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Wellness Wednesday for March 13, 2024

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • 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.

  • 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:

  • Internalizing ideas from Stoicism. There is a difference between the event and how we frame it. The feelings we experience are caused by how we choose to internally frame the event. We can choose to internally frame events in less distressing ways.
  • Realizing that some feelings are influenced by extra information that we add to events. If someone is rude to you then we might add the assumption that they don’t like us. We don’t know this for sure, it may just be that they are having a bad day. If we add a mental note that this extra information is tentative instead of certain then the feelings associated with it may be less intense.
  • Exposure Therapy. For example, working in a retail sales setting makes people less sensitive to rejection if they face it a lot in their job.

if someone who's sensitive starts creative endeavours they will be better than average?

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.