What exactly is a HSP anyway? That’s an understandable question – most people will never have even heard of us. In a world of non stop 24/7 pretty much everything, it’s a wonder any of us manage to exist at all. And being honest, because that’s the best and only way to be, it can often be a struggle.

HSP means Highly Sensitive Person. A broad label which probably doesn’t make anyone unfamiliar with the trait any the wiser. In an attempt at explanation here’s an exercise – try to imagine something that induced an emotional reaction in you and remember how deeply you felt that emotion. Now, apply that reaction to events, interactions and your day to day life in general, multiply it by, say, a factor of 10, then add on the absorption of other people’s reactions and subsequent emotions – and there you have the life of a HSP!

Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? And it can be for the HSP concerned. Often. The thing is, it’s not possible to control the depth of feeling you may experience in a given situation. You know it may happen, but all you can do is attempt to manage that depth and any resulting reaction. Sometimes that sensitivity is a blessing and an absolute joy , and sometimes it can become a devastating curse, causing the HSP intense and engulfing anxiety. For me, it can be so easy to fall into a level of depression that is a struggle to climb back out of.

Often, being a HSP can mean being quite far along on the introversion scale, but not always. This is not exactly helpful when trying to cope with depth of feeling. Often, HSPs are extremely misunderstood – the reality of the world means that these traits are not often valued. Young people are told to come out of their shell; others are advised not to be so sensitive. Put introversion and HSP together in the same person and you have an individual who, outwardly, may seem confident and together, sometimes even aloof, but inwardly may well find the world an overwhelming and sometimes disturbing, place to be.

There are so many ways in which a HSP’s mind and emotions work differently. It took me 45 or so years to understand that I was not alone in my depth of thought and feeling. As tiring and draining as it can be, it’s also an honour to feel so alive. A rich and creative inner world is somewhere to escape to when those feelings of inability to cope come knocking.

Today, we’re all living in a world that’s very different from just a few years ago. Not just because of the obvious, but also as a result of the wedge between individuals, or groups of individuals, actively promoted by some sectors of society through one means or another. A Government department dedicated to the manipulation of its citizens through psychological prods and nudges should give anyone pause for thought at the very least. Create a world where humans are forbidden to live freely and be responsible for their own destiny, sometimes to the point of criminalisation, all under the auspices of the public good, and there begins a recipe for tragedy and pain. To experience this as a HSP is, frankly, terrifying.

So, how is it possible to function with any kind of peace in this world as a HSP? For me, there are two major strategies. The first is recognising the signs, acknowledging whenever I’m ‘in’ a situation and doing my best to remedy it by removing myself or retreating until it subsides. The second is applying rational thought and reason – the Objectivist philosophy for life. When someone so in tune to emotions, absorbing all the nuances of relationships (usually involuntarily!), with a sharp  ability to sense a person’s motives sometimes  after only a few short moments, attempts to apply these principles of rational thought don’t come easy because of the extreme debilitating overwhelm. Although it often doesn’t come easy to most people anyway. We aren’t taught these things as way of living, as a guide – to examine aspects of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics and to apply them to life in this world. I don’t pretend to understand those elements in their entirety either – the Objectivist philosophy sends you on a constant learning curve, but it’s a curve that adds only positive experiences to life. Objectivist thought states that reason and emotion should be in harmony – but the misunderstanding by many that reason supersedes or dictates priority over emotion provides for a society that has a tendency towards dismissiveness of any kind of feelings. Observe the way in which expression of an emotion is often vilified, as a result of the false elevation of ‘hurty feelings’ over rational thought and common sense. This over-arching black or white pressure, when society as a whole starts to view emotions as a problem, encourages people to suppress what they feel, even to the point of outright denial. And we all know, at the very least, that this is not a good way to be to achieve a healthy mental state.

For a HSP, the emotion response to our own experiences, and those of others, is involuntary and not something that can be controlled or reasoned away – that’s exactly the point, and that’s where the problem arises. The strength and depth of overwhelm can make it extremely difficult and usually impossible to process anything but dealing with being overcome with the emotion in any given moment. There is a real inability to examine the facts with clear-headed reason, and so evaluating an appropriate response can become almost unreachable. It can take time for that to pass before attempting to analyse and reason through. For a HSP Objectivist then, the repeated conflict is the recognition of the need but the inability to process rationally, due to the overwhelm you feel resulting from the depth and scope of the emotions you experience.

There are those who say emotions are too unstable, too inexplicable, or simply irrational. Some would also say that emotions are exactly why we’re all where we are, why the world is why it is today, why we have so many angry people, individuals lashing out, high tension conflicts. .Absent emotion, however, I believe it’s not possible to adequately reason as a human being, whether that means ruling out a feeling or emotion as being unviable, or giving it recognition – both of these influence reason. Once properly understood and controlled, emotions are the driver of reasoning. Without them, or by denying their importance, a mind risks considering only logic and ‘top-level’ thinking and chooses to not scratch the surface of the deeper meanings and motivations behind decision-making. This has the potential to lead us to a future world where technology formed from programmed logic takes precedence over the human condition and people are relegated to mere cogs in a wheel. What THEN do we become?