You Were Never Too Much. You Were a Highly Sensitive Person in a World That Was Too Loud.
4 days ago
5 min read
A peony in extreme heat is not a broken peony. It is a flower that needs more tenderness and tending.
Have you spent years quietly asking yourself why the world feels so much heavier for you than it seems to for everyone else? If that question has lived in you for a long time, this post is a gentle answer.
Today I want to offer you the one piece of information I wish someone had placed in my hands decades earlier: there is a scientific name for the way your nervous system works, and it is not a flaw.
The Kind of Exhaustion That Doesn't Have a Simple Explanation
You are not burned out from overworking, exactly. The depletion you carry feels older and more pervasive than a difficult week, and it lives somewhere specific: in the tightness behind your eyes, in the weight that settles after a crowded room, in the hours of quiet you need just to feel like yourself again.
I know this because I lived it. As a child sitting in a circle of playmates, I once sensed that something was off with one of the other children. I leaned over and quietly asked if he was okay. The response came back sharp and immediate: "What do you want? You are always so heavy." I had no framework for what had just happened. All I knew was that the thing I was most naturally designed to do, feel what was present in a room, had made me a burden.
It did not stop there. Years later, close friends I trusted would say "of course you are overreacting" or "you react too much, can you just ignore it?" And so I learned, slowly and thoroughly, that my inner world was too large for the spaces I was moving through. The only conclusion that seemed available to me was that something was wrong with me.
There Is Actually a Name for This
In the 1990s, psychologist Dr. Elaine Aron identified a trait she called Sensory Processing Sensitivity. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population carries this trait, meaning their nervous systems are genuinely wired to process sensory and emotional information more deeply than the baseline. This is wher ethe term Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) is coming from.
This is not anxiety. It is not a disorder or a weakness to be corrected. It is a fundamental difference in how your nervous system receives, filters, and integrates the world around you, including the emotions of every person in it.
What Deep Processing Actually Looks Like in Daily Life
Where others scan a room and move on, you read it. You notice the subtle shift in someone's tone before they have named it themselves. You feel the energy of a space before you have even sat down, and you process the texture of a conversation long after it has ended.
This depth is a form of intelligence. The cost of it, inside a world that was not designed with your neurobiology in mind, is an extraordinary amount of energy spent simply getting through an ordinary day.
Why the Usual Advice Has Never Quite Landed
You have probably been told to build more resilience, set better limits, or stop taking things so personally. These suggestions come from people who genuinely want to help. They also come from people whose nervous systems do not process the world the way yours does.
I learned this the hard way during my years in a high-pressure tech career that asked me to switch context constantly: from meeting to meeting, from one demand to the next, never fully landing before the next thing arrived. My nervous system had no space to process what it was absorbing. I burned out twice before I finally understood that the problem was not my capacity for hard work. It was that I had been trying to run a finely calibrated instrument at a speed it was never designed for.
You cannot think your way into a less activated nervous system. What a highly sensitive nervous system needs is not more discipline or a better morning routine. It needs something closer to sanctuary thought for the Highly Sensitive Person.
Nature Has Always Known Sensitivity, and Wanted it.
Something I return to often, both as a neuroscientist and as a highly sensitive person myself: in every ecosystem, some organisms are calibrated to detect subtle changes that others cannot register. Certain flowers respond to the faintest shift in underground moisture long before the drought arrives. Some root systems sense what is coming through changes in the soil that are imperceptible to everything around them.
A peony does not wilt because something is wrong with it. It wilts because extreme heat was simply never its natural habitat.
These are not the fragile members of the species. They are the ones with the most refined perception. Your nervous system is not broken. It is exquisitely attuned. It simply needs a different kind of tending.
A Small Practice to Try Right Now
The next time that particular heaviness settles in, the one that arrives after too much noise or too many hours of keeping pace with a world that moves faster than your system can comfortably hold, try this one small thing.
Find a single point of physical contact between your body and whatever is supporting you right now. Perhaps your hands in your lap, or the floor beneath your feet. Notice that point of contact for three full breaths. Not to fix anything or perform calm, simply to remind your nervous system that it is held, and that the ground is still there.
This is the beginning of what I call somatic nesting. It is available to you anywhere, at any time, and it costs nothing.
Want to Go Deeper Into This Conversation?
I recently sat down with April Snow on the Sensitive Stories podcast to share more of this journey: the growing up feeling different, the career, the two burnouts, and the slow discovery that sensitivity is not something to fix but something to tend. It is one of the most honest conversations I have had publicly, and I would love for you to listen.
Your sensitivity is not the problem. The mismatch between your nervous system and the environments you have been moving through, that is what has been so tiring. You were not built wrong. You were always in a world that was simply too loud.
If something in you quietly said "this is me" while reading this, I created a free resource aimed to give your nervous system exactly what it has been asking for. The Mini Bloom Kit is a free three-day online mini-retreat for sensitive hearts, guiding you gently through somatic practices designed to help you move from overwhelm to a genuine felt sense of inner safety.
Love this blog post, feel so seen!