I was teaching at an international school in Shanghai when I first came across the trait of the highly sensitive person - I discovered it while watching the documentary Sensitive, and for the for one of the very first times I experienced a feeling of being deeply understood. The sensory overload of the city and the way I often needed a whole weekend to recover from a week of classroom noise; the tendency to absorb the emotions of 20 children and their parents and carry them all home, all of it, apparently, had a name! What was more surprising was that around 20-30% of the population shared it.

That was 2014 and in the years since then, I have moved away from teaching in primary schools to transpersonal coaching and training other people how to coach highly sensitive clients. Along the journey of teaching and coaching and working with hundreds of highly sensitive clients, I discovered there were common themes and patterns surrounding the struggles of most highly sensitive people and in this article, I will summarise a few of these.

Anyone who has worked with sensitive people knows how diverse sensitive people are - we express the trait in unique ways. This is because we all grew up differently, and various environmental conditions shape who we become as adults. However, we all share a depth of processing, a tendency toward overstimulation, emotional responsiveness, and sensitivity to subtleties. Elaine Aron summarised this as the DOES of the trait (Aron, 2010). In addition, I have discovered that we tend to share similar struggles, which can also become our greatest gifts when we’re offered the necessary resources and interventions to embody our innate qualities.

 

Stress, Anxiety & Depression

For example, sensitive people are more affected by stress, more prone to anxiety and depression and more easily overstimulated. Yet, research on vantage sensitivity (Pluess and Belsky, 2013) highlights that even though we are more affected by difficult environments - we also gain more from nourishing our nurturing ones. When highly sensitive adolescents were offered a school-based programme for the treatment of depression, it worked far better for those who scored high in sensitivity than their less sensitive peers (Pluess and Boniwell, 2015), and when highly sensitive adults were given an 8-week mindfulness course, their stress and social anxiety fell while their self-acceptance, personal growth and sense of self-transcendence rose, with the effects still growing a month after the course had ended (Soons et al., 2010).

As Highly Sensitive People, we are not fragile; we are responsive in both directions, and with support we can actually begin to choose the direction.The nervous system that is quick to overwhelm is also quick to settle, once it is given what it needs.

Nervous System Regulation

It is essential that highly sensitive people explore ways in which to regulate their nervous system and expand their window of tolerance. HSPs report far more overstimulation when tired, low or surrounded by noise and harsh light, with peaks in the late afternoon and in social settings (Weyn et al., 2025). So, when our nervous system is well tended, we can feel grounded and able to navigate complexity and stressful environments; when it is not, we may recognise rumination, the narrowing of attention to whatever feels threatening, and eventually this can lead to burnout. Mindfulness, in its open and receptive forms rather than the effortful kind, is the best-evidenced answer we have for helping us to self-regulate and be able to handle overstimulation. The research also shows us that a non-judging stance towards our own inner experience is one of the core mindfulness skills that most protects sensitive people from anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms (Takahashi et al., 2020). Those of us who turn on ourselves for our reactions suffer more than those who meet the reaction with acceptance.

Self-Identity

Many highly sensitive people struggle with the belief that something is wrong with them, and because of the narratives and stories they have created around their self-identity, they have learnt to hide or repress core aspects of their sensitivity. Almost every sensitive person in a large interview study described feeling different and somehow isolated since childhood, often long before they had a word for their sensitivity (Roth et al., 2023), and in a study of more than 1,000 adults, HSPs were 4 to 6 times more likely to report guilt and shame (Buchtova et al., 2025).

  

The Impact of our Environment

However, we must remember that this all depends on the environmental conditions a highly sensitive person finds themselves in (or grew up in). Aron, Aron and Davies (2005) showed that sensitivity only led to adult shyness when it was combined with a difficult childhood, and that sensitive people who grew up well supported were no more shy than anyone else. In addition, discovering the trait is itself a turning point; 30 of the 38 people in that interview study reported greater self-acceptance afterwards, which matches my own discovery very closely.

Empathy, Compassion & Attunement

When HSPs look at the emotional expressions of people they are close to, the brain regions linked with empathy and self-other processing light up more strongly than in others (Acevedo et al., 2014); the pull to attune and to respond is wired into those of us who are highly sensitive. Another study that included around 1,566 healthcare workers and teachers showed that sensitivity predicted burnout and compassion fatigue (Pérez-Chacón et al., 2021) and I recognise that figure with some tenderness from my own years in the classroom. However, the same depth of processing and empathetic attunement that can lead to burnout or compassion fatigue also makes attunement, compassion, and empathy for others possible. With practice and the right skills in place, many highly sensitive therapists name this as the gift the trait brings to their work (Roxburgh and Wright-Bevans, 2025). Sensitive therapists also describe self-care as non-negotiable, and I have also concluded that prioritising ourselves is what prevents us from tipping into depletion.

Beauty, Awe & Grief

When we explore the concept of vantage sensitivity and differential susceptibility in more depth we also find some other advantages of sensitivity - HSP connect to nature more strongly than others (Holzer et al., 2024), respond to beauty and music with an unusual openness, and have easier access to awe than almost anyone. This is something I have always resonated with as a highly sensitivite person and that same depth of feeling also means we often register what others turn away from. Grief, loss and the unspoken currents in a family or a culture are felt by sensitive people, often before they are named, and what lives in the shadow of a group tends to surface first in its most sensitive members, who are then, unfortunately, very often pathologised for it. Shadow work is the reclaiming of what was disowned, and for many highly sensitive people what is often disowned is the sensitivity itself.

References

Acevedo, B. P., Aron, E. N., Aron, A., Sangster, M.-D., Collins, N. and Brown, L. L. (2014) ‘The highly sensitive brain: an fMRI study of sensory processing sensitivity and response to others’ emotions’, Brain and Behavior, 4(4), pp. 580–594. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.242

Aron, E. N. (2010) Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Person: Improving Outcomes for That Minority of People Who Are the Majority of Clients. New York: Routledge.

Aron, E. N., Aron, A. and Davies, K. M. (2005) ‘Adult shyness: The interaction of temperamental sensitivity and an adverse childhood environment’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(2), pp. 181–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167204271419

Buchtova, M., Malinakova, K., Benitan, M. C., Husek, V. and Tavel, P. (2025) ‘Sensory processing sensitivity and its associations with guilt, shame, self-esteem, and neuroticism’, BMC Psychology, 13, 1203. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-03530-1

Holzer, J. M., Dale, G. and Baird, J. (2024) ‘People with sensory processing sensitivity connect strongly to nature across five dimensions’, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 20(1), 2341493. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2024.2341493

Pérez-Chacón, M., Chacón, A., Borda-Mas, M. and Avargues-Navarro, M. L. (2021) ‘Sensory processing sensitivity and compassion satisfaction as risk/protective factors from burnout and compassion fatigue in healthcare and education professionals’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(2), 611. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020611

Pluess, M. and Belsky, J. (2013) ‘Vantage sensitivity: Individual differences in response to positive experiences’, Psychological Bulletin, 139(4), pp. 901–916. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030196

Pluess, M. and Boniwell, I. (2015) ‘Sensory-Processing Sensitivity predicts treatment response to a school-based depression prevention program: Evidence of Vantage Sensitivity’, Personality and Individual Differences, 82, pp. 40–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.03.011

Roth, M., Gubler, D. A., Janelt, T., Kolioutsis, B. and Troche, S. J. (2023) ‘On the feeling of being different – an interview study with people who define themselves as highly sensitive’, PLOS ONE, 18(3), e0283311. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283311

Roxburgh, E. C. and Wright-Bevans, M. (2025) ‘Therapists’ lived experiences of identifying with sensory processing sensitivity: A phenomenological inquiry’, Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 25(2), e12857. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12857

Soons, I., Brouwers, A. and Tomic, W. (2010) ‘An experimental study of the psychological impact of a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program on highly sensitive persons’, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 6(4), pp. 148–169. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v6i4.228

Takahashi, T., Kawashima, I., Nitta, Y. and Kumano, H. (2020) ‘Dispositional mindfulness mediates the relationship between sensory-processing sensitivity and trait anxiety, well-being, and psychosomatic symptoms’, Psychological Reports, 123(4), pp. 1083–1098. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294119841848

Weyn, S., Greven, C. U., Schmidt, S. J. and Gillebert, C. R. (2025) ‘Sensory processing sensitivity and overstimulation in daily life: an experience sampling method study’, Scientific Reports, 16, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-31629-3