The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Is it possible to go from sensitive to not so sensitive?
Being so sensitive does not allow you to function as well as other people. Things that get people down for a day, gets you down for weeks or even months.
If it's not possible to turn off high sensitivity then how does one use their high sensitivity for gain?
According to random youtube videos and quora posts, high sensitivity is a "superpower" which makes you creative and gives you the ability to "read" people.
Does this mean if someone who's sensitive starts creative endeavours they will be better than average?
Generally, some ways a person might become less impacted by their feelings are:
Yes, it can help in certain situations, but it takes some training to make it work to your advantage. It is probably similar to how certain physical characteristics make people better at certain sports, but they have to (1) be interested in the sport (2) train themselves to use the physical characteristic advantageously.
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I'm a sensitive person and I've found ways to live with it. I won't go as far as the YouTubers and say it's a superpower, but it doesn't have to be a debilitating handicap either.
The biggest thing for me was working directly with my emotions and bodily sensations, first with somatic meditation and then Internal Family Systems therapy. An easy trap to fall into as a sensitive person is to develop a fear of your own strong emotions. IFS helped me see that my feelings are actually trying to do something helpful, even if they don't know the best way to do it, and that I can negotiate better ways for them to express themselves.
I'm spending something like 15-60 minutes per day working with my emotions, which is a lot of time for maintenance work that normal people don't seem to need to do much of. But hey, it beats being an anxious wreck like I used to.
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Yes. Get yourself a bottle of wine, an Airbnb in a resort town in the off season, a girl who wants to spend a weekend making love. The next week the volume will be turned down on everything.
Boxing works too.
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I suspect there are two concepts that are being conflated here -- sensitivity in terms of what you feel, and sensitivity in terms of what you detect.
One is being a highly sensitive person. While I think this is a useful construct, when you break it down I suspect it's a combination of neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience in the Big Five model of personality. I don't think this is the sort of "sensitivity" that is conducive to "sensing" other people's hidden intentions, though maybe it allows you to be creative in particular ways that people with other personality dimensions would find difficult. I don't think it's a superpower. (Maybe if you want to write angsty poetry, of which I wrote much when I was a teenager.)
The other is what is often called "emotional intelligence." I don't like the term. I would prefer "cognitive empathy." This type of "sensitivity" makes it easier for someone to "read" other people's emotions and intentions because it allows you to mentally understand their perspective, modeling their behavior in your head. It has nothing to do with poor functioning, and in fact has everything to do with good functioning! It's the closest thing to a "superpower" in terms of what you're talking about.
My evidence for these being separate is that psychopaths, who are definitionally not highly sensitive in the first definition, are capable of being highly sensitive in the second definition -- that's where the ideas about psychopaths manipulating people by reading and mirroring their emotions comes from. In fact, to function at all as a psychopath, you probably have to develop a great degree of cognitive (system 2) empathy, because the more automatic emotional empathy that gives most people a head start in understanding other people's emotions is absent for you.
I suspect that the random youtube videos and quora posts are a bit of copium, combined with it being high-status and rewarded nowadays to praise sensitivity and emotionality to the high heavens.
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