kind of a no-brainer right bright lights pressure to get projects done who knows the lighting the whatever it is the commute week in Spearin smore stress in the workplace there's an study of HSPs who are working international here given an international assignment they actually are the best employees to be sent overseas but they last the shortest amount of time because of the pressure and the stress of adapting to the new environment so although we are perceiving stress and it gives us a lower well-being HHS peas tend to be rated with a higher performance rating by their supervisors you know all that deep processing comes in handy and it makes you a very good employee and it makes you good at your job whether you're working in a large business or as a solopreneur here's the good news this is the research I love the most belsky employees discovered the researchers in England and they discovered this concept of differential susceptibility all it means is that our brains are have a different level of susceptibility to our environments that makes sense right it's also called the Vantage sensitivity so originally they thought that if you have this more reactive brain it's an advantage only in certain situations like say only when you're supporting someone who's having strong emotions but actually it's an advantage in all it's generally an advantage in all situations so this research was really exciting because it means that with just a little bit of help in intervention we can make a huge difference in the life of an HSP so here's one of the studies that helped them helped everyone discover a differential susceptibility they took these uptight babies in the rhesus macaque population and a another enclosure where the the these monkeys are studied and when they took the uptight babies the difficult babies remember that earlier research from 1968 on human babies and young children and they assign them to skilled mothers they cross fostered them with skilled mothers these were the advantages that happened they had developmental precocity they had a resilience to stress and they became the leaders in their families so when they weren't in skilled parenting or a low stress environment as babies and growing up they actually had more injury and illness and they didn't fare nearly as well as the other the larger percentage the 80% so we call them the orchids like an orchid requires a lot of TLC to keep it alive so if you go out and buy an orchid and take it home and you just put it in the middle of your kitchen table and you water it like you would any cut flowers it will die quickly it needs southern exposure it needs not to be watered as frequently as you might think it has to have just the right kind of care and I mentioned how beautiful this orchid was before we started and I said who's taking care of this orchid and I under I was told that an entire team of people are here to take care of these plants and that's really what would it just be might need so here's another way that they discover differential susceptibility this is a graph you can see family stresses on the bottom and behavioral problems severity is on this the left and wouldn't you expect if there's stress in a family that the children would have more behavior problems it just makes sense right but this does not show that although the line is the correlation it does go up a little bit that's not what we would expect with really significant family stress we would I mean I personally and I think most of you would to expect there to be a lot of behavior problems if there's severe poverty or violence or mental illness or even marital conflict so the scientists said why is this not computing it just doesn't make sense so then tomboys and others separated out the highly reactive brains with the low reactive brains and what they found was the difference here that the orchid children they're the magenta line the orchid children in a low stress environment growing up had way fewer behavior problems this is heat priests and Romel psychopathology that that he was studying here but he's studying many different variables it doesn't matter what's on the left it can be illness injury behavior problems this is early signs of future mental illness if an orchid child or a highly sensitive child is raised in a low stress environment they have way fewer problems than a dandelion child if they're in a high-stress environment and this one again is marital conflict but it doesn't matter what the stress is they have way more problems so this is the thing that's a little aggravating for me as an orchid that just kind of makes me wish sometimes I could be a dandelion look at the dandelion line it's practically horizontal you know what that means dandelions are almost not impacted by family stress or childhood stress Wow now you can go you can see why it's so important that we have 80% of any population that is going to be minimally impacted by stress that are gonna be able to muscle through take their sword out in the world and fight their way and you know keep everything functioning at the same time we need these Canaries as well the ones who alert the family the community the culture the species to signs of stress and the negative impact that they have so here it is in just a slightly different graphical representation an adverse childhood environment results in a strong path to negative results negative effect problems for a highly sensitive person but a weak to moderate path for the 80% world the dandelions here's the good news I'm sorry I've depressed you I know if you're highly sensitive that that's hard to hear and that and most of us did have stressful childhoods it's in Western environment Western cultures it's just really not a friendly place to raise a sensitive child even the regular public school day is challenging for a highly sensitive child they come out of it exhausted and overstimulated so most highly sensitive children in the Western cultures grow up feeling overstimulated and stressed by childhood but it actually it's okay you adults because see the bottom line any intervention at any age creates a strong path to great benefits that's great that means if you do yoga you have good nutrition you take naps you close your eyes for 30 seconds before you get out of your car you meditate you get bodywork whatever it is that you do I are some things that I do but anything that you do that's self-care you keep your blood sugar even that's a big one for me then you're going to experience great benefits and guess what therapy is also a great tool and I'll get to that in a moment so why do highly sensitive children thrive these are pictures of me and although I grew up in a typical American family I did grow up on a farm and so the great benefit to me was that I spent time in nature and I had a lot of responsibilities so I got to get out of away from my little sisters and the chaos of young children in the house the older I got the more responsibilities I had I spent time in nature and with animals and that's a great thing and if you can do that for yourself it's great as well and if you have a child who has some of these experiences than they can thrive as an adult here's one more study I throw in for you because I just think it's fascinating and it's something that impacts my family that highly-sensitive people make better gambling decisions because we have a more responsive attitude toward risk and we're more likely to recognize opportunities so my dad's a Texas Hold'em player and he and I both day trade so those are both places where we use our sensitivity to be successful here we go this is the the the book that I'm writing it'll be out early next year the HSP 5 to thrive so there are just a few things that we need to do in order to thrive whether our childhood was stressful or not the first is to believe this trade is real so I hope that the fact that you're here means that I'm convincing you that this is an innate trait that 20% of over a hundred species are born with it's a huge number of people the research is extensive on the brain and the different areas of the brain that are more activated by having the trait being born with it it's really important that we have these people they're the ones is there anyone who in say in California when we've had the fires who was the first person to be bothered by the smoke in your family or community right you noticed the smoke I was that person I'm like I need a mask and you know you walk out around and we had a lot of smoke and in the bay area of California and you'd walk around and you see all sorts of people everywhere on the streets not wearing masks at all and then there'd be those few freaks with the big masks on and those were probably the highly sensitive people because they really felt the impact so I'm showing you that the trade is real you so you need to know if you're highly sensitive that you have the trait and to believe it's real that is the first step and it's it's an easy one to do you can take Elaine Aaron's self tests that she developed and it's in the book and it's also where Anthony mentioned and on the website a chess person calm and once you believe it's real then you're more likely to take care of yourself and that's number two to design a life that's compatible with being highly sensitive now for parents and partners of highly sensitive people sometimes it's a pain in the behind to have to design a life that's compatible with somebody being highly sensitive right you just want to go you just want to go out to the concert you just want to get up at the last possible minute get everybody in the car drop them at school and get to work none of this deep processing slow transitions business and designing a life that's compatible with being highly sensitive is some involves some of those things I mentioned before that kind of self-care and spending a little more time getting places so that you have time to do the deep processing now I like I look back on my own childhood and say that something that would really bugged me was birthday parties I hated them I was that freak child who never wanted to go to the birthday party and I'm dating myself but in my era of childhood the way we played musical chairs was it wasn't just that you had to get a chair that could be overstimulating anyway but we had to sit on a balloon and pop it to keep our chair in musical chairs and that just those popping balloons sent me over the edge luckily I had a highly sensitive mom who got it and didn't force me to go to the parties and but you know I have to say that I probably sometimes to force my highly sensitive son to go to them because it just seems like that's what makes childhood happy right so I look back on that and I thought and before I've always thought of myself before Alaina and told me I was highly sensitive I always thought of myself as having something wrong with myself that I couldn't just be out in the world doing everything I want to do and in fact I look back and I'm like oh I'm highly sensitive my brain was more reactive to all of that stuff and actually I had a great instinct it wasn't a place I wanted to be I wanted to be out on the ranch building a fort in the creek where my only rule was be home by dark so that instinct was such a good thing so I can reframe my childhood in my past in light of the fact I was highly sensitive I can see some of those conflicts that I had as perfectly normal for somebody with a more reactive brain the fourth five to thrive is to heal from past trauma and I already mentioned that I really I feel pretty strongly that childhood in the Western world is traumatic for highly sensitive children it's just our expectations for the fast life that we're living now is really hard and very few children today and especially in urban areas get to grow up the way that I did and you know I attended the first open classroom Elementary School in Henrietta Oklahoma and it was a great thing because although there wasn't a lot of structure I was allowed to go find a quiet corner to do my work I just had so many advantages and I'm so grateful for but not everyone gets it and so we have to be able to heal from past trauma and with children we want to prevent it so when something really traumatic happens we want to talk about it and process it right then and probably most people know that the best way to heal trauma is with a skilled therapist so I don't want to send you out there on your own thinking I'm gonna heal all those traumatic experiences on my own that can be reach Ramat izing but a skilled therapist can be very helpful the fifth of the five to thrive is to know other highly sensitive people if you're highly sensitive and this makes sense because it's part of resiliency research we know that people who are in some way different than their majority community that they're living in need to know others like them so it's it's a very challenging life to be to feel unique to feel terminally different to never really feel like there's anyone like you and so this is why it's so important for highly sensitive people to know other highly sensitive people so you don't feel like a freak all the time and so it's important to find those communities and that is the five to thrive for highly sensitive people thank you how often do you open floor office plans come up in your conversations open floor office plans you know it's like the open classroom it can be so over stimulating because of the noise all the time and at the same time it's more freedom that you're not you don't have to be in necessarily always in a certain place so it's it requires if you know you have the trait then you know how to work you can figure out how to work with it and we always like to tell highly sensitive people to become the most valuable person on your team so that you can negotiate with your supervisor or your business to create the things that you need and so to be able to go into a quiet corner and take care of yourself at the same time we often recommend two highly sensitive teenagers and I can say this for adults as well to use noise cancelling headphones for example so that you're there and you're present but you can block out some of the over stimulation so it's an you know it's a blessing and a curse I think we have an online question as well this one says any advice for those of us who may be married to an HSP and when we get home from work then dinner then kids to bed she's exhausted / overwhelmed and just once time to herself how do you build a relationship when there's no energy or focus left to share with the spouse oh it's so hard and you and you've been out at work all day and you think she's been home all day and you're ready to engage with the children and I know there's a story in my family that my dad would come home from work and get me all riled up wrestle with me and toss me in the air and get me all riled up and then my my my mom couldn't get me to sleep and she was so worn out from having them with me all the time because I was one of those difficult babies so the the highly sensitive parent or partner who's at home with the children all day she has to have self-care and I'll never forget that when I had a young child I looked for yoga class every kind of meeting or activity that I wanted to do I only went places with childcare for example so the partner the the parents stay-at-home parent with who's highly sensitive needs to design a life that's compatible and the person who's the dandy-lion who's at work can help support that at the same time I know you come home from work and you're tired but to give the person who's highly sensitive time to get out of the house and go sit quietly you know that there are two places that we recommend most for highly sensitive people your car in the bathroom and just to you know those are two places that you're allowed to go and people aren't allowed to interrupt you like strangers usually will not knock on your car door when you're hiding in your car with your eyes closed so but it's also of course great to go sit next redwood tree in nature if you have that ability so we need to give those partners an opportunity to have self care alone away from the children both during the day and maybe right at the end of the day and then they can recharge and be more available to you kind of related to the question about open offices if you're designing for teams or groups of people given the dynamics of I think the percentages of highly sensitive people versus dandelions how can you optimize for both types of people well I saw this beautiful design where they were putting these phone booths in the middle of the open work space and they were places that you could pull blinds down if you wanted to and I think that it's so important to have the getaways and you know the research on extroverts not even highly sensitive extroverts just extroverts in general is that they are more over stimulated and overwhelmed than the introverts because introverts are more likely to pursue time alone so when you have these sort of you know closets when you have breakout places that are quiet zones low light you know places to chill whatever you might creatively call them in your workplace then everyone can make use of them and here's something that you can look at any environment the highly sensitive person what they are bothered by your experiencing and what they need for intervention is usually what everyone would benefit from so I'll give you a child example in the preschool when one high when the highly sensitive child one child starts to scream because it's too loud and and worked up in the classroom and they get overstimulated and then that means that everybody is starting to feel on edge so the highly sensitive person is your canary and if there's someone on your team who's saying the lights are too bright the pressures too much there's nowhere to get away and take care of myself then that person is probably giving voice to things that are living in the entire team um so I've always been told my whole life that I'm too sensitive so when I heard about to speak ha ha but I especially felt it last year I had a pretty severe concussion and I was very sensitive to light and sound and I was questioning you know how much of that had I had formally and how much of that is my brain recovering from the trauma and I was wondering if you could talk just a little bit more about the brain I know you were saying before that there was more research you could delve into I'd love to hear a little bit more about that so that you've got two parts to your question there one is about trauma as well as the brain and trauma activates the brain in a similar way that the trade of sensory processing sensitivity or highly sensitive people activate the brain so when you get two things going on at the same time it's extremely challenging you know if you look at veterans and other survivors of trauma and people with PTSD post traumatic stress disorder we see that they look like highly sensitive people because they are more sensitive to their environment because of the trauma so both people need but when you have both going on at the same time the recovery period has to be way more protected and often longer in fact we're slow highly sensitive people are slower to develop slower to recover however we recover better if we do everything that we need to do so when the brain gets out you already have a highly reactive brain when the brain gets further activated by a brain injury a traumatic brain injury then it's very very important to give it that that settling and quiet that it needs I remember there was a lot there's a lot of talk among athletes about concussions and brain injuries and in the schools when a child a minor gets a brain injury the rules for what they have to do what they have to abstain from are just they seem really radical like you know no stimulation and no input at all for a period time and you know almost sometimes months before they can get back on the court or the field and that's what a highly sensitive person needs is that level the way we would protect our children with a concussion for example thank you then we have another question online and this one says I come from a family that just says what they think out loud I'm now realizing that my partner is an HSP and comments and thoughts that were normal to me to say out loud have been hurtful to her she's distanced herself for me emotionally to protect herself how do you think I can overcome that or what advice can you give you know it is it's so great for HSPs to be with partners who are not highly sensitive it's also great for HSPs to be partnered together they have their own unique challenges so the fact that you're not highly sensitive it sounds like is a gift to your family because you can monitor what you're doing and you can recognize when she's feeling challenged but I'd like to think of it as you know the bucket gets full they're probably sometimes when you can say whatever to a highly sensitive person and they're an optimal level of arousal and they think oh that's just you and then there are times when they're exhausted and overstimulated and the comment is just way too much it's really important to be able to modulate at the same time the highly sensitive person in a partnership has a responsibility to do her own self-care so that her bucket isn't full and so that every little thing is not taken personally and I'm gonna say speaking from experience it's hard not to take things personally it really is I have so much compassion for that in empathy and at the same time we have to be able to - sometimes a couples therapist is so helpful to help you identify what is personal and what isn't and to just to build that fence it doesn't have to be a concrete wall that's 20 feet tall but a fence between you so that you say ah this is your acre and this is my acre and when you're saying that it's just you and you're still loving to me and I need to go take some self-care you know I like to coach couples to to have a sort of a policy and like I say a rule a policy in there couple that when they are struggling with something that if any person in the couple either person in a couple starts to feel overstimulated like your heart rates coming up you're feeling stressed you're feeling hurt and angry to take a timeout and it's not you know you want to say I don't want to talk about this it's not that it's to say I can't talk about this anymore right now I'd like to take a break can we come back to it in an hour so to really practice self-care is the responsibility of the highly sensitive person to practice loving care is the responsibility of the dandelion partner conflict is one of my biggest anxiety triggers what advice would you give to HSPs if conflict is an expected part of our job especially if we are expected to move up in the job ladder by persuading colleagues who are strongly opinionated and or maybe opposed and or maybe what opposed a post yeah I'm triggered by conflict too and and it's really hard but I bet you anything that to be saying the same thing over and over again just because it's so true and so important that if you are at your optimal level of arousal you can manage those folks so here are some tips that we use that are so important for a highly sensitive people in many situations even in conflicts with your partner this can apply to some of the other questions as well practice really develop a plan imagine or even write down every opposition that could possibly come up and practice a response to it write out a response to it so that when you're in the conflict it's not hitting you new because have you noticed that it takes longer for you to come up with the response like I always have a great comeback for everything three minutes or 30 minutes or three days after the conversation happened so to really prepare here's here's another thing it's so important I like to tell HS that we need to come out about our sensitivity we need to tell our supervisors our employers and even our teams about high sensitivity and how do you say that you say you may have noticed that some people have stronger feelings or more reactions to certain things and I'm one of those people the plus side is that I'm really thinking about what's going on and my problem-solving is deep and I can guarantee your team recognizes that that when you come up with the solutions or a strategy that yeah it's very well-thought-out and it's even hard to find the loopholes in it because you've thought about it and worked on it so hard so being prepared for those situations it's also really a great tool whenever possible to negotiate with the person who's in charge of whatever meeting is happening when you're when you're hashing out whatever the proposal is or the part of the project that you've been working on to limit the time of it and to put a break in it or to schedule this meeting over two different periods one in the morning one in the afternoon or two subsequent days so that you have time to go back and process the information that's been coming in and get your rebuttals your responses ready so that you're not overstimulated when you're trying to do it it's a little bit weird in the meeting but again if you can just take a breath and even close your eyes for a couple of moments it will help you reset [Applause] you